Estate agency leads generator and comparison website NetAnAgent has launched a crowdfunding campaign.
Unlike recent fundraising rounds in the industry, the firm seems to want relatively little money in relation to its valuation.
The business states that it is worth £4m, apparently arrived at independently by a respected firm of accountants and business advisers.
NetAnAgent is looking to raise just £150,002 in return for 3.61% equity in the company.
NetAnAgent, launched in 2012, says in its pitch that it has so far worked with over 8,000 estate agent branches, and that for consumers it takes the hassle out of finding an agent while delivering a risk-free route for agents to reach property owners.
Visitors to the site – sellers and landlords – enter basic details about their property.
This information is then anonymised and sent to local agents.
Interested agents are then able to express their interest to the vendor or landlord by supplying information as to the fee they will charge, where they will advertise the property, and what type of agent they are (eg, high street or online); they can also give a comment about themselves. They do not give a valuation of the property.
NetAnAgent has also just incorporated a review section on its site, so that members of the public who have used the service can review agents.
Over 6,500 branches are said to have signed up to NetAnAgent to deliver instant automated proposals to property owners.
The business model appears to be very different from some others in the field: the site does not rate agents, and agents do not pay anything to subscribe or anything in advance.
Instead, agents pay 0.1% of their fee when a property that has come via NetAnAgent is sold.
Online agents pay upfront, when they are instructed. In other words, agents pay once they themselves are paid.
In the pitch, it says that over 29,000 properties are currently listed by NetAnAgent, estimated to account for around 1% of UK residential transactions.
Since launching, NetAnAgent has rolled out a lettings service, and says it has grown its revenue per property 154% since launch, while cutting its cost per listing by 25%.
Its pitch says that the “target market is vast”, explaining: “Estate agents pay us a fee based on final sale price if a property sale or let completes – home owners pay no fees for our service. The more properties home owners list on site, the higher our agent engagement rate.
“The model is proven over four years and is now ready to scale to bring in more property, greater agent numbers and ultimately, increased revenues.”
Alex Thorpe, managing director of NetAnAgent, said yesterday that despite the independent £4m valuation of the company, the £150,000 being sought would be a very useful sum.
He said the money would be used to accelerate the business’s growth: “We would like to steal a bit of a march on where we would normally expect to be.
“We have been in business four years and proved that it works, although it was initially hard convincing estate agents that we are genuinely on their side.”
He added that the launch of the crowdfunding on Seedrs has been timed to coincide with the January ‘bounce’, when he said his firm always sees a large rise in interest from people wanting to sell their homes.
By yesterday afternoon, the pitch had attracted seven investors and raised £6,135. The round closes in the New Year.
Comments (29)
From what I can see as readily available for public viewing on t’internet, the Key Financials of this company are all heading South quicker than a starling on Crystal Meth – with the exception of the liabilities which are growing at an exponential rate.
And the number of ‘investors’ remains static. That’s something, at least…
A service provider ought to help their agents increase fees and income. It is reasonable for the service provider to take a fee on the increased revenue.
Net an agent business model is essentially we will haggle your fees down by increasing the number of agents asked to tender for the business, agents the vendor probably wouldn’t have contacted. The vendor won’t pay us a fee, you will!
The financials of Net an agent simply do not support the valuation of £4million, £150,000 raised looks as if it will give the firm a only just a positive net worth.
A business model that doesn’t favour its clients consistent and repeated losses mean investors would be unwise to give this more than a passing glance.
Leeches sucking blood from a business being forced to loose money. Wonderful idea for me to invest in.
I am a service supplier to the industry as well as a service supplier to a service supplier of the industry. That makes me one of the leeches, one of the parasites, it’s important that any service supplier adds value rather than removes it, that is the contradiction this scheme creates; increased competition, reduced fees.
“NetAnAgent, launched in 2012…”
Innit funny how things stick in yer mind? A quick Rummage took me to the original article Ros published (down the other pub) regarding this company, in September 2012.
I’d like to quote one poster from that article, if I may…
“Okay… My unbiased opinion (as a non-Agent who frequently uses and abuses Estate Agents): It’s cr@p. Will I be using it? Not in a month of Sundays. Sorry to those “experts with many years’ experience in the property and digital industry” who have obviously spent a couple of hundred quid on the site – but the idea and the execution both suck. Big style.”
The poster? Well… I’m certainly not going to protect anyone.
