Home » News » Agencies & People » Yell of a result: 5,600 estate agencies were founded last year says classified platform
Agencies & People

Yell of a result: 5,600 estate agencies were founded last year says classified platform

Combination of a property boom and increasing numbers of hybrid, self-employed and franchisee agents are most likely explanation of survey.

Nigel Lewis

estate agency opening

Some 5,618 estate agencies were established last year according to data from the Companies House website crunch by online classifieds website Yell.

The extraordinary figure, which if accurate would suggest a bumper year for the sales and lettings sector’s expansion, which figures collected prior to the pandemic suggest contained just over 21,000 estate agencies within the UK.

Yell’s figures would also explain the difficulties many agencies have found recently when recruiting in order to expand their teams. But many of the companies registered are likely to include the plethora of small franchise, self-employed and hybrid agencies opening up at the moment.

The classified advertising platform, which is the digital replacement for the one-ubiquitous and fat Yellow Pages directories delivered to everyone’s home, contradicts data from leads platform BestAgent.

Closing

Only a few weeks ago it reckoned that some 4% of agencies or 900 businesses had closed over the past six months.

Yell says overall some 109,000 businesses have been created within the overall ‘real estate’ sector which covers all disciplines and that 40,000 of these were either property developers or property traders.

claire miles“With the challenges of the last two years, we might expect to find that fewer people were deciding to take the leap into the world of starting and running their own business,” says Claire Miles, Chief Executive Officer of Yell (pictured).

“However, the data clearly shows that it has potentially inspired more people to take ownership of what they do for a living and finally make the dream of running their own business come true. It certainly has when it comes to the property sector.”

February 18, 2022

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