Purplebricks is by far and away the dominant player in the online and hybrid estate agency market – but it is somewhere in the middle when it comes to average asking prices.
New research shows that its average asking price is £285,223.
This is a long way behind the average asking price of sellmyhome, which is a touch off £700,000 at £696,967.
However, major differences are that sellmyhome is based in Fulham and some 40% of its 151 listings are in London.
Tepilo (£381,601) also has relatively high asking prices compared with Purplebricks, as does Urban (£373,711) and hatched (£367,688).
These four are followed by zoom995, with an average asking price of £353,360. Notably, ten online agents out of the 22 have average asking prices that are more than the latest new asking price quoted by Rightmove, of £307,824.
Of the online agents with 1,000+ properties on the market, Tepilo has the highest average asking price (£381,601), followed by House Network (£344,278), HouseSimple (£331,734) and eMoov (£315,299).
Notable agencies with lower than average asking prices were Poundland founder Steve Smith’s Estates Direct (£298,175) and easyProperty.com – which licenses its brand from Sir Stelios Haji-Iannou’s easyGroup (£191,433).
Not one of the online agents measured by comparison website SellingUp, which drew all its data from Zoopla on Monday, has anything like the inventory of Purplebricks.
Purplebricks has a stock of 8,709 properties. The online agent with the second highest inventory is eMoov, at 2,519 (plus another 56 if you add in its Bucks office), followed by housesimple with 2,192.
SellingUp, which provides a guide to online estate agents, measured the 22 onliners with stock of 100 or more properties for sale on Zoopla.
Some of those figures are particularly interesting.
Hatched, for example, has 336 at its main branch, plus another 250; Sarah Beeny’s Tepilo has 1,466; Settled has 153; easyProperty has 991; Yopa has 874.
Oliver Lewis, director of SellingUp, said: “The fact that the best known online agent, Purplebricks, has lower than national average asking prices fits the common perception that low-cost fixed-fee online estate agency suits the bottom end of the market, but this data shows it is not that simple.
“It is worth noting that almost half of the online agents were marketing at above the national average price level, and substantially so in the case of SellMyHome which is London-centric.
“We hope that these figures are helpful to sellers considering which online estate agent is best suited to sell their property.
“If a vendor wants to dispose of a property at the lower end of the market they may feel an agency that typically operates at a similar asking price level may be a good match.
“On the other hand, if the owner is selling a house at the top end, even the multi-million pound mark, they may feel that an online agency with proven experience in negotiating at that level would add value and can be trusted with the sale.”
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Comments (3)
Interesting data but the only facts that will determine how effective an agent is, are not the number of properties they have for sale but factual, accurate (not juggled) answers to the three key questions.
1. How likely is an agent to actually sell my home? – Listing to completions ratio
2. How effective is the agent at valuing and negotiating a sale price for my home? – original asking price to eventual sold price (at the HMLR not the last quoted asking price used by Zoopla) and, compared on a like for like basis to similar sale properties in the area
3. How long am I going to be up for sale? – Time from initial advert to exchange of contracts.
None of the call-centre agents seem willing or able to offer these statistics without clear attempts by a couple to deliberately obfuscate and twist the figures, presumably to deceive in order to gain financial advantage.
Two dislikes at a statement of the blindingly obvious? Is it that you are unable to engage in intelligent debate or simply annoyed at someone printing inconvenient facts?
Welcome to my world, Mr W!
I got over 150 ‘Dislikes’ not too long ago.
How right must I have been that day!!
;o)