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Hybrid Agent
Hybrid Agent
Author and Hybrid Estate Agent
939  Profile Views

About Me

10 years of living, breathing and performing for sometimes 15 hours a day as a 'hybrid' estate agent, I feel safe in nominating myself as the world’s leading authority on low fee/ high volume tech supported estate agency by default as no-one else will have done this for so long and with so many properties.
A traditional estate agent works from expensive high street retail premises, prints out brochures, writes letters and uses armies of staff to answer numerous phone enquiries for viewings and buyer offers in order to try and justify its very large fees.
The next generation of evolved / hybrid agent works from their home office, uses technology to receive enquiries for viewings, valuations and offers, embraces social media for marketing, charges a fraction of the fee and is much closer to their clients.
An evolved estate agent no longer in its original form, A Bastard estate agent!
I have a book on Amazon entitled
“No.1 Bastard Estate Agent. (someone no longer in their original form) How to Evolve in Property Selling”

my expertise in the industry

I had a high volume low cost/low fee estate agency business for 5 years in the early 2000s and then created the most successful fourteen postcode area under a big hybrid estate agency over the longest period ever. The highest level of client instructions as a single ‘territory’ of this size with the best proportion of those becoming house sales, over 3000 properties sold in five years, and with the lowest number of cancellations or complaints. Perfect for scaling up this local business recipe for national long-term success.
I have an established knowledge and understanding of what works in hybrid estate agency with the extensive evidence I have gained. I have conducted thousands of hybrid agency property valuations, far more than anyone else, in home owners front rooms offering a low fee, tech-based version of estate agency and have determined very clearly what is of most importance to the client. I have achieved unbeatable business conversion levels of valuation appointment to client’s instruction and property sale over the longest period. I have evolved in my work in an industry that still hasn’t, no longer in original form.

Hybrid's Recent Activity

Hybrid Agent
What is a Self Employed Estate Agent? With the developing movement towards being a ‘Self Employed Estate Agent’ is this the best approach or terminology for the newer hybrid estate agent? A philosophy of being an ‘Estate Agency Business’ rather than thinking of yourself as ‘self-employed’ will serve you better. Calling yourself self-employed in any field has become a kind of personal social branding by which you offer yourself to others to be judged, it makes you sound better at what you do, you must be good because ‘you work for yourself’. However it’s too easy to give up being ‘self-employed’ and get a job, if you have a successful local estate agency business you will not be able to walk away easily until you sell or retire, a big difference. So which are you going to be? Feeling like a Self-employed agent will have you thinking in a short-term transactional way; a self employed plumber or carpenter will focus mostly on the current job and the next one. As a ‘self employed’ agent you will lose longer term focus by only thinking about where your next valuation/property sale is coming from reducing your ability to progress over a longer period. Thinking like a proper local estate agency business by monitoring growth and profitability and using local marketing, branding, service and your reputation will see your business develop well beyond its first year. Working one property to the next is not sustainable over a longer period. You need to build a framework that the transactions will stack-up within in a more automated or ‘production-line’ way. This will enable you to manage your business to long-term success rather than have your head spinning chasing the next instruction or house sale alongside the other daily business responsibilities. This ‘framework’ is best considered in terms of service and pricing in the local market you operate in so that your clients are always left contented with the outcome after their sale completes having received what they were promised (and more) at an understandable cost. A recommendation to other clients is then far more likely and your business will grow over time. Thinking “that’s another instruction” and will pay me £X now or later will make for a ‘roller coaster’ feeling in your working life. It will shorten your time working outside the traditional employed model as an agent as you stress over how many instructions you are getting this week or month to pay your bills. Doing the things that get your local brand known and appreciated will give you a natural level of instructions each week, month or year to make your working life far more flowing and less stressful by not just chasing the next property or deal. But how do you operate in this way? One small tip would be that you split your day. Be a ‘maker’ in the morning and a ‘manager’ in the afternoon as someone once said. Start your day by doing the things that will grow your business, the creative things that produce a unique and appealing offering to clients and helps them know about you and be interested in your services. Use the afternoon to do the jobs that will get you paid sooner. Plant the seeds in the morning and pick the crops in the afternoon. So the next time you read something about being a ‘Self Employed Estate Agent’ under a network or big hybrid operation consider whether it actually provides the tools to create for yourself a long term business in your location. Does the network give you the ability to create a personal legacy? May sound dramatic but if you are going to put 12 hour working days into a business you will want to know that something tangible will be built in the long term. The future of estate agency cannot be on the high street 9-5 by phone, so home-based local agents with great technology will become the way that consumers, both buyers and sellers get what they need from their property transaction. If your local operation is structured to provide this you will succeed in this new version of the industry. Bumping from one instruction to the next will become too tough and will likely see you fall back in to the employed high street role quite quickly. Read more about being a Local Hybrid Estate Agent in the book "The No.1 Hybrid Estate Agent, How to Evolve in Property Selling" available on Amazon

