We’d be interested to know what readers make of the Allagents league tables which are now out.
They have been broken down into areas and are, says Allagents, “designed to help consumers compare agents” as well as for agents to compare themselves against the competition.
We keyed in London and found that Paramount Properties, which seems to put a lot of effort into Allagents, has sailed into top place with 784 reviews, followed by Martin & Wright with 582, MyLondonHome with 413, Ludlow Thompson with 356 and Streets Ahead with 357.
However, as EAT doesn’t live in London, we also keyed in our local town (Fleet, Hampshire). Fleet may be on the small side, but all the same, it has more estate agents than you could safely shake a For Sale sign at, and here we found an altogether more mystifying scenario.
Coming top in the Allagents league table is Carson & Co with just two reviews, ahead of McCarthy Holden with just one. In third place is Leaders with 15 reviews, and in fourth Romans with three reviews.
Even odder is Halifax coming in fifth place, despite no reviews at all, followed by Mann Countrywide in sixth place, Countrywide Residential Letting in seventh, Waterfords in eighth, Vickery & Co in ninth and Mackenzie Smith in tenth – all without any reviews.
Something called a First Division is then listed, with all ten agents not having one review between them. Meanwhile, the Second Division lists four agents, of which the one in first place has no reviews, and the ones in the lower places all have one review each.
We’re even more stumped than usual. In fact, it makes the RICS’s net balances and the Halifax’s seasonally adjusted prices look relatively straightforward.
What do you think? Are the tables an accurate reflection of your own high street?
allagents league tables
Comments
Last poster - I'm guessing here that sarcasm isn't your strong point, is it? ;o)
@Peebee 'our recent 98.8% TPO rating' are you having a laugh!
Is this the referenceline scam survey that brings everyone back with top ratings. How on earth did you not manage 100% when your controlling who is allegedly being surveyed???
Answers on a postcard please
'NW6 Agent': "...I am not prepared to enterinto any more dialogue on this. People can believe what they want"
WOW! Is that an example of your MA technique by any chance?
You must be a treat to behold in the living room, matey - rolling over like a float of crocodiles in feeding frenzy mode the second a vendor asks for a fee reduction...
Maybe you DO need this website as a crutch for instructions after all... ;o)
Thank you for being honest at last and confirming you are Allagents posting.
@sales pitch I am not prepared to enterinto any more dialogue on this. People can believe what they want
The positive comments here read like a sales pitch rather than constructive commentary.
What is the name on your pay slip, bet its begins Al..............................
NW6 agents , bet you pay Rightmove and moan too?
This is a parasite web site funded by agents , wake up guys!
'NW6 Agent' - my company don't 'feature' on the site. Nor do 99% of Agents here 'oop North'. If we did, then I have no doubt that we would attract a fantastic rating from any customers we could badger into posting (our recent 98.8% TPO rating gives me the confidence to state that...) - and a fair smattering of p!$$-poor ratings posted by our competitors thrown in for good measure.
I have no doubt that this site has a fair way to go to 'peak' as you suggest - as no doubt you and others will continue to feed it until it starts taking more of the hand that feeds it than the food on the hand.
Good on them. They have identified one area of Agents' weakness and built upon it.
@PeeBee I assume from your comments that your firm is not a fan of the site or perhaps you are not upto date with the power of customer review sites.
Personally I couldn't care if agents do or don't use the site as the less half decent competitors that use it the better for us.
However we like the site and the team that operate it. I make no secret that we opted for their premium support package however we want to spend more of our time selling houses knowing that we have the advertising and support there for managing our profile and generating the leads.
They have achieved so much to date for a firm that doesn't even have a London base or presence. This is one site is no where near its peak yet
"Allagents has become our biggest provider for New instructions."
I can only say that I'm sorry you admit to have so little else in your armoury to gain instructions!
What did you rely on to keep you open before this website came into being?