That poster would have been me. And, four years later and an Agent once more, I stand by every syllable.
I agree,
This is not upselling agents services just lowest fee.
Still stuck at £6,135 on Seedrs.
No rush from agents looking to invest!!!
I want £150,002.
Better pitch than the article subject – I’m in – how do you want it?
The model works on agents bidding their fees against their competitor to get the instruction. Another one of those cheapo business models, the lowest bidder wins …. you work for nothing? When will these companies get it into their heads that agents have (should have) a business fiscal plan each year and messing around with it is a recipe for disaster. If you can’t afford it … walk away. I do not see this business being a proposition that helps agents one bit!
So looking at their website, they promote fee saving to those that enquire, they suggest that the agents they contact will pitch online against 4 other agents and all for a 1% fee or less.
Well if any agent wants to pitch without speaking to the owner directly, based purely on being able to offer the “best deal” then frankly, they need their heads examined.
I receive maybe an email a month from this outfit.
They’ve never received a reply – and can look forward to status quo being maintained.
“JUST £150k for 3.61% equity”
IS a high valuation of £4.155m!!
Ridiculous!!
And why would an agent give away circa 10% of their fee when the consumer will never look at a property website outside of the duopoly & maybe onthemarket?
Anyone who invests can say goodbye to their cash!
Oh come on please! Can’t you recognise the great value in this business. After all it works with the interweb. I’m sure it must be worth at least 1% of what is suggested and looks outstanding value at 150p.
We also get a monthly e-mail from these guys and have never, ever had any sort of proper lead.
Isn’t about time independent agents formed a network to promote themselves, their services and generate their own leads? Anyone interested?
AgentV,
This is a great idea and always will be a great idea. If only agents realised the power they would have if they all came together.
NetAnAgent is just another company that utilises Adwords. It then compares agents fees for an end user in the hope they pick one through the system and they get paid. Their business model does work. It’s pretty simple.
They advertise on Adwords for search terms like estate agent fees but they compete with the likes of Purplebricks, Yopa, HouseSimple and Emoov on terms like that. There’s more but that’s the one they have always targetted. It’s an expensive keyword so they only rank 4th at best for it because they don’t/can’t bid high enough to rank number 1.
There’s a long established Australian company https://www.localagentfinder.com.au/ that tried a few years back to do the same thing in the UK (they set up offices in Upad – not sure why) but it didn’t kick off. I know they make A LOT of money over there.
HOA which ranks number 1 organically for a whole load of keywords including estate agents fees is where all the hits are going and consequently where all the money is. An agent owned website could easily rank number 1 after a few weeks/months. But will it ever happen….? It will be hard to convince agents even though they should understand they themsemves are ranking Rightmove so high. They are the ones who ranked Onthemarket number 1 for houses for sale (165,000 searches per month).
As a side note, none of the larger portals rank anywhere near page 1 for this estate agents fees. They aren’t even trying to rank for it. 5,400 potential monthly searches gone begging… for the sake of a few minutes keyword analysis 🙁
If an SEO expert ever set up an estate agents…
LondonR90…..how about a chat on twitter
mayapaul07 @ hotmail.com
AgentV talk to me. Easily found on twitter and linkedin
I run a single branch estate agency which generates a very significant proportion of our valuations and sales enquiries through internet marketing.
Rightmove and Zoopla are an important but relatively minor part of our online presence.
Whilst I absolutely agree that agents should try and take more control of internet lead generation, beware of falling into the SEO trap.
Google make a fraction of their income from clicks to SEO and PPC is where they want you and everyone else is to click.
In order to motivate PPC clicks over SEO Google have increasingly relegated SEO further down the page in addition to making PPC ads look ever more similar to SEO. Four PPC ads and, often, local listings appear above SEO and it isn’t unusual for SEO to appear ‘below the fold’ i.e.., you have to scroll down before you see SEO listings which is a click killer.
Also, how many of you have realised that Google have now removed PPC ads from the right of the page?
That space will not go to waste and the betting is that Google will allocate this space to PPC image ads which will without doubt massively increase clicks compared to text ads, especially SEO text ads below the fold.
So – you could spend time and/or money pursuing SEO without any guarantee of achieving a ‘top spot’ and even if you do you will appear below PPC ads and local listings where they appear.
By all means optimise your site for SEO but in my opinion, without a doubt, the smart money goes into developing a slick and Google friendly PPC campaign which gives you far more control over your site position and lead generation.
