Yopa boss rebuffs claims that online agents lack sales motivation

Verona Frankish CEO of YOPA – feels that being mediocre is something to shout about.

Here are my thoughts, Purple Bricks which was acquired for £1, was for some years by volume the biggest lister of property in the UK, at its height listing 80,000 properties a year (6,666 a month), so on that market valuation YOPA is worth around 5p year to date.

If YOPA a 'national' brand is listing just 200 + properties a week having burnt through tens of millions, my advice close the YOPA door and use investors cash on a better vanity project.

Maybe pour it into AI, which would be a better return, look at what proptech founders like Johnny Morris at Fifth Dimension AI is up to - now that is a venture worth backing - and he is not one of my clients - but he and his co-founder are doing something of high value and high return for the real estate industry.

Also doing the maths, 160 agents list 4,318 properties in 16 weeks, which means each YOPA agent lists just 2.7 properties a week - so about 12 properties a month which is the national average for the industry.

Metrics funny things you can use them in any way you want, but the best metric to a business is the profit and loss one, and YOPA loses multi-millions every year, if they traded without being propped up by investors cash they would have ceased trading many years ago.

Which begs the question why do the investors continue to pile the cash in - hubris, lack of an exit strategy, if I received a deck that outlined the YOPA business model today, it would never have got investment, it belongs to the golden age where cash was cheap and badly thought out ideas were given merit due to the people who dreamed them up. In 2024 property technology is making quantum leaps, but with useful tech and driving real innovation delivering quantifiable ROI.

Let’s face it 100K of properties complete each month in the UK, where is the burning need for a YOPA or a Purplebricks in that picture? Is the public crying out for this particular service, and even if they did, why can a traditional agent run a profitable business and the costs to run YOPA etc always ends the same way - a pile of debt and closure or a change of ownership followed by the same cycle.

The only winners are those in the c-suite taking large salaries whilst presiding over failing companies, if salary was linked to performance they would be paying the investors - an interesting suggestion. It might get some very different results.