Purplebricks sold properties worth £2.8bn in the financial year to the end of April, the agent announced to the stock market this morning.
It said there were a further £1.7bn worth of homes sold subject to contract.
Purplebricks also said that its instruction to sales conversion rate was over 77%, above industry norms, and described as believed to be industry leading.
Its instructions in April were 2,827, and Purplebricks said instructions had continued to grow.
By the end of April it had 205 local property experts, with recruitment ahead of plan. The figure is expected to be 245 by the end of this month. Purplebricks said its local property experts are “some of the best people in the industry who have a strong desire to be part of a business that is changing the way people think about estate agents and estate agency”.
It said that “more and more talented, professional estate agents want to be part of what Purplebricks is seeking to achieve”.
Website visits to Purplebricks grew to 1.23m in April this year, against 0.4m in April last year.
Purplebricks also announced plans to launch in Australia this year, a £3.3bn market.
The agent said it had gross profits of £10.6m, with a gross profit margin of 56.9%.
Its loss for the year to the end of April was £11.9m.
This was on revenues of £18.6m. Cost of sales was £8m.
The firm, which also announced it is starting a new advertising campaign this weekend, said its momentum has continued into the second half of the year with continued growth in instructions.
Michael Bruce, chief executive, said: “In just our second full year of operation we are leading change in an industry that has long been stagnant and is only now waking up to the opportunities and threats posed by technological advance and changing consumer behaviour.
“While others are following we have retained our leading position, with 62% of the non-traditional estate agency market and look to replicate this success in Australia.”
He added: “Notwithstanding our growth, I am proud to say that we are the most reviewed estate agent in the UK, achieving a rating of ‘Excellent’ from 5,800 Trustpilot reviews.”
Sarah Beeny, of rival online agent Tepilo, this morning said: “The success of Purplebricks shows just how far the sector has come. At Tepilo we are thrilled to be on track to more than double the size of the business in the next six months so would certainly agree the opportunity for this sector is strong, and growing.
“We’ve appointed a new CEO, Nick Charnock, amongst some other key senior management hires and are leveraging this experience to enter an exciting period of expansion.
“We are working with our key investment partner, the Northern and Shell Media Group, to build a brand new national multi-channel marketing campaign, harnessing their strength as a major force in British media to reach more customers and communicate the benefits of selling with Tepilo.
“We’re on course to achieve our ambitious 2016 sales targets and have helped our thousands of customers save thousands of pounds in fees by combining our expert knowledge about marketing and selling properties with the ever-developing technology that makes online the place to be. Others are recognising this now, but we are well-established with a strong business model, and are continuing to grow. Our levels of profitability and rapid growth means that the future certainly looks bright for Tepilo and the sector as a whole.”
Comments (81)
205 LPE’s. Soon to be 245 LPE’s.
Remind me. How big is the UK?
Just remember guys it’s the public who are important, if they think it’s a great business/service then they will use it.
Its like the battle of the search engines and other large online businesses, get big and get big quick will win long-term.
As independents you need to work out your boutique strategy and focus on why you are really different, not everyone wants to shop at Amazon, the experience, trust, confidence, peace of mind must outweigh the convenience and price offered online.
If your local market thinks all agents are the same they will be tempted to have a punt online, especially the more mid market property owners as all they see is a big saving on fee’s and can afford the bet.
Still 0.01% market traction for online agents in our neck of the woods.
And selling your house is not the same as buying some music from Amazon.
Agentshittingbricksdisliker has gone off to watch the football.
Hate to think what they’re doing to sell your house.
Whatever he or she was doing, they were bashing the keyboard refresh hard a few times. Gone off to bash something else in the house perhaps?
the bishop would be my guess
Surely by announcing that they are looking at moving to Australia is just giving the business the ability to hide a few more years of poor profits by ‘reinvesting’ the capital in another territory.
Investors must be totally peeved that their investment money in a company that hasn’t yet made a profit in one territory is being put into another less densely populated marketplace.
It seems to me that one of purple bricks main aims is to try to educate and convince the general public that their offering is better. Without any effective counter argument they may well succeed.