From: Hybrid Agent 01 December 2020 13:32 PM

Hybrid Agent
Extract from the book. “No.1 B*stard Estate Agent. (someone no longer in their original form) How to Evolve in Property Selling” “As I write the world is in the grip of the biggest viral pandemic in living memory and the resulting economic destruction. The outcome from this book may come to be a plan for business starting up again once the world’s economies are on a path to recovery following the shut-down of 2020. Many workers in all trades will have adapted to working from home and the cost benefits for business of not having to provide shops or office premises for its workers will be clear and create a landscape that is perfect for the next big rise of the Hybrid estate agent. Further to this the speed and ease at which some high street agents were able to have their negotiators and administrators switch to home working during the pandemic shut down indicates that the High Street estate agents have retained expensive retail premises long after these were no longer required and could have disposed of them much sooner. Holding on to the high street premises has been in order to try and justify taking thousands of pounds of unnecessary fees from their customers. Estate agent’s customers will now be more content than ever with their preferred local agent operating from home and paying a proportionally lower fee whilst receiving a more personalized and adaptable service. There are two definite approaches to starting as a ‘Hybrid’ estate agent as well as a plan for adaptation from an existing High Street chain or local independent estate agent. Your approach as with most things in life will be determined by your access to resources and the money you have available. Some of you will have aspirations of creating a billion-pound company others will be content having a successful local business that performs well and enables you to take a healthy wage whilst working flexibly from home and being your own boss. In terms of switching to new ways the national high street chain will have some major hurdles to get over in order to “re-model” whilst the local independent agency with a few offices, less so.… …No one needs a printed brochure and an expensive high street shop to sell their house and haven’t since the rise of the big online property portals twenty years ago.”

From: Hybrid Agent 20 October 2020 14:47 PM

Hybrid Agent
Hybrid not Online Estate Agents… “ Big brand names such as Purplebricks, Yopa, Housesimple (Strike) and Emoov and others continue to chase the perfect formula for lower cost, higher volume, technology driven, non-traditional, work from home estate agency success. These newer businesses are often described as ‘Online’ or ‘Internet’ Estate Agents which they are not. They are a group of individual, genuine estate agents provided with software, marketing and support services to run their local businesses without retail premises. Individual estate agents using technology and an altered business model to be an adapted form of the traditional estate agent. This is still a common confusion and misunderstanding in the estate agency industry press, in traditional estate agents, for the house selling public and the wider investment markets as to how a ‘hybrid’ estate agent works and why it’s better. Some of this confusion comes from the ‘Online’ or ‘Internet’ estate agents who were around in the early 2000s where vendor clients uploaded their own usually awful property photos to their internet site and only dealt with a distant call centre without any local estate agent help. Most of these failed due to the terrible property photos and no local agents to sell the service or to help support home selling customers. The next generation of evolved / hybrid agent works from their home office, uses technology to receive enquiries for property viewings and buyer offers, embraces social media for marketing, charges a fraction of the usual agent fee and is much closer to their clients. Evolved from a traditional estate agency ‘no longer in its original form’ What the estate agency industry and trade press think about hybrid estate agency and how they see things couldn’t be further from the reality. There is a huge misunderstanding as to what a hybrid/technology based estate agent does and the potential and benefits this method of operating provides. Noise from trade media is very loud drowning out the new generation of estate agency within the industry.” Extract from the book… “No.1 B*stard Estate Agent. (someone no longer in their original form) How to Evolve in Property Selling”

