New research shows how much revenue estate agencies are potentially losing due to unanswered phone calls.
The study by YourBusinessNumber has revealed that missed phone calls are costing estate agents an estimated £119m annually.
Missed calls are estimated to cost UK businesses £30bn a year, and this equates to an average annual loss of £5,357 per company, based on the 5.6 million or so firms registered in UK.
There are thought to be 22,145 real estate agencies currently operating across the UK property market, with each suffering a loss in revenue to the tune of £5,357 annually due to missed calls.
Regionally, the biggest losses are being endured in London. The region is home to the largest number of estate agents at 6,445 – accounting for 29% of all UK agents.
As a result, the capital’s estate agents are estimated to be losing out on £34.5m a year due to missed calls.
Agencies in the South East are also suffering as a result of missed calls, with YourBusinessNumber estimating they lose £18.5m a year.
In the East this loss of income equates to £11.6m annually, and in the North West, estate agencies are losing £10.1m every year due to missed phone calls.
George Lineker, co-founder of YourBusinessNumber, said: “The UK property sector has seen an overwhelming level of market activity since the start of the pandemic and the nation’s estate agents have been on the front line working tirelessly to process this heightened demand.
“This will have stretched many of them from an operational standpoint and it’s inevitable that, at times, the phone will have gone unanswered as a result.”
Comments (3)
Lol. If I missed a call there was a reason …. it wasn’t feasible to answer it. I have only one pair of hands, my staff have only one pair of hands just like the customer. Unless I employ more staff to take a call I do not know when will be made and at a cost that the business cannot cover …… unanswered calls will always happen and a reality. The article is nonsense statistics unless you are saying agents deliberately don’t pick up the phone when they are not doing something. Mind you, I and my staff expect to have a lunch break or go to the toilet in peace. I refuse to have phones put into the bog, even if that is where some of the conversation belongs!
That’s a bit of a daft study! So if someone is serious about buying or selling a house and they can’t get through to the agent they think to themselves, ‘oh I won’t bother buying or selling then!’ I can see that a particular agent may lose that particular potential customer, but it’s not an ‘industry loss’ surely.
I think they count it as a “loss’ if Agent 1 missed a call and as a result loses out to Agent 2. It’s not a loss to the industry, but is a loss to Agent 1. Maybe the company pushing the research has a vested interest in getting that headline. Maybe they offer a “solution” to this problem???
If they have a vested interest, I doubt they wanted to do this research to discover that agents not answering calls makes more money for the industry. Therefore the research is likely to be bogus.
Perhaps Agent 1 and Agent 2 missing the call worries the customer who then realises that not all agents are equal and so is willing to pay a higher commission to Agent 3 when they answer? Or maybe not answering the first call straight away gives the impression of a busy agency with lots of buyers? It’s just speculation, but not inconceivable that some missed calls could actually increase industry turnover? Did this “study” look into this? It doesn’t sound like it.
Personally I think it’s intuitive (and maybe even obvious) that missed calls would be bad for the agent who missed them, but as someone thought this was not obvious to them, or that this assumption needed to be challenged by doing a study, let us ponder why the study looks so much like bad science, as if written by a call answering service? No mention of what percentage of missed calls switch agent vs what percentage keep trying. Also no mention of the percentage of calls from Buyers vs from Vendors. Do people really buy a different house if the agent does not pick up first time?
Surly everyone knows to answer their phones. Was this study needed and did it “discover” anything newsworthy? Is it even relevant to estate agency, as it seems to be very generic, done across all businesses.