Estate agents whose advertising has been keeping a newspaper afloat are to be offered shares in it, in a last-ditch bid to keep it in business.
Chris Bullivant sparked headlines earlier this year when he launched the part-free, part paid-for Birmingham Press earlier this year in opposition to Trinity Mirror titles in the city.
Trinity, rumoured at the time to be downgrading its print offering in the city, retaliated by bringing out a free version of its main paper, the Birmingham Post Lite, and distributing it in the same affluent suburbs that Bullivant had been targeting.
Bullivant then launched the Birmingham Free Press, which is – as the title suggests – a completely free offering, as a sister paper to its Birmingham Press.
Now he has warned he needs more backing from advertisers.
He has invited estate agents to a meeting to discuss forming a consortium that would own part of the Free Press, claiming a similar enterprise in the south of England yielded the estate agent partners £2.2m when it was sold.
Bullivant also claims Trinity Mirror has been offering estate agents full page ads in its titles for only £150, which he describes as “an attempt to remove us from the marketplace”.
He said: “We cannot compete with such rates as they are below the cost of production, and as a small, new business, we cannot continue to sustain the impact that has on our company. A number of my customers have been lured back to Trinity Mirror, and if that continues, we’ll have to close.”
At the time of Bullivant’s launch, former Birmingham Post editor Marc Reeves blogged: “I give it six months.”
Estate agents to be offered shares in regional newspaper
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Comments
I was a bit hasty with my first comment and now ive had a think about this – Chris Bullivant appears to own several titles, is the 15th biggest newspaper publisher in the UK it would be fair to presume he is a clever and wealthy man that knows a thing or two about papers.
He then goes head to head with an established paper owned by a properly big outfit and can’t attract the property advertising he needs locally to support it so he then asks the same people that aren’t supporting it to go in it in return for a share of something that’s worth nothing and cant be supported by the estate agents that are advertising in it at the moment.
Well if he pulls this off then the best ‘Polishing a turd’ award must go to him……..ive just made up the award in fairness but ill make some changes to an old 5 a side trophy we’ve got in the office and drop it in once he has mugged enough agents off to make it viable
Jonnie
Newspapers need Agents as much as Agents need Newspapers, 40million read one every week! They can in cases be used to drive prices down, and keep them down, business is business, but christ, it should be done with a degree of professionalism! I know Chris Bullivant, he is all that Mr Wilson has said, he has suffered at the hands of big publishers just like Agents have, he is trust worthy, honest and he knows how to look after Property Agents! Worth attending! FYI some Agents in the South that were offered shares in the past and chose not to, still pay as much as the next agent for pages, but without the financial windfall of those that did!
I think he achieved exactly what he wanted!
What did he expect to happen??
sorry to disappoint you Richard, flattered by the mention though.
Now chop chop, those windows wont lick themselves.
Sorry Richard – nothing to say on this really
Jonnie
Little Jonnie, Wardy where are your really clever posts?? Need a laugh you guys are always good for that!Come on show everyone how really smart you are
Try the dedicated tel. no. with Yellow Pages, Thomson & Phone Book & after seeing the results, you won't even have their pushy sales reps in the building.
I was a director of the consortium for the estate agents mentioned in the South of England. I can say that Chris is one of the most honourable men I have met. The paper he helped the agents create provided us with over 10 years of advertising comfort with distribution levels unmatched by rival papers and at the end - all the agents got a fantastic financial reward.
most papers have no idea how many leads they generate. Their rates are based on what they can get away with. When a rival comes in they have to drop rates because they can't justify them. What you can do is get a trackable phone number in your adverts, start tracking how many leads each ad generates, check whether these leads are good and then offer to pay per lead to the paper. The least you'll get is a discount when you show the information to them of how many leads they do or don't produce for you. Do it with all your marketing and the low hanging fruit is easy to gather. Ditch the poor performing marketing, change your adverts and reap the rewards. Ask your newspaper sales rep to justify how few leads their paper generates, show them the proof, what them squirm and then presto, your rates are reduced, even if there isn't another paper in the area. Especially if you are the first one to do this.
;-)
Two years ago in Devon there was a rival paper, better quality and over half the page rate of the "normal" publication, to cut a long story short the paper folded within 6 months although by this stage the local paper had reduced and guaranteed rates, which are still at the same level today:)
In Loughborough most agents (myself included) did something similar a couple of years ago, and with the help of a publisher produced our own property mag which ran for a few issues against the incumbent Trinity Mirror title.
TM responded in exactly the same way by offering us page rates lower than what it cost us to produce the mag, so we ditched the mag, wrote off the small investment we'd each made in it and went back to the TM title.
Result: happy agents who have ended up with a good deal from TM. The publisher who backed our venture was a bit peeved, but business is business as they say.
Perhaps agents ought to look at Mr Bullivants recent history and his Observer group which went into liquiation about two years ago, leaving agents with problems.
He never seems to deliver what he promises, which are worth nothing, and all that will happen is that you actually lose the ability to get a better rate.