From: Hybrid Agent 07 October 2020 20:20 PM

Hybrid Agent
"top 10 corporate and franchise estate agency groups have seen a collective decline in their new instruction year-on-year market share." Where is the estate agency industry going? Large corporate chains, small local shops or another even more ‘local’ possibility. Is there room for all or will consumers decide which offering is most appropriate to them?. The next generation of evolved / hybrid agents work from their home office locally, use technology to receive enquiries for property viewings and buyer offers, embrace social media for marketing, charge a fraction of the usual corporate agent fee and is much closer to their clients. If you are a traditional estate agency of anywhere from 5 to 100 retail branches, you will have noticed the effect on market share over the past five years as the lower fee hybrid options have risen to put pressure on prices that can be charged. It has become harder for the corporate agents to make paying 1.5-2% fees to sell a property understandable to clients. This is now starting to show according to this article. There are already indications in some quarters that the offices of these corporate businesses will become administrative ‘Hubs’ for large geographic areas serviced by experienced local agents working flexibly from home. The further rise of the self-employed agent in the UK. A great opportunity for experienced local agents to work under these new style ‘big hybrid’ models. The freedom and flexibility of agents working like this will be felt by their buying and selling clients alike. Truly local service with an appropriate price for what the client actually receives. Read more about the direction of the industry and becoming the local 'Hybrid’ mix of technology and people in this book on Amazon “No.1 B*stard Estate Agent. (someone no longer in their original form) How to Evolve in Property Selling”

From: Hybrid Agent 14 September 2020 09:15 AM

Hybrid Agent
In traditional UK estate agency the fee that the client pays is determined by a number of factors. The value/eventual sale price of their home and whatever they can negotiate as a percentage or fixed commission figure with the valuation agent on the day they sign up. The agent's pricing is a dark art, a closely guarded secret, try calling a traditional retail estate agent and asking what they charge and you will see this perfectly demonstrated. Not very transparent and a factor in the general mis-trust of traditional estate agents. One thing the much criticized 'big hybrid' agents have made clear is the fixed fee that they charge for their services. It’s made very obvious on their websites and in other marketing material. A more consumer friendly approach. Some confusion prevails regarding whether estate agents should really charge variable ‘commission’ or not. Where a buying client finds a property online, sees it, views, offers and has a sale agreed there is little sales skill on the part of any agent in achieving a higher than expected price for the vendor. The purpose of commission is meant as a way to motivate and reward salespeople and encourage specific sales behaviors, but isn't it market forces that determine the true value of the property? The traditional agent may be claiming 1% commission of the sale price upon completion. If the property sale gets £255,000 rather than £250,000 that equates to an extra £50 to that estate agency business of which the sale person may see an extra £5 from this. Does this really change that employee negotiator’s approach or behavior when taking an offer and forwarding it to the vendor client? generally no. The same routine process of receiving offers will repeatedly be followed often several times a day to get to the agreeable sale price. This is why the concept of variable commission for a single property transaction in modern estate agency is next to pointless and may as well be a transparent fixed fee. Traditional estate agents would say that they have obligation to achieve the best possible sale price for a vendor client, as do fixed price agents. This sale price will happen naturally due to market forces so where is the job here with a variable percentage? What behavior does charging a variable commission influence? Discuss...

From: Hybrid Agent 11 September 2020 08:55 AM

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