Online agents Purplebricks and Yopa both gained more market share after rivals Emoov and Tepilo went into administration early last month.
That is according to data collected by independent website Property Road which gives consumer advice on home-related subjects such as DIY, buying and selling, and finding an online estate agent.
The site – which launched in January last year and favours online over high street agents – has analysed Zoopla listings in 2018 for 16 online firms. Its simple methodology was to take a snapshot of each agent’s active Zoopla listings on the last day of each month.
It found that, according to Zoopla, Purplebricks extended its ‘vice-like grip’ by growing its share of the online market in 2018 by 6.2% to 59.3%.
Yopa became the second largest online agent, growing its market share to 15% at the end of the year, up 5.4% from last January.
Purplebricks itself claims much greater market share of online agency, in excess of 70%, but the Property Road data was drawn solely from Zoopla listings.
Even so, the gap between Purplebricks and other online agents is enormous – Purplebricks had over 15,000 more listings on Zoopla at the end of December than its nearest rival, Yopa.
After Emoov and Tepilo went into administration on December 3, the Property Road study found that out of the online agents it tracked last year, six of them posted 96.4% of online agents property listings in December.
They were: Purplebricks, Yopa, Express Estate Agency, House Network, Doorsteps and HouseSimple.
Property Road also assessed each of the 16 online agents, giving them a review based on value for money, customer support and ease of the sales process.
In each of these three areas Property Road scored the agent out of ten, and then averaged the scores for the purposes of a league table.
Yopa came top, with 9.6, HouseSimple came second with 9.5, and Doorsteps third with 9.2.
SellMyHome was in fourth place with 9.2, house network fifth with 9, Settled and Purplebricks tied with 8.2, easyProperty scored 7.8, and in tenth place came Express Estate Agency with 7.1.
It rates Yopa highly because it offers both a fixed fee and no sale, no fee, and includes a For Sale board as standard. However, it does say that Yopa’s fees in London are high.
Its rating of Purplebricks contains pluses – strong brand, and fixed price means customers know how much they will pay – but also negatives: ‘Customers reviews vary wildly’; does not offer no sale, no fee; and pay later option ‘is tied into taking their conveyancing service’.
Paul James, owner of Property Road, said that after Hatched had been closed down, with Emoov and Tepilo subsequently entering administration, larger online agents had stamped “their authority on the market”.
James said: “It’s difficult to call what will happen in 2019 but it’s likely that the larger brands will continue to dominate and we’ll see some of the smaller firms closing up shop or being acquired by those with the deepest pockets.
“That said, don’t rule out more big-name casualties as the online agents continue to try and find a sustainable model that appeals to consumers over the traditional high street offering.”
The full study is here:
Comments (17)
Seriously flawed data. Critically flawed methodology. Fatally flawed concept.
Let’s have a think for a second – a site leaning heavily toward property investment telling everyone to market their properties with NSPR – or more to the point, ‘sell at any price – who gives a fuppenny…’ Agents.
Now why on earth would they possibly want to do that…?
Happy New Year everyone. Good to see the appetite for bashing the on-liners still exists.
It is interesting to see these numbers, and in particular see how some of the most vocal and vitriolic firms have faltered or failed to make a dent in the on-line stakes.
For some their only option is to lower their fees which spells doom.
For others, they may feel the time is right to significantly lift their fees, which spells doom.
If you set yourself up to be cheap from the start, you will always be cheap in the eyes of the public. You don’t see Harrods offering goods at BHS prices now do you. Guess who survived the longest.
The losses keep getting bigger as well. Over a £million a week at PB. Once the money runs out they’ll be joining Russell Q at the job centre.
As per this league table on property eye previously, they’ve missed out a few players.
http://www.ealeaguetables.co.uk/
Missed out are:
Ewemove – 1,004
Springbok Properties – 736 listings
Open House Estate Agents – 233 listings
British Homesellers – 321 listings
Apart from that a good analysis…
Thanks for noticing that EweMove is missing ValueCounts31…..although I am happy about that as we don’t regard ourselves as the same as the folks in this league table. The ‘OnLine’ agents here are typified by the ‘upfront’ charging model.
EweMove doesn’t charge up front. We charge only when a house sale is completed and we only operate in geographies where we have a franchisee. i.e. we don’t list houses in areas we don’t cover and given that we host 100% of all viewings, it wouldn’t make sense, so our numbers won’t be as high as the ‘we can list anywhere’ players.
However, if we were included in the table, we’d be 3rd, as the year ending 20/12/2018 we listed more than Express Agency but less than YOPA, and a third more than we did in the prior year, so our growth is very positive.
