The media bashing that high street agents are currently getting has exercised a lot of minds in the industry, but this – from Ed Mead, of Douglas & Gordon in London – could chime with your thoughts.

Here, in a new blog, is what he says. In a nutshell, human beings buying, selling, letting and renting homes need the human touch, and the internet is over-selling itself. It’s a tool, nothing more.

Do you agree?

Mead writes:

“Buying, selling, renting and letting is not a two-dimensional experience.

Comparisons between online and full service agents are missing the point. The limitations of what the internet can and can’t do surely make the argument for us.

We should all welcome competition, and given the way the world moves we might all be expected to move with it. Except for one thing: what we sell isn’t a commodity bought on price and it hasn’t changed for thousands of years.

Buyers set parameters, often wrongly, but buy on emotion, and emotion isn’t conveyed in pictures, however cleverly delivered.

My concern for the business of buying and selling property is that the internet services the needs for buyers and sellers to a point, BUT as a medium is over-selling itself in the whole process.

If we were all living like battery hens, then it might be a different story, but luckily human beings require a human touch.

Let me use an example. When I started, photos on details were a rarity and floor plans a distant dream. As for area, you’d have an idea where you wanted to be but were a little bit flexible.

Anyone calling an estate agent (probably with budget of £25k back then!) would be invited in and would spend an afternoon looking at what they thought they wanted and end up buying what they needed. The latter would very often be miles away, metaphorically and geographically, from what they started off looking for and would be because they’d taken the time to look around.

Modern day searchers will go onto a big portal and simply put in a list of their priorities and wait for their inbox to fill up. This has two corollaries: one, that they will usually only see what they think they want, not what they really need; and two, that the agents simply become key-holders and lose the ability to actually advise people.

Everyone seems to see looking for property on huge monolithic portals as a universal panacea, but with up to 40% of properties (in my experience) selling without seeing it on the web, this is obviously not the cure-all we may think.

Finding the right property is all about knowing the locality you want to live in and having someone there unearth the right thing for you.

This has always been, and will for quite some time, I think, be the preserve of estate agents. A good one will open up a real new world to consumers, not one limited to a computer screen or mobile device.

Online agents are welcome to some of the action. A central office with a dozen agents looking after the whole country may provide a ‘cheaper’ service – although perhaps £500 upfront versus an average fee of £2,500 IF sold is not the bargain it appears – but it can never replace the local knowledge that the huge majority agents use to both their buyers’ and sellers’ advantage every day.

The internet is a tool designed to help humans. Buying a property is an emotional process, and until the internet can communicate that, consumers write off full service local knowledge estate agency at their peril.”

Pictured is a young Ed Mead starting out in estate agency – with the internet a distant prospect and the office décor distinctly underwhelming.

Editor’s note: If you have strong opinions and/or run blogs on your website that you think may be of interest to the industry as much as to consumers, please get in touch with Eye.

Email: ros@propertyindustryeye.com

Young Ed Mead