A nationwide recruitment campaign has been launched by EweMove, headed: “Estate agency is BROKEN”.

The campaign is aimed at both owners and staff at high street agents.

The letter, from ‘head shepherd’ Nick Neill, starts by saying “high street agency is dying”.

EweMove is the hybrid brand owned by The Property Franchise Group whose other businesses are high street firms such as Martin & Co.

The EweMove recruitment letter, which may not go down too well with other franchisees in the group, says: “We are experiencing an unprecedented and industry-shaping level of change, and the fact of the matter is that the agents that keep their heads buried in the sand and don’t change WILL go out of business.

“Let’s be honest – none of this is a surprise. The public have voted with their feet, who can blame them?

“For too long home movers have had to endure the lacklustre services of many high street agents.”

The letter goes on: “Agents are in it for themselves, and – to be frank – they couldn’t give two hoots about the real needs of their buyers and sellers.

“The world has moved on, and the fact of the matter is that the traditional high street agent no longer works with the way that people live now.

“We need 24/7, on-demand service, but the traditional agency model continues along the route of inaccessible high street offices with little or no parking and a strict 5pm closing time.”

The letter goes on: “It’s not just the service where agents let their customers down; it’s also in their misleading statements and practices.”

It singles out the claim that the agent has a list of registered buyers.

Neill pours scorn on this, saying that in pre-Rightmove days, this would have been critical to success, but no more: “The last thing you need is a stale old buyers list.”

However, the letter says that high street agents are not the only issue: “The industry is broken but the problem is that the so-called saviours are just as bad.”

It says Purplebricks has gained market share because of the “laziness and apathy of their competition”.

Online agents are not angels “who have come to set the world free from greedy and untrustworthy high street agents”.

The public, it says, are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with online agents offering lower service levels and higher fall-through rates.

The last part of the letter suggests that agents join the “EweMove revolution”.

It says: “If you’re hungry for success and you feel frustrated by the constraints of your current business as an independent agent, or your employer if you’re working for a corporate, we want to talk.

“But just to be clear, we want to talk against the backdrop of this letter – we only work with people who share our philosophy, which means that you’ll need to be open minded enough to be challenged and jettison the bad habits in our industry.”

The letter ends by saying that Neill himself benefited when he became a franchisee, in York, and cites its Basingstoke franchisees, Robert Bassett and Mark Holmes, as having written £865,000 in commissions in the last 12 months, “with no high street shop in sight”.