Sellers don’t switch agents so touting doesn’t wo...

A popular myth suggesting 50 per cent of homes sell with a second agent, is simply untrue.

That’s the claim from property data and analytics company TwentyCi.

“This stat regarding more than half of homes being sold with a second agent has been floating around the market for a number of years. It has taken hold in many agents’ minds and has become almost accepted, but we’ve always found it a little hard to believe” according to Katy Billany, executive director at TwentyEA, part of TwentyCi.

“This statistic has often been quoted by industry leaders and PropTech suppliers, and typically goes unchallenged, but our findings suggest something very different.”

TwentyEA found that last year just 6.2 per cent of sellers actually switched agents.

It says that this means even taking into account that some 8.2 per cent of new instructions were multi-listings, more than 85% of new instructions in 2021 were from people whose properties were not already on the market - so couldn’t have been as a result of ‘agent switching’.

“It could certainly be claimed that 2021 was a unique year in the fact that there was such a large supply-demand imbalance” Billany continues.

“As a result, it was nearly impossible not to sell a property as there were so many buyers fighting over what little stock came to the market. This argument does have some merit, so we decided to analyse the numbers going all the way back to 2017 to check if this was an anomaly or not.”

This deeper analysis shows that the recent year with the highest number of sellers switching agent was 2019, but even this was still only 9.1 per cent of the overall market.

TwentyEA says that nationally, on average, 71 per cent of properties listed will actually end up selling.

But of the small minority listing with a second agent, that drops to an average of 50.8 per cent between 2017 and 2020.

“So, not only do you have a lower chance of actually selling at all, if we look at the number of exchanges from properties listed with a second agent as a percentage of the total number of instructions, between 2017 and 2020 only 4% of listings achieved a sale after switching agent - not the 50 per cent that is often stated” concludes Billany.

She says that typically many agents spend a large chunk of marketing budget on ‘prospecting’ or ‘touting’ the properties of their competitors, but in the light of her statistics that might be a waste of time.

“We would argue that actually the large majority of your marketing spend should be focused on the pool of people who still haven’t listed yet but are looking to move. Whilst ‘agent switching’ activity will always be part of the mix, the stats clearly show that it shouldn’t be the main focus of agents’ marketing campaigns.”

Billany says the size of the market of those unhappy sellers looking to switch agents is relatively small, so it makes sense to focus on a pool of potential sellers that is much, much larger.

Sellers don’t switch agents so touting doesn’t work - claim

Max Boyne
02 March 2022 08:42 AM

I love people who post this crap. What do you want, a gold star?

Virtually every single business that could be considered 'successful' under the mainstream definition, that's ever existed, has has become successful through revenue growth driven by sales, marketing, cavassing, hustling, or whatever you want to call it.

Business owners who consider it some kind of vulgar black art and say they don't do it, or don't 'need' to (with the obvious implication being that they're sooooo good that customers just flock to them like women to Brad Pitt), as though they're morally levitating above the rest of us are fundamentally clueless. Almost without exception they work harder than they need to, make less money than they could, waste huge amounts of opportunity and end up with businesses that are a tiny fraction of what they could have been.