As independent agents we all act as small voices. What we need is a united front to make the challenge that if you pay a small amount for a service up front…where is the incentive for that service to maximise their efforts on your behalf …it’s simply more efficient as a business for them to minimise the work they have to do on your behalf – quantity above quality. Lets make no mistake… purple bricks and all the online companies were never designed to provide the best service and end result for the customers…they were designed from the ground up to make the most money for their owners (over a period of time …when they have eradicated competition) and that can only be achieved with a production line process.
What we need is a cohesive response designed from the ground up to promote the alternative… a network of professional independent agencies offering a ‘no sale no fee’ arrangement designed to maximise the ‘walk away net result (sale price minus fee)’ for the most important person in all of this…the Vendor.
We are working on some truly ‘disruptive technology’ to help independent agents make a stand and show they can deliver the best service possible to Vendors. Is anyone else interested in forming a network? If so let me know by email – hiphip@agentV.co.uk
you do know Hips bring agents out in hives? info@ might be better
Sorry I thought it was poignant.
Because I have done so many viewings over the last few years (and all the up and down stairs) I have lost the cartilage in both my hips and have to now have them both replaced with titanium – and I am only in my early 50’s! Perhaps I should have called myself terminator agent with I’ll-be-back@agentV.co.uk
I also hoped the hiphip would lead to an eventual hooray! We need to b e really positive against the challenges ahead.
Anything but HIPs
The disliker seems to have given up. no staying power or did John Brassington track you down?
Clearly Mr disliker (or lots of people) didn’t like my attempt at a joke. Still I’m still at 64 to 50 on this thread at the moment.
Hi Robert and anyone else. Further to your suggestion;
info@agentV.co.uk
should now be set up. Just off to watch the game now, but I will be keeping an eye on posts on this page. Thanks
Ros and Nick. As I am sure you are already discussing, I think you have a problem with your like and dislike buttons. As has been suggested above, perhaps it would be better if the names of these people were made available when they like or dislike as per the other pub, Facebook etc.?
wow thats a motivated hater – 129 dislikes, sounds like someone has something to hide….
(£5,400,000) + (£11,900,000) = ( £17,300,000) in two years
the losses increased by 220.3% despite increased listings
the HUGE profits promised in 2014 by 2016 were (1,500,000) + 17,600,000 + 24,900,000 so £41,000,000
the gap between (£17,300,000) and £41,000,000 projected is £58.3 million adrift from the business model, that should concern management,staff and investors that the business plan was wrong.
they delivered almost to the penny the results I predicted way back ahead of the float so won’t waste too much time on this but what happened to “For the year ending July 31, 2015, it anticipated getting 85,413 instructions, and the year after, 100,849 instructions – equivalent to 10% of all transactions”?
I certainly would not have any confidence in anything said, predicted or promised by anyone at the head of the scheme. Perhaps if there are genuinely good quality agents within Purplebricks ( I’ve monitored a few) there is a hybrid model for them but away from the circus so evident in these performance figures.
can I please have 58,300,000 dislikes 1 for each £ of failure? at least let me have more than Ajax.
thank you! Are you doing the same with the share price?
Dude, a debate is most properly consumed with conversation, wit and copious amounts of Tennessee Whiskey. A dislike can go blow me. Dislike’s are the tools of cowards and represent a corruption of the spirit. Sure, you have to figure no one is without bias but it’s the mother f*ckers pretending to be impartial that you really have to watch. Born charlatans and you got over 300 of them, and counting. Stand tall dude.
The figures quoted are in Billions to confuse the market. If any other business just put we lost 1 million quid but we are using your money to spend it in austraila they would last 10 minutes.
And yes we have 10 purpleshits disliking at moment.
Probably the same ones who make up the ******** on untrust pilot.
Come on, you dislikers in the chicken shed. There have only been 8 reviews on Trustpilot this morning.
Have you been spending too much time on EYE?
On the other hand, the shares are going up.
Which proves that as with George Osborne, you can fool some of the people, some of the time…
the shares might be going up today but they have lost nearly 1/5 of their value recently dropping from over 160p to 130p.
