Agencies & People
News covering the businesses, activities, people and personalities in estate agency and letting agency and wider residential property industry.
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Yopa gets ANOTHER £20 million to fund its expansion
Savills has injected another tranche of cash into hybrid estate agency Yopa alongside several other investors, taking the total invested in the firm to £75 million. News emerged over the Bank Holiday weekend that Savills was one of four shareholders to raise a further £20 million for the company on top of previous cash calls. This latest round includes Savills’ subsidiary Grosvenor House and the Daily Mail’s parent company DMGT. “We’ve closely followed the dynamics of the property market and believe that technology-driven consumer demand will move estate agency transactions from the high street to online hybrids such as Yopa,” says Manuel Lopo De Carvalho, CEO of dmg ventures. Yopa says the new cash will be used to recruit more local representatives, upgrade its tech and fund a new customer services operation in Watford. The total raised so far includes £16 million in 2016 just a few months after it launched, while last May it raised £15 million in a similar cash-call on investors plus a further £27.6 million in September. Market share This means the business has now completed all the traditional funding rounds that start-ups usually attain, and it’s likely that investors will be expecting Yopa to start grabbing…
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Foxtons turns to Saatchi to help boost its flagging business
Estate agency Foxtons has employed the services of global advertising gianlt M&C Saatchi to launch a campaign across London.
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Former Humberts Country House chief joins property search firm Recoco
Former Humberts Country House chief Jeremy Campbell-Harris has now joined leading property search company Recoco.
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Leaked sales data from Purplebricks in Oz suggests it was 70% off target in June
The Negotiator has been shown documents from inside Purplebricks’ Australian operation that shine a light on how far its sales teams have been behind their targets recently. Speculation within the Australian media has been rife in recent months, highlighting how the company may be having difficulties making headway as the Oz property market hits a rough patch. The listings achieved chart shown to us suggest that in June its territory managers achieved as low as 18% of their monthly listing target, and at best 46%. Property sales fared better in June, the figures reveal, but still didn’t hit target. In South Australia Purplebricks achieved 64% of its sale target and 50% in Queensland, although Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales didn’t do so well. Trustpilot targets The document also reveals that Purplebricks’ teams are measured by the number of Trustpilot reviews lodged by customers, including targets to reach every month, indicating the review site is much more part of its business model than previously thought. These figures follow a story in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) newspaper yesterday detailing the largely unflattering experiences of a former Purplebricks employee. The company’s Australian CEO Ryan Dinsdale last night circulated a memo…
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Humberts opens first regional hub in Dorset and prepares to open second in Kent
Humberts has begun rolling out its much-vaunted ‘hub’ system for its non-franchised offices, the Negotiator has learned. This includes the closure of its other high street branches in the South West and the start of the same process in the South East. Last month the company said it was to move its high street operations to new centralised high-tech hubs which would service entire regions or counties. Many staff are understood to be mobile rather than based day-to-day at the hubs. The first hub is in Poundbury, Dorset for the SW, which has opened earlier than expected, and the next hub is to be in Tunbridge Wells in Kent to serve the SE. This is part of Humberts’ plan to make the company profitable again by cutting the huge cost of multiple high street branches, a move it has framed as expanding “expertise across each respective county by employing more Property Consultants in the field and specialising in entire counties, rather than just small pockets”. Hybridisation? When originally announced the move was hailed as the first signs of ‘hybridisation’ within the wider industry as agents cut high street locations and move to hubs instead. “Responding to our consumer’s needs is…
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Former Purplebricks territory manager in Oz reveals why he quit
An Oz estate agent with over 20 years in industry has quit Purplebricks after claiming it needs to change its model in Australia in order to work.
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Eight Haart branches found to have ‘issues’ with housing benefit applicants
An undercover sting by researchers from Shelter and the NHF found that 10% of Haart branches it contacted disdriminiated against housing benefit applicants.
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Northwood MD Eric Walker promoted to run whole of Belvoir
The MD of Northwood Eric Walker has been promoted to run the whole four-brand operation of parent group Belvoir Lettings Plc.
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‘Overcrowded hybrid and online agency sector will soon consolidate like portals did’
The current over-supply of online and hybrid agents will soon consolidate down from around 80 at the moment to a handful of main players, it has been claimed. Bob Scarff, the former MD of Countrywide’s Estate Agency Division and now MD of telephony technology firm Callwell, says the current position where many are jockeying for position behind Purplebricks is very similar to the mid-noughties. At that time a huge number of property portals vied to be No.2 in the market behind Rightmove. “I remember one day at Countrywide when we sat down and counted the number of places that were displaying our stock and it was nearly 100 or a similar ridiculous number,” he says. “So just like the portals, I believe the hybrids or ‘agents without branches’ as I prefer to call them will also go through a consolidation.” AllAgents.com currently lists 78 online and hybrid agencies operating in the UK and Bob says these agents will boil down to a key half a dozen including Hatched, Yopa, Purplebricks and Ewemove but who else survives through the process is up for debate. He says he can’t make up his mind about the recently enlarged Emoov and that he has…
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Estate agents are the UK’s most sociable office workers, study reveals
A study by experiences firm Boundless has found that estate agents are the UK's most socialable office workers and developers the least.
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