HouseSimple
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Latest property news
Housesimple secures £20m in growth capital
HouseSimple.com has secured a further £20m growth capital as it plans to build on its success and challenge PurpleBricks as the UK’s leading online estate agency.
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Latest property news
Online agent YOPA investigated again by advertising watchdog
Online agent YOPA has been investigated by the advertising watchdog just two weeks after being reported for potentially misleading claims on its website. This time the London-based sales and lettings agency was reported by a member of the public for a mailshot sent to them that advertised its sales service but, they claimed, wasn’t clearly marked as marketing material. After being approached by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), YOPA has now promised not to repeat the mailshot and that future advertising of this kind would be clearly marked as such in future. YOPA has been reported five times since it started two years ago including three times this year and once in 2016 and 2015 all of which have been informally resolved, although this hasn’t deterred investors – both Savills and LSL have put substantial amounts of money into the firm. Online agents Among the online agents, Emoov leads the pack for complaints to the ASA with ten referred to the watchdog so far including two serious complaints, one of which was upheld and another upheld in part, and eight informally resolved cases. Not far behind it is Purplebricks, which has had been referred to the ASA nine times including…
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Latest property news
Third of all asking prices have been lowered, says online agent
Online agent HouseSimple reckons a third of properties for sale in the UK have had their asking prices reduced since they were first marketed, based on listing data is obtained from Zoopla. The agent looked at 100 large towns and cities across the UK and found that in eight the percentage of homes reduced was in excess of 40%. All are in the north or Scotland and include Stockton-On-Tees, Aberdeen, Halifax, Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Rotherham and Darlington. Only one city in the south experienced asking price drops in excess of the 31.3% average – Oxford – where HouseSimple says 36.8% of homes for sale have had their price lowered. Of the three largest cities in the UK, London has the highest percentage of properties currently being marketed (30%) that have had a price reduction since they were initially listed. This compares with 27.6% in Birmingham and 19.9% in Manchester. HouseSimple says this “suggests that estate agents in the Capital are finding it harder to secure a sale and are having to drop asking prices to attract buyers”. “Price reductions can indicate that there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, but actually there has been a lack of stock coming…
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Latest property news
Online-only agent’s ‘fee saving’ claims rejected by ASA
Online-only agent Housesimple.com’s claims that it can save London vendors thousands of pounds in fees compared to a traditional agent, and that it sells property three times faster than the average have been rejected by the Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) after a complaint about one of its London Underground posters. The ruling by the ASA today means online-only agents, who often promote ‘fee saving’ as a key part of their proposition, must be more careful about the claims they make in advertisements and be more clear about the data they use to substantiate their claims. Within the lengthy Housesimple ruling published today the ASA questions whether the data was London specific enough to substantiate the company’s claim that “we potentially save our average London client £18,764 in fees”. Also, the ASA says that anyone reading the advertisement “would think that the online-only agent’s average client selling an averagely-priced home in London would be able to save that figure on fees in comparison to competing agents,” it says. The ASA questions several aspects of the data used by Housesimple to substantiate its claims. This includes using just one competitor’s fee structure – Foxtons’ – to represent the average fees charged to London…
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Latest property news
Stakes are high as YOPA invests in advertising
Profile raising expertise is sought for the online agency backed by Savills.
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Latest property news
HouseSimple gets £13million to grow
Carphone Warehouse founder leads the funding charge to help HouseSimple be the best.
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Agencies & People
The big debate: traditional agent vs online agent?
Traditional agent Lee James Pendleton makes the case for the traditional model while Alex Gosling bats for the online agent model.
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Latest property news
Founder of Carphone Warehouse invests in HouseSimple
Sir Charles Dunstone (right), founder of Carphone Warehouse and Chairman of TalkTalk and of Dixons Carphone, together with his business partner, Roger Taylor, last week committed a substantial investment of £5 million into online estate agents HouseSimple, Online Agency of the Year winner at The Negotiator Awards 2014. The investment highlights the increasing appeal of the online estate agency market, with many analysts projecting room for growth over the next few years, supported by the low cost nature of online estate agency. HouseSimple provides a full estate and letting agency service, from valuation guidance, photography, floor plans, hosted viewings, negotiation and full management of the sale or rental, through to completion, with costs starting from £290 which is generally cheaper compared the cost of a high street agent. Charles Dunstone said: “We believe estate agency is going to change considerably, with the future increasingly belonging to online estate agents. We like HouseSimple, we like its management and we like the idea of saving Britain’s home sellers billions of pounds, with a better experience. HouseSimple has the potential to be one of the industry’s real online winners, and we intend to be a core investor to help it achieve its full…
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