Allagents has become our biggest provider for New instructions. We do get more leads from other sources but they have a lower conversation rate.
It really does work, but only if you genuinely provide a great service and are proactive in getting customer feedback on it.
And from the number of league table tweets they are getting, its fair to say we are not the only ones put there that like it
Would a genuine agent (@Happy agent) who claims to be gaining a significant advantage in terms of new instructions, then go and tell his competitors all about it, or would he keep quiet and enjoy it?
Funny how there's always a positive post about allagents (and let's face it, positive posts for them are few and far between) several days after a news story about them is published.
Hoping to have the last word?
You can all the moan about Allagents as much as you like.
Amazon has fake reviews as well as real ones.
I can say I have one at least 3 instructions because of my listing and promotion of my good work.
This is business that may have gone to you - but didn't.
They are asking a minimal amount for support services, yes the data may not be 100% and it has issues.
Until a better review site comes along I will continue taking instructions away from you and having a good laugh.
After all if I don't do a good job I would lose the instruction just like any of us.
Great idea and will help vendor make right descision,but it should be operated by TPOS
If you are weak at valuations / marketing / selling you're self. get on here, you can buy a usp.
We got an email from them during the week about it.
There are some old data on it, but in fairness they have added an error reporting section on the tables.
Will it proove to be the 'game changer' that many think it will be?? The jury is still out on that, however it is a great idea and will certaintly not be doing any harm to the agents that are proactive on it and the top in their own areas.
With a big marketing budget and campaign behind it, then it really would be taken seriously
They should have purchased the latest database of agents instead of one years old, the only way to do the site properly is to let agents manually join one by one.
In Huntingdon we are listed twice in the 'Premier League' but, worryingly, so is an Agent, Price Properties who went bust years ago owing thousands to landlords and tenants and another agent, Vernons, who were taken over a couple of years ago - what a load of tosh!
"Who would have ever heard of 'Premier league' and 'first division' estate agents before!"
Err... just about every 'premiership' Agent, I would have thought!
I was classing Agents in 'leagues' ten years before I became one!
"sw agent" - it seems that every time you post you go so simply to suck up to this company.
Unless you are blind or just dim you should see that other posters seriously doubt your motives and your authenticity.
Competitor up the road had not even been active up the road, in the space of two days, over 50 reviews went on there, all 5 star as well. I know a few of them, and their families etc, and I would have a leat thought if they were getting to get their families to write reviews, then they would have at least written it under a fake name. You couldn't make this up.
The public still don't really know about this site, and If I dont know by now, then its never going to take off in the way some people think it will.
Saying that, i think the concept is still a good idea, only if someone else reputable ran it, or policed it.
Actually would you believe that Amazon are guilty of this too...?
I told AllAgents about it when I joined a few months back.
OK, this is where it gets complicated and deeply mathematical (seriously - I'm not kidding).
The problem is easy (ish to state) but quite hard to sort out.
Essentially one 5 star review is nowhere close to ten 4 star reviews - I know which I would go for.
But it is more complicated than that, because 5 bad reviews and 5 glowing reviews gives an average of 2.5 and that should come out on top of a single 3 star review in a league table, but it doesn't.
But a computer can't work it out for itself without some more intelligent programming.
If anyone is interested in higher maths & computer programming you can look here: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
It's called the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter.
I knew that my Maths A-Level would come in handy one day!
Bet you are not No 1 except in your own mind, or you would have used your name.
agent league tables for customer experience- Fantastic idea but it will require a lot of work to keep up to date with the current list of firms branches.
We are no 1 in our area :-)
It's always the same on this forum, agents with poor customer service skills complaining about their feedback and claiming all negative reviews have been written by their competitors.
Review site like this one are here to stay so you are going to have to change your attitude towards them.
Is it not a bit of coincedence that the league tables have been launched just at the same time as their discussions with investors story??
Are they about to go head to head with rightmove and zoopla now? Or has zoopla quietly done a deal with them?
