easyProperty boss Robert Ellice has said that last week’s mock funeral to mark the “death” of high street agents was highly successful.
Denying a rumour that easyProperty had parted company with its PR firm, The Red Brick Road, Ellice said: “We are delighted with the parade and feel it was a great success.”
It is unclear how much publicity the march gathered, beyond the trade press.
Separately, Savills has confirmed that it has parted company with The Red Brick Road but underlined that the firm had never done PR for Savills.
A spokesperson told EYE: “I can confirm that Savills is looking for a new creative company, not a PR company as has been reported.
“Red Brick Road has been involved with some of our creative work over the years but has never had any involvement in PR for Savills.”
According to the advertising trade publication Campaign, The Red Brick Road had worked for Savills for five years but parted ways due to a client conflict.
That conflict came back in May when The Red Brick Road was hired to handle both the creative and PR activity for easy Property.
David Miller, chief executive of The Red Brick Road, told Campaign: “We worked on a project-by-project basis with the fantastic Savills team for a number of years.
“We were appointed to launch a game-changing property business for the easyGroup earlier this year – therefore are sadly unable to continue working with Savills.”
According to easyProperty’s crowdfunding pitch of just over a year ago, the firm is set to lose £4,773,979 in the financial year October 2014 to September 2015, but to make a profit of £2,908,359 in the new financial year, followed by a profit of £9,729,111 in the year after.
The firm raised £1.4m on Crowdcube from 358 investors, ahead of its £1m target.
However, eMoov’s current pitch has exceeded the amount raised last September by easyProperty.
Comments (21)
Not exactly gonna say it died a death is he, boom boom.
£40 ish k to get some trade PR. The agency should be fired Rob.
I reckon Ros should start a “crowdfunding” industry daily bulletin for those firms that specialise in raising money for an ideas……Would be very popular….certainly the online agents would be better represented away from a professional industry press as they never have anything to say about successful, profitable, service lead, innovative agency.
How has he quantified it a success?
The guy is a joke.
It cost thousands to stage – He is saying high street agents waste money on overheads, well none of us have wasted this much money on such a campaign that does not get a great deal of attention.
Taken to the High Street to promote it! – Online advertising not getting noticed to decides to go to the high street, how ironic!
EHenderson unable to comment as unable to read anything that doesn’t feature The Duopoly!
Sounds like a politician. Even the biggest failures are pronounced success.
hahahahaha..still laughing from Roberts comment..haha…good one Robert…haha..ok..stopping laughing..hahaha..nothing like a bit of humour to start a Monday morning..
It’s time for Ellice to cut the cr*p and start delivering isn’t it.. I found this comment on another website;
“Where is the Spurs deal Ellice? Where is the IPO promised this year Ellice? Where is the move into Europe this year (that you bought all those licenses for)… and why do you keep re-posting half your property inventory on RM everyday even though your gross and net ‘lets available’ total doesn’t vary by more than four or five properties… all about impressions isn’t it Ellice.. not actuals! Easyproperty will probably succeed long-term but it will be no thanks to Ellice, who will certainly be replaced as CEO if and when the company actually does something it says it will do and floats.
It seems its time time for Mr Ellice to start walking the walk over talking the talk..!
The re-posting of property registers on the portals is known as portal juggling. It is practice which is put down to, described as, administrative errors, oversights and technology glitches. The net affect of all these unfortunate issues is that the sales performance of an agent can appear better than it is.
Portal juggling has some strange side effects, as the very respected Julian O’Dell noticed, winter has already set in at High Wycombe; a ‘new listing’ at the beginning of September showed snow on the ground.
Snow way Robert 🙂 Whats a funeral with horses cost these days, complete with full nut crew mourners that looked like they came straight from the asylum. All those investors must be saying easy come. Easy go.
Its no administrative error. For example, Easy showed a total of 220 properties on RM one day last month..but take away the ‘let agreeds’ and they had 170 properties available to let..then they started re listing let agreed properties and whilst their tally went straight back up to 350, their availables stayed at 170 and the same pattern is repeating.
Relisting ‘let’ or ‘sold’ properties is against guidance and any agent finding another cheating the impression given to Joe Public consumers should report it with evidence to the ASA, NTSEAT and the Trading Standards officer where the companies Head Office is.
Agents who play fair should report those who cheat figures
I have been speaking to the data quality team at Rightmove this morning who sound like they will do something about it,( they have to given the breach of CPR regs) Please email any examples through to dataquality (@) rightmove.co.uk. use #portaljuggling in the subject line.
One juggled property I found has been on the market for 3 years. It not an Easyproperty but it shows these admin errors aren’t restricted to just one firm.
“I have been speaking to the data quality team at Rightmove this morning who sound like they will do something about it”
Good luck with that Robert…RM make all the noises about data quality but, in truth do nothing about it. I was in lengthy dialogue with them a couple of years ago about groups and single branches that were leaving sstc ‘s on RM and re-cycling lets and sales. The only solution RM gave me was to supply evidence (pref land registry or electoral roll for each offending property……….It was at that point I decided that the only way forward was to join this practise as it would be too time consuming to do what they asked.
I can understand that RM are very busy and that they work on very tight budgets. They probably can’t afford to employ a new team to specialise in data quality!
There is a small team of determined characters on this across the country from the boot end of Cornwall to right T’up North. With everything being shared on social media and beginning to trend it was at Rightmove’s request we contacted them.
Using social media (hash tag #portaljuggling) and the practice being a contravention of CPR regulations it will be very difficult to turn a blind eye to and if they try people like Peebee, Chris Wood are a bit tough to shake off a topic like this.
Its sounds like a very worthwhile cause.
Have you seen any benefit from it yet?
What i mean is have the agents stop juggling or the portals banned them?
Not yet Smile, we have only just sent the evidence file across although we have been gathering it for a while.
On one firm alone the screen shots and pdfs total over 515mb of data.
Am i right in assuming it is an online agent by chance?
So far it is 4 firms with a national presence (all a bit shouty as Jonnie call them) I won’t be drawn on whether they are online or not as evidence suggests it is a learned methodology and not unique to the 4.
The only press they seemed to get from this was on EAT and PIE so not a great result to be honest. I wonder how much it cost them.
Mr Ellice also congratulated the England rugby team for their highly successful world cup campaign.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha..etc