2033 listings PCM divided by 205 “snake oil salesman” ( AKA Local area experts ) means that, if as I’m advised, the listers receive £200 of the upfront fee as their remuneration then the average PB LAE earns a meagre £19k pa before tax ?!
More individual companies being contracted in (which substantially increases costs, alters the business model and PB quietly omitted to mention from the city update) with higher competition for ‘local’ areas between ‘experts’ meaning even lower income potential for them, all in a UK market where instruction volumes are falling. In a fixed price model contingent on volume instructions and not sales (a clue to customer dissatisfaction perhaps), this mitigates towards big income problems as PB will have to spend even more to gain an even larger share of a shrinking income stream. Customers on social media (despite what the official reviews say) appear to hate the service and, in the digital world, friends reviews trump review site ratings. At some point, the wheels are going to come off the wagon.
Please explain your dislikes. I’m keen to debate this with you.
The dislike on some stories are silly, Far be from me to tell eye what to do but….. Down the other ‘Pub’ if a comment has a ‘like’ the name of the person liking (Or in this case disliking) is shown. I think this would be a very good addition to this far superior ‘Pub’
Then again, down the other pub there have been some “3,400” reads of their PB story, but only 5 comments.
More smoke and mirrors
I think someone once said from the moment the story goes live they have a high number of ‘Reads’
It would also help if there was a concerted challenging voice in response to the ‘online v traditional’ propaganda that is being pumped out all the time.
Ahem
‘Its loss for the year to the end of April was £11.9m.’
Forget the associated spin – that says it all.
Pay peanuts – get monkeys.
You’re getting quicker on the dislikes.
Are you a robot? Have you borrowed one from Russell, perhaps?
Thanks again, “disliker”. You have well and truly proved my point.
I’m now going out, and may be some time.
Meanwhile, my love to the Bruces, Sarah, Russell et al
DM me on Twitter @PDQproperty
8 dislikes simply for asking for direct contact with someone claiming to be a journalist. It suggests you are very, very concerned about something being made public knowledge
So who is it from PB that is going through the comments disliking anything that could be negative?
Same people as do the TrustPilot reviews, I guess.
Go on, dislike…
Many thanks for the instant dislike
Thanks again.
And BTW I am a journalist, not an agent, so your dislikes tell me as much about PB as your poor results today do
Your dislikes are priceless…
I see you are ramping them up all over the comments.
You should stick to the TrustPilot reviews. They are Excellent
Large tech companies employ people to post positive messages on forums and help with positive messages.
Would not be surprised if that was the case, You see a lot of this with portal news stories as well.
2.8 billion is about 10300 properties in a year, that isn’t 1000 per month.
If they are listing 3000 per month but only selling 857, 2143 vendors (71%) are paying them to not sell their property!
It appears that the cold, hard light of factual data is not appreciated by some Robert. Now, why might that be?
Purplebricks also said that its instruction to sales conversion rate was over 77%, above industry norms, and described as believed to be industry leading.
I can’t think there were many agents, certainly in the South of England whose “industry norm” was only 77% over the same reporting period.
Another example of PB twisting the facts to support what is fundamentally a poor way for someone to sell a property.
Gross Profit is a great term to use when you are losing bucket loads of cash….
But is it a loss leader designed to crush any competition?
Surely the value of properties sold is totally irrelevant for an online agent charging a fixed fee.
It’s just telling traditional agents what potential fees they missed out on.
Number of instructions is given for April, but for the whole year – how many?
smoke and mirrors
Can anyone remember what their loss was the year before?
£5.4m. http://www.londonstockexchange.com/exchange/news/market-news/market-news-detail/PURP/12855950.html
In fairness, the increase in turnover is astonishing.
They lost £5.4m in 2015.
Don’t ask what happened to the formatting…
Nice one
Revenues
18.6
Gross profit
10.6
Gross profit margin
56.9%
Sales and Marketing costs
(12.9)
Adjusted EBITDA1
(9.7)
Adjusted Loss before interest and tax2
(10.5)
Net cash
30.5
yeah and put the negotiators’ salaries above the line where they should be since they are a direct cost of sale and then you have a Negative Gross Margin
They are not salaries, they are ‘independent’ businesses who trade under the PB name. However, it is quite possible that HMRC may take the view (as they have in other similar cases) that these companies are, in effect, employees which will cause further issues for PB and those brought in by PB.