This analysis comes from an independent data provider, who also tells us that the average time to sell and complete for traditional agents is 167 days, for onliners it’s 157 and for EweMove it is 146 days. For the same period and the same data set, we sold (completed) 69.8% of listed stock, compared to 57.8% for all other agents.
So am I happy to be missing from this report, and even happier to still be the UK’s Most Trusted Agent on Trustpilot and winner of the best Hybrid Agent at the Negotiator Awards Nov 2018.
Keep it up Head_Shepherd#2 think you guys do a good job.
So, you host 100% of your viewings? is that really true? I know that this is a minor point but seriously, that really doesn’t happen does it, I’m sure a good percentage of your vendors do their own?
Hi Agent Derbyshire. All our systems, process and training are designed to ensure we host 100% of all viewings as we know this is where we are able to achieve better sales results, through improved offers and to win more instructions from eager buyers, (who Rightmove say 80% of which also have a house to sell and we recognise that). So we regard hosting viewings as a critical part of the ‘sales job’ that vendors primarily employ their Estate Agent for – i.e. to sell their house. And we gain more business too, so everyone’s a winner.
And it’s important that the right person hosts the viewing – i.e. the person that originally met the vendor and carried out the appraisal as they know the vendor circumstances and the history of the property, so are better able to engage with viewers and ensure the property meets their needs, rather than having an ‘accompanied viewer from the office team’ who may have never been to the property before or know much about the vendor, or the buyer for that matter.
The way in which EweMove deploys its technology layer is unique, in that this sits behind the franchisee (not between the franchisee and the customer – as other new model agents do) to take the admin burden away from the agent, to allow them the time to spend most of their day face to face with clients, as that’s where the skill of the agent is best converted into earnings and also why we complete c70% of the properties we list.
Why aren’t signs express and other board companies on there ? They put signs up on houses and then drive off as well…
Raised a smile on a Monday.
It looks to me that they are measuring stock levels rather than market share of new listings.
This is a flawed method. They are saying for example that September was the busiest month because the stock level was the highest at 43848 but they should be looking at new listings not stock levels.
Looking at the new listings in Zoopla for PB in December you’d find it hard to say they benefited in any way from Emoov’s demise. Up about 13% according to my proxy on December 2017. Lower than their increases for earlier months compared to 2017. That’s about 270 listings.
If PB had gained a good number of Emoov’s customers you’d expect a dramatic percentage increase in new listings because the number of listings in December are low at around 2400 (2017) according to my proxy.
…. what happened to the early doors chop wobble you posted?
Was it like this:
‘After selling with PB and regularly receiving phone calls from other agents trying to poach me as a client I wonder if the slowdown in growth could partially or fully be explained by misleading comments being made about them by traditional agents when they come out to value. Whilst the two agents who were regularly phoning me didn’t categorically state PB were doing anything wrong there was certainly an implication that the property had been on the market too long and this started pretty early on.
Luckily I was keeping an eye on the market in general and even had a property for sale next door and they actually got rid of the first agent they appointed. One of the Agents that phoned me had difficulty remembering they had been sacked in regard to the sale of another property down the road. I know PB are no angels and have been found guilty of misleading advertising by the ASA on a number of occasions (usually after complaints by one of their competitors) but once their competitors have you where no witnesses are present they can get away with saying pretty much anything.Here we have Haart getting caught sending out letters claiming PB were about to go bust.https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/estate-agent-apologises-after-sending-2399593I’d love to be a fly on the wall when potential customers ask PB’s competitors why they are so much more expensive than PB.If I were PB I’d employ some mystery shoppers to see what is being said about them behind closed doors.’
No… from memory it was more like…. I really love Purplebricks, Purplebricks are great!
I have some poxy figures chomp, chomp, chomp that prove Purplebricks really are like the greatest firm ever…
They are listing more, these numbers are wrong….
His usual groupie swoonings!
Cyberduck you say:
I’d love to be a fly on the wall when potential customers ask PB’s competitors why they are so much more expensive than PB.
How about because we have to complete on your sale to get paid and for 2/3 of UK are they much cheaper, on average, for this huge advantage?
Personally, I would love to be a fly on the wall when one of their customers ask the % chance of them losing their money and the likelihood of them having to pay two estate agency fees?
Whilst i accept this “study” is predominantly about market share, it does mention ranking these companies on a value for money score. Strangely this rating seems to be based around offering a for sale board for example, rather than the key ingredient for most homeowners….how many blooming properties do the sell??
No one knows, or more likely no one wants to admit it!
The absence of any mention of operating profits makes this report of little interest.
It’s simly based on “size” of on line market share. As we know with everything, “size” must also have “quaility”…..in this case a decent bottom line.