Independent agents Tarrant & Robertson have joined the Winkworth franchise and are rebranding this week.
The business, which has branches in Farnham, Surrey, and Petersfield, Hampshire, has made the move after the opening of the long-awaited Hindhead tunnel has cut travel times to London, making Petersfield a realistic commutable option and already boosting demand for family homes.
Some 40% of Tarrant & Robertson’s buyers of family homes now come from London, where Winkworth has 57 offices.
Stephen Tarrant, senior director, comments: “We have continued to attract purchasers from both London and across the UK, but often found we lost out on business to some of the larger estate agencies with London offices.
“By joining the ever-growing Winkworth, we can compete equally with the larger firms on marketing, PR and advertising nationally – and tap into the London and international marketplaces through our new partners across the Winkworth chain.”
Winkworth now has 92 offices in total, with 83 in the UK.
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Comments
My experience of franchised agents is their offices remaining independent, sometimes not even networking applicants, and very much NOT refering clients to other franchise offices. I would assume that in this case T&R have contracted W to definitely refer their applicants & ideally to share them across all franchisees.
I was once a member of TEAM and even there I experienced regular instances of some (definitely not all) other local members being far from team players. A common trick by one was to market properties in every way other than the shared database of available properties until found out (when he'd blame yet another admin error) but conversely have staff scouring that same shared database for new stock from other team members, and hit the phones damn quick. He was fairly poor at winning instructions, but damn good at ringing out those brought on by others.
Franchising has its merits, but I don't fancy it.
Established franchisors charge 10 -15% of annual turnover, some go for a set fee of say £1,000 - £2,000pcm, usually a hefty fee up front, antything from £5k - £15k, 1 postcode as territory. Why not have an off High Street operation with much lower base costs, cover several postcodes with much higher income potential and pay little up front.?......works for us!
I assume he didnt read all the comments last week on Barstow Eves francisees being shafted.
It is shame this story doesn't dig deeper than the press release and find out what an existing agent pays per month to use the Winworth brand and to what extent they have to change their systems and culture.
I used to be an agent 'franchisee' back in the 1980's and I paid 10% of turnover to the franchisor with a minimum fee of £1500pcm.
10% of turnover would be exhorbitant for an established business to convert to Winkworth.
Is there anyone out there who has an overview of the franchising model and costs across the various franchised brands? Or would EAT do research and write a detailed article about the costs giving us the inside story?