Unfortunately, PB ‘forgot’ when it first started trading (pre IPO) that it was a legal requirement to register these businesses with an approved redress scheme and, as far as we can tell, may have failed to comply with other requirements in law and TPO regulations for agents to trade lawfully. And yet, these people call themselves ‘property experts’ – the ‘qualified’ statement being dropped after Michael Bruce and I exchanged emails about wether a court would view his interpretation of ‘qualified’ in the way I believed most reasonable people would.
That is a very good business losing £1m a year, wish i’d thought of that 😉
Looks like all the PB local agents are online with the dislikes lol.
But what about if they and their investors believe they can get to 10,15, 20 % of the market? With that critical mass there will come a point when they don’t need rightmove anymore because they will have the majority of properties – remember google first started off on yahoo’s search engine!
Rightmove is currently worth ?£4,000,000,000 I read somewhere – that’s a lot of return on your initial investment if it ever reached that stage, and at the moment their progress is unchallenged.
I agree. Can someone explain in simple terms what their net profit or loss is please?
I am not a fan of purple bricks however I read the bit about wanting to launch in Australia
madness, it’s much bigger than the UK. less densely populated and the LPE’s will have an even larger territory.
@ dalielswem45 – Would it be fair to say they might go down under. Aus is a very different market.
Sorry I dont get how you can have a gross profit and a loss??
Smoke and mirrors….
Don’t run a business if you can’t see that principle.
IF you invest (spend, waste, blow) more income than your business generates, you create gross profit but net loss. That’s pretty simple accounting,
PB are claiming to the stock exchange they are making a gross profit and re investing it into productivity creating a temporary loss for even greater profits at a later. That’s city talk for good things to come
Of course there is the normal PurpleShxxts spin, making it sound a lot better performance than it really is. Alistar Darling must be writing the script at that shop. So on that announcement they will sure get a few more suckers to part with their hard earned cash.
SMELL THE COFFEE FOLKS.
Thank you Eamonn, my son who is an accountant has also just tried to explain.
From what I gather its an accounting trick when you want to throw away lots of money and pretend everything is still OK.
Well done purple bricks. Think your more then dodgy but any normal person has to respect the performance.
the operating loss is a small temporary price when you balance it against the to the market share obtained and future profits it will bring.
How funny the disliker disliked the only vaguely positive comment on here. brilliant!
Thicker than a slice of belly pork in a pan of bacon!
there is a great danger here if we all do nothing….remember amazon and bookshops…we all need to pull together and unite for the common good.
Profit for sanity, turnover for vanity.
Could someone explain how a loss of almost 12million pounds is a good thing? Especially since they essentially made 10mill.
.com businesses.
Show a proven model that “makes money” then sell it in a few years.
Someone buys it, turns it into a profitable company and the proceeds of the sale give the investors their money back and a return.
One of our INEA member agents has just taken an offer on a penthouse at £505k. The Purple Bricks valuation was below £400k.
Even if the owner had gone with PB at £1100, then our agents main agency to sub out at 1.5% is far better for the consumer seller.
The recent Guild and Countrywide lower cost entry models to sell with the option to upgrade will hit the budget alone agents.
Cartel?
Frown, why the word cartel. I’m totally confused.com??
You seemed to miss the word out of your post Trev. Thought it must have been missed by accident.
🙂 Frown – I only add it when its just such as when some commercial concerns restrain agents and others in an anti-competitive way against EU laws 101 and 102.
I totally agree…. but we need to get this message out to the public… have a look at my post further down the page.
Someone a bit upset and hitting the dislike button. Why not explain why you disliked the question instead?
Bet 12 dislikes
This business will never make a profit! It’s arithmetically impossible: 245 people selling 2,827 properties. That’s 115 instructions per head. (Wow, they must be busy!) So more instructions will mean yet more people and costs, but with a flat fee structure, break-even will continue to be just as elusive.
It will make a profit if it manages to destroy all the competition before the money runs out and can then charge what it likes! Have a look at my post below.
Anyone picked up on PB going down under ?