New BestAgent advisory board revealed
Several high-profile names from estate agency and beyond have been recruited to help boost Charlie Lamdin’s venture.
Estate agency and advertising heavyweights are among the high-profile names to have joined the BestAgent advisory board.
Launched by industry commentator Charlie Lamdin (pictured, left), BestAgent aims to shake-up the home moving process with its Find Your Agent service, and calls for more transparency and a focus on service over price.
The advisory board includes Verona Frankish, chief executive of Yopa and an investor in BestAgent as well as DDRE founder Daniel Daggers.
Rory Sutherland, (pictured, right) Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK for 20 years, now President Emeritus Ogilvy Consulting, is supporting BestAgent as both an adviser and investor, alongside Alex Groundwater, former Programme Director for the FT, Sony, Cisco and The Crown Estate.
We’re not trying to replace good estate agents, quite the opposite.”
Other members include Simon David of Thomas Legal & Equilaw, Jo Henry, Property Acquisition and Operations Specialist at Jess Simpson,Andrew Tillard, Founder of Animos LLP and Nick Armstrong, a retired Partner at Charles Russell Speechly.
The group will advise BestAgent alongside Lamdin as it seeks to challenge some of the behavioural problems that the brand says make buying and selling a home unnecessarily slow, stressful and likely to fail, starting with which estate agent to trust with their move.
Moving forward
Lamdin says: “Britain isn’t short of property websites or estate agents. What we’re short of is completed moves. One in three agreed sales falls through and those that survive take months to complete. A huge part of the problem is that the system rewards people for winning listings, generating leads and processing their individual part of the transaction, rather than getting somebody successfully moved.
“One of the most important decisions a seller makes is choosing their estate agent, so that’s where we start. Find Your Agent lets sellers hear directly from local agents and choose the person they trust to get them moved. Agents can’t buy their way to the top and only the agent who wins the instruction pays.
We’re not trying to replace good estate agents, quite the opposite.”
“We’re not trying to replace good estate agents, quite the opposite. We want to make the good ones easier to find and create a marketplace where delivering a better result is rewarded.
“Verona, Simon, Daniel and Rory all bring very different perspectives to that challenge. They understand the industry, business, technology and, crucially, how people make decisions. Having that breadth of experience around the table will be invaluable as we build something designed to fundamentally change the experience for movers and agents for the better.”
