Estate agents make up just 2.2% of high street businesses across the UK, new research is claiming.
The figure compares with retail at 30.32%, charity shops at 7.76% and banks at 6.28%.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the research says there are more travel agents on high streets than estate agents, with travel agents consisting of 2.78% of high street businesses.
The research was based on a sample of 6,682 businesses across 120 high streets in towns across all 12 regions of the UK. The research did genuinely concentrate on high streets, and so may not have taken in ‘estate agents’ rows’ in town centres but off the actual high street.
The research – which breaks down high street food outlets into three separate categories, consisting of ‘café’, ‘food and drink’ and ‘fast food’ – found that the proportion of agents among high street businesses varied per region.
The highest proportion was in London, at 3.83%, and the lowest in Wales, at 0.63%.
The data was collected in May by finance firm Together.
Ten towns per region were sampled and then averaged.
A spokesperson told us: “Our research team go in-depth to make sure our studies are as accurate as possible.”
Comments (5)
I said a few years ago that it just doesn’t make sense any longer for any estate agents to have offices in the high street. Almost all property searches these days start online. In Maidenhead there is one particular street that is stuffed with agents, all paying no doubt outrageous rents and rates and the offices are often empty of customers.
Why not simply have standard well appointed office block premises where clients etc can come to sign paperwork, speak face to face etc. Surely this is the way to deal with the online only threat?
A shop window still has value – and the shop front is branding, especially if you’re in a prominent position. I wouldn’t give up our shop for an office space – although it does help that we own it. I shouldn’t want to be at the mercy of a commercial landlord at the moment.
Agree. Neither would I. We’re in a prominent position and we’ve leased for 19 years so we do have a commercial landlord but we’ve been there longer than the rest of his row of businesses who change hands every few years and we fight tooth and nail for moderate rent increases every 5 years.
No high street presence = listings nightmare for agents and madness for letting agents (so many reasons). Some people forget and confirmed in research, people like face to face and some parts of the jobs can only be done effectively that way. Non-high street presence is all about saving on overheads, not providing a better service.
I wonder if this is a higher or lower percentage than say 10 years ago? There don’t seem to be any fewer estate agencies in the high streets these days.
Could it be that far from killing off high street agents the online disrupters and gamechangers have actually had a negligible effect? Who would have thought it eh?