Apropos

‘Estate agency branches will soon go the way of the horse-drawn bus’

A leading industry figure has ‘reluctantly’ concluded that the estate agency branch will soon be a quaint part of high street history and that the only conclusion he can draw is that agents will eventually all be self-employed, Purplebricks-style operators. That is the incendiary claim made by high profile Edinburgh agent David Alexander whose company DJ Alexander is in the process of launching a platform, Apropos, to offer agents a way to set up their own letting agency business from home. In a column published this morning in The Scotsman, Alexander claims that the recent acceleration of estate agency closures to almost ten businesses a week at the moment is an augur of things to come. “Respected competitors may disagree with the sentiment that High Street estate agency will go the way of the horse-bus and the traditionalist in me partly wishes they were right. But the facts speak for themselves,” he says. Hub offices The 59-year-old founder of DJ Alexander, which has large ‘hub’ offices in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, says he initially considered creating Apropos into a ‘hybrid’ style app that would include physical branches before realising going completely online is the future. Alexander says that when he…