It was the article that started “Everyone love to hate estate agents” and which galvanised Eye into writing a comment piece saying that it was time for the high street to fight back.
Under the headline Is this the end of the road for high street estate agents? Caroline McGhie’s piece in the Telegraph carried an interview with Dan Attia, chief executive of a new online agent called Yopa.
In it, he said: “Estate agency is an archaic industry which has not been reformed for many years and needs someone to ruffle its feathers. I want this to be as disruptive as Airbnb has been.”
Anyway, here’s a development.
Private Eye has taken an interest in the story and reports on the Telegraph piece “bigging up a new online property agency called Yopa”.
According to Private Eye: “Yopa’s chief executive, Dan Attia, was given space to expand on his company’s not very new idea, which he says will revolutionise estate agency in the way Airbnb has transformed holiday lettings.
“Yet space seems to have prevented McGhie mentioning that Yopa is not a one-man band.
“Attia has two fellow directors: Messrs Andrew and Alistair Barclay.
“Could they possible be related to the Telegraph’s owners, Sirs David and Frederick Barclay? They could indeed: Alistair (aka Alex), 25, is the son of Sir David, while Andrew, 23, is the son of his partner’s older brother, Telegraph chairman Aidan – and therefore his fellow director’s nephew.
“Alistair/Alex and Andrew are also directors of Yopa’s parent company, Hillgate Property Investments Limited, which claims to manage properties worth £50m – not bad for a pair of youngsters who only set up the company in 2012, when they were barely in their twenties.
“Hillgate was also the name of the estate agency via which the senior Barclays made their first serious money in the 1960s.
“Successive generations of Barclays may be secretive, but they turn out to be sentimental souls.”
According to Company Check, Yopa has three directors, Alistair Barclay, Andrew Barclay and Daniel Attia.
Eye has now emailed Yopa asking it to make contact with us, but we have not yet heard from them.
We also tried to contact it by phone, but despite its proposition that it is open 24/7, the phone was not picked up.
The agent charges between £510 and £870, says “We don’t need to visit your property to estimate its value”, and advertises on Rightmove and Zoopla.
The original Telegraph story is here
Comments (5)
I had a frightening insight into an online agent last week. I won’t reveal their name, but they one one of the most prominent. As part of the due diligence requirements, we ask potential franchisees to mystery shop local competition. Upon inviting this agent around for a market appraisal, the guy asked ‘When did you buy it, and what price did you pay’. He then (in front of the ‘vendor’ went onto Nationwide House Price Index, obtained an annualised mark up and said proudly that the house was now worth X + HPI rise% = Y….
An R4 site specific search of telegraph.co.uk for Yopa shows up a stack of stories by the Telegraph promoting these fellas
“We don’t need to visit your property to estimate its value”… Because LOCAL AGENTS are so good at ensuring we’re (maybe) selling your property within a 10% margin of it’s actual value.
The sooner on-line-agents (and their misguided clients) realise that Estate Agency is made up of hundreds of micro markets, the better.
I now have a new applicant desperate to buy after he had an offer accepted/pending on a property being sold through an on-line agent SINCE JANUARY. You’ve guessed it – the vendor, who is managing the sale’s progression doesn’t really have a clue. He has sworn he’ll never offer through an on-line agent again.
The fact is that loads of similar articles like this that have been doing the rounds for the past few years and online agency has only made a tiny inroad into traditional agency says it all.
People are constantly being told that traditional agency is finished, yet they genuinely feel that an established, local, full service agent is who they want to instruct to sell their house.
There seems little point in a “media” fightback as professional, full service agents are still winning the argument and doing the business on the ground, and that’s what counts.
Live and breath Twitter for a few weeks and you spot all sorts of things going on. Someone recently asked me why I spend all my time snooping about on the internet.
It seems there isn’t a story published where there isn’t some connection between the journalist and someone, “considerwibbly richer than youw” who they are schmoozing for a bit of the action.