Forget allagents, we've entered the ESTAS for the last 3 years and those guys REALLY are trying to help agents in their local markets. All the feedback stats and comments from clients are only seen by us (not the general public). The ESTAS team do a 3 month audit process so we know the results are genuine. Would recommend them highly to any agent who wants genuine feedback.
Go away. We're talking about you, not to you.
Every allagents topic here follows the same trend of numerous agents slagging them off, and a few postvetorials from allagents.
For once, can allagents try listening, taking note, learning and improving; instead of pretending to be agents posting themselves the most stunningly wonderful, fake, "reviews".
I can't believe that this site continues to get away with the false impression that it is a consumer focused site when in fact its real purpose is to make money out of agents.
Our own company reached the dizzy heights of 7th nationally before being asked to make a monthly payment. Research indicated that some other firms were also asked for a payment albeit at a different level whilst others were advised that they could continue at no cost.
As we refused to pay we were removed from the site and still do not exist as far as All Agents are concerned. What a great shame that this opportunity for an objective review site has been abused in such a way. All it seems to do is to allow those agents that pay them money to appear at the top of their tables.
I have heard that there is a major chain of agents going to give allagents a big surprise soon from their solicitors.
whole site is compromised when they review us, who are not agents! Priceless!
Are people still giving money to this company?!
A follow up story would be nice of the chap that threatened them with legal action. I'd like to know if Allagents rolled over...I bet they did.
I simply cant understand why anyone would support a review site that knowingly allows one agent to slander another and won't fix it until they are payed, unless of course they are manipulating the site themselves.
If you are paying these people money you are simply being mugged off.
So who am I? an agent who has a bad review on the site? Someone involved with a competing review site? jealous that I never thought of it? That's the point isn't it....hopefully my comment will have cost them a subscription and nobody at allagents will know why or who I am. Double edged sword this reviewing malarkey.
You have got to take your hats off to these guys , this really is a great concept and one that will surely capture agents attention. Who would have ever heard of 'Premier league' and 'first division' estate agents before! I can just visualise this at a valuation asking the customer if she wants to work with a premier league agent or one from the first division! 5 stars lads, keep up the good work!
Your analysis dsays it all Ros.
Complete and utter waste of time on a system easily fiddled - sorry, manipulated - and where coming first counts for nothing anyway
This site is a complete load of tosh. It gives a totally misleading picture of agents' performance.
We are part of a small group of letting agents and Allagents has just lumped together all the agents with vaguely similar sounding names across the country as being part of the same group or company. One of the agents that has been lumped in with us has horrendous reviews so we come out almost last in the country. I've emailed them about this but they say that we will have to pay them to correct the incorrect data that they have set up.
Worst of all is that anyone can write anything on there anonymously without fear of comeback and there is no control of malicious or mischievous use.
I'd be happy to have a review site where people write genuine reviews and the agent being reviewed has the opportunity to see who it is and put the other side of the story if they need to. At least that way you'd know the reviews were genuine. The downside for Allagents is that making this change would remove probably 75% of their already sparse reviews. It seems they want quantity not quality.
I like it. It difficult for us to see what agents were in front of us, but now we can also see who is catching up. We only do sales, so the only draw back is that agents that do both sales and lettings can move up league quicker. It would have been much fairer to do seperate tables for sales and lettings
I agree with M. It needs old listings removed but has definately got potential and certainly original .
All too easy to post glowing reviews for your own company and negative ones for your competitors.
A review that says, for example, "rubbish- do not use" is allowed to stand yet there is no chance of refuting that claim and no way of knowing which customer you have upset.
Then it counts against you in the league table.
clearly utter nonsense and a site you can no longer trust or rely on, Halifax in 5th????? Halifax closed or sold their branches over 4 years ago.
I think they make it up as they go along, with the sole intention of flogging whatever they can think of to agents and advertisers. The site has become an overcrowded and confusing mess. Yet so much potential....