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Graham Awards

TODAY'S OTHER NEWS

Purplebricks leads UK league table of agents with available properties

An unknown website called EA League Tables has issued a list of agencies and agency-groups which it claims shows their order by the number of available properties on the market.

“We have spent a considerable amount of time producing the below three estate agency league tables as of December 2019 … We are trying to provide some transparency to the amount of current available (not including Under Offer, SSTC, commercial or new build) properties for sale with the major players in the industry” claims the website, whose authors appear to be unknown.

“We have scrutinised 100s of thousands of properties over 10s of thousands of agents. We have stringently cross-referenced, over numerous iterations, each agent’s available properties between each of the main property websites (Rightmove, Zoopla, Onthemarket, S1Homes, Property Pal, Property News and home.co.uk)” it continues.

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It puts the top 10 brands as:

1. Purplebricks (16,284 properties)

2. William H Brown / Connells (5,316)

3. Connells (4,820)

4. Hunters (4,578)

5. Your Move (4,661)

6. Haart (3,727)

7. Reeds Rains / LSL (3,074)

8. Express Estate Agency (2,807)

9. Savills (2, 660)

10. Yopa (2,477)

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By estate agency groups the site puts the top three as:

1. Connells (19,294)

2. Countrywide (17,143)

3. Purplebricks (16,284)

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And looking solely at hybrid and online agencies the top three are:

1. Purplebricks (16,284)

2. Express Estate Agency (2,807)

3. Yopa (2,477)

Some familiar online agency names like Emoov and easyProperty have very small numbers of available properties according to this league table - just 114 and 112 respectively.

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You can see the mysterious website here.

 

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    A) Mostly overpriced
    B) Unsold as no tenacious sales team trying to sell them
    C) Vendors trying to do their own offer negotiating, having mostly never sold a property in their lives!

  • Paul Singleton

    Available means UNSOLD! All the LPE’s will be knocking off for Christmas now, listed = job done!

  • Andrew Stanton PROPTECH-PR A Consultancy for Proptech Founders

    As they say Graham, statistics can prove anything you want them to, but here are a few pre-Christmas thoughts.

    Purplebricks have over 500 Local property experts/listers who are self-employed owning their own company. This means that on average they each have listed for their company around 30 properties currently for sale. 16,000 instructions divided by 500 LPE’s.

    Purplebricks unlike most other agents, turn each instruction into upfront cash, typically a spend by the vendor of £1,300, so that 16,284 of listings means close on 21M of fee in their bank, and that is just for listing. So, a good model for their cash flow.

    But, why then do Purplebricks lose/burn around 3M more each month than they get as income?

    In April 2018, they had 150M sitting in their bank according to their annual accounts, in the next 12 months despite taking to the market thousands of properties, they managed to burn through 7.5M of cash each month, more than their incoming cash, a staggering 90M burnt through in the year, leaving them with only 60M in the kitty by April 2019.

    In their latest financial report, they have burnt through another 19M since April, leaving just over 41M. Which if they burn through 3M a month, means they will run out of cash in 14 months.

    The reason perhaps Purplebricks has so many instructions is that it is ‘buying the market’ which is fine if you have the cash to keep the company moving forward, but unless there is another round of capital funding to underpin the company, it simply will run out of cash.

    It was alright when private investors and the founders pumped their own money into the company, followed by capital generated by listing on the the Alternative Stock Market, etc, but, with the share price in the doldrums in real terms, and six major online agents withdrawing or being forced to withdraw I feel there is little appetite to get fresh investment.

    The most likely outcome is that Axel Springer will take them private, re-jig the model, make it cheaper to run and it will service a certain sector of the market and type of vendor who is price sensitive to fee.

    Perhaps, the lesson for other agents is that taking a fee of some description upfront, sale or no sale is not a bad idea, it helps with offsetting costs, gains commitment from the vendor and should help cash-flow, all positive things.

    Back to statistics, having a huge market share of property for sale, is also not really a sign of anything, as we know that Connells or the Skipton building society – will return multi-million pound profits at the end of its financial year, whereas Countrywide who in this snapshot has only 11% less stock for sale is unlikely to be in the same position.

    Turnover Graham, as you know is vanity, profit is sanity.

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    Still yet to see a Purple twits sold board in my patch. Never in the history of Estate Agency has so much been spent on advertising and so little sold. Shame the public can't see through this........ yet.

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    Interesting that the mighty Paul Smith's SpicerHart Group has lost almost a third of its stock in twelve months. Instead of lecturing the rest of the industry on what it should do, he seemingly needs to get his own business in order!

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