The big problem though is that the vast majority of PPC companies are run by people who are long on nerdy computer jargon and short on the real skills needed in PPC; marketing, copywriting and sales conversion.
That is the single biggest reason why so many businesses, of all types and sizes, say that PPC ‘doesn’t work’ or is a ‘waste of money’.
In short, they couldn’t be more wrong.
My advice to a local only agent would be to concentrate heavily on Google maps placing and not PPC. Google make most of their money from PPC (ie Adwords). They do not make any money when someone clicks on an organically ranking website or a website in Google maps.
PPC is very expensive and requires a lot of knowledge and then some patience getting a good page score. Even then the are some things out of your control. You could be the victim of click fraud or many companies can just outbid you making you increase your bid to maintain your position. You are right that most companies that look after a PPC campaign do not either know what they are doing but most likely will not be able to charge enough for their service if they did it properly. It does take time to, as you have said, come up with good copy, optimise your page for speed etc and then test different ads against others. Why would a local business go through all of this? Especially as you are not likely getting as much traffic as you could with Google places.
Google places is easier to optimise as long as you have a local office. That’s why a local agent who has an office has an advantage over someone like Purplebricks who can never rank for a term like estate agents wimbledon. Yes they can use Adwords for that term (they do) but the majority of the clicks will be to the Google maps listings. A local service (ie indian restaurant, hairdresser, estate agents) needs a local result. This has been proven with eye movement studies and heat maps were produced. A search for pizza : http://www.mindcorp.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Google-heat-map-2.png
Google maps will also rank you for terms you would never think off, something that Adwords can never do unless you go for every keyword – and you know if you do that you will be wasting money paying for clicks for search terms like: estate agents wimbledon jobs. With Google maps you don’t pay per click and it picks up much more in terms of clicks. A few years ago you could see the number of visitors to a Google maps pages – the results being number 1 were very impressive.
PPC is good for keyword research, building an email list or getting a large market share before selling a company – the profits come long term. An example, Hassle.com used Adwords, built up a lot of debt but build up a huge customer database of regular clients then sold the business for about £25m I think.
Adwords has always been thought of as spammy because when first introduced to Google it was. They’ve got better but so has their organic search algorithm. They really do deliver relevant search results.
“So – you could spend time and/or money pursuing SEO without any guarantee of achieving a ‘top spot’ and even if you do you will appear below PPC ads and local listings where they appear.”
That’s true but so many searches are not local searches. Just to mention a few searches, Google do not consider online estate agents, conveyancing, estate agents fees to be local searches. They have a combined search of 31,000 per month)
I think you have a well optimised, fast loading, well designed website that converts well and therefore you think PPC is good value. If so you are missing out because Google places is better!
LondonR90
You make some good points but;
Your position in local listings is out of your control – it isn’t with PPC.
You can stop your ad showing in PPC for non relevant searches i.e.., estate agent jobs (as a matter of interest PB are wasting £££’s everyday on PPC, their agency isn’t stopping their ad appearing for a host of non relevant searches – I know because I have in excess of 1000 keywords that my ads don’t show for).
You say PPC is ‘very expensive’. That depends;
Expensive is spending more than you earn in return irrespective of the PPC click cost.
Good value would be earning two, three or four times what you spend on PPC irrespective of the click cost.
Great value would be earning 10X+ which is what I do in valuations and instructions alone never mind the sales directly achieved from traffic to the site.
You are absolutely right that what the average PPC company charges, £100-£500 a month, is nowhere near enough to provide the in depth service required to achieve good to great results.
I run my own estate agency campaign in addition to many others for clients in various businesses through a separate internet marketing company which I own.
Google Places can get you so far – but nowhere near as far as a slick PPC campaign.
AgentPink92….very interesting points and insight….how can I contact you?
AgentV, what area are you in?
AgentPink some fascinating comments, Would love to hear more if you are contactable on twitter or if you could start a thread in the Arena.
I spend a good deal of time on social / online marketing but never fully cracked PPC but you make wonderful points and peaked my interest at trowing some more of my budget at it.
I’ll start a thread tomorrow in the Arena.
Ask Robert May how he manages to achieve a top of Google search within minutes for his agents @Rummage4_search on Twitter – Mystifying but jaw dropping
west midlands
AgentV,
I’ll start a thread tomorrow in the Arena.