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Latest research into the market share held by online agents shows they have taken 7.5% of the market overall and that Purplebricks has edged up to 4.98%.
The figures, gathered by TwentyCI for the Guild of Property Professionals, also show that Countrywide is marginally ahead of Purplebricks at 5% of sales agreed during 2019. This paints a different picture to Purplebricks latest full year results for 2019 which claimed it had the largest market share by listings.
Both are in front of Connells at 4.92% agreed sales and then LSL with 2.89% followed by Spicerhaart with 1.48%.
But the point of the figures, presented by Guild CEO Iain McKenzie at the organisation’s national conference in London yesterday, is that its 800 or so independent agents are No.1 when grouped together with 5.91% of the market or 53,669 agreed sales.
McKenzie (left) also revealed the regional market share figures which highlighted a much larger share in the Midlands and North of England for online agents.
In Yorkshire and the Humber they have captured 12% of the market while in both the East and West Midlands it is 10%, considerably higher than most other areas of the UK.
“My personal interpretation is that the ‘bulge’ of market share in the Midlands and parts of the North of England is down to one online agent offering a ‘free to sell’ service,” McKenzie told The Negotiator, referring almost certainly to HouseSimple.
Asked whether the online agency ‘threat’ is over, McKenzie suggested that it was not and that the Guild’s iBuyer initiative, which was launched yesterday during the event, would help member agents circumnavigate the online threat.
As a real estate and proptech analyst and strategist I spend all my time with people and figures. People are easy, drilling down into figures not so. Especially, is you get into the realm of what they really mean.
As Evan Esar commented – ‘Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.’
Ian McKenzie does well to rely on the figures by Twenty Ci, who I visited last month and spent time speaking to amongst others a top class data scientist. Renown for my ability to throw the odd hand grenade into proceedings I was reassured with the methodology and rigorousness of how data was collated and interpreted by the company.
One thing did strike me though, and after my visit and I put together my own data and came to some surprising conclusions.
In 2019, Purplebricks – (and many hold that I am their nemesis, I am not I just hate poor tech applications) took to the market in excess of 64,000 properties across the UK. Is this significant? History will tell.
What is significant is that from my data in 2019, 22,000 properties listed by Purplebricks were withdrawn. Why is this significant, well each of the 22,000 vendors paid an average fee of £1,300 to Purplebricks, and got NOTHING, just a hole in their finances. Whereas Purplebricks got a cash fillet of £1,300 x 22,000 = £28,600,000.
That is right 28.6M of fee in 12-months, for NOT SELLING a single property, so that is 2.38M a month.
Now Trading Standards, The Property Ombudsman, the National Trading Standards
Agency Team (NSEAT) and RoPA seem to feel that this is acceptable, but I think not.