BestAgent founder Charlie Lamdin has recruited a string of senior property figures to its advisory board as the platform targets cutting home-moving transaction times and fall-through rates in half.
Yopa CEO Verona Frankish, Thomas Legal & Equilaw Group CEO Simon David and DDRE Global founder Daniel Daggers have joined the board alongside advertising executive Rory Sutherland, who is also an investor in the business.
They join Alex Groundwater, Jo Henry, Andrew Tillard and Nick Armstrong as BestAgent develops its marketplace and builds partnerships across the property industry.
The appointments come as BestAgent looks to tackle what it describes as the behavioural and commercial incentives contributing to delays in the home-moving process.
CHANGING THE INCENTIVES
The Government’s Home Buying and Selling Reform programme says transactions currently take around 120 days from offer acceptance to completion – about 60% longer than in 2007 – while roughly one in three transactions fail.
BestAgent argues that part of the problem is a market that rewards agents for securing listings and other participants for completing individual stages rather than incentivising everyone around the ultimate completion.
Its Find Your Agent service allows sellers to invite local agents to pitch for an instruction and watch short videos before deciding who they want to meet.
Agents cannot pay for preferential positioning and only the agent selected by the seller pays BestAgent.
Lamdin (main picture) says: “Britain isn’t short of property websites or estate agents.
“What we’re short of is completed moves. One in three agreed sales falls through and those that survive take months to complete.
“A huge part of the problem is that the system rewards people for winning listings, generating leads and processing their individual part of the transaction, rather than getting somebody successfully moved.
“One of the most important decisions a seller makes is choosing their estate agent, so that’s where we start. Find Your Agent lets sellers hear directly from local agents and choose the person they trust to get them moved. Agents can’t buy their way to the top and only the agent who wins the instruction pays.
“We’re not trying to replace good estate agents, quite the opposite. We want to make the good ones easier to find and create a marketplace where delivering a better result is rewarded.
“Verona, Simon, Daniel and Rory all bring very different perspectives to that challenge. They understand the industry, business, technology and, crucially, how people make decisions. Having that breadth of experience around the table will be invaluable as we build something designed to fundamentally change the experience for movers and agents for the better.”
‘CHANGE THE SCOREBOARD’
Sutherland says changing incentives rather than replacing existing market participants could prove key.
He says: “The housing market doesn’t just have an economics problem, it has an incentives and behaviour problem. If you reward agents for winning listings, you shouldn’t be surprised when the system becomes very good at winning listings. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as getting people moved.
“What interests me about BestAgent is that it changes the incentives. Instead of asking who can promise the most attractive number or spend the most to get in front of a seller, Find Your Agent gives people a different way to choose the person they trust with their move.
“Often you don’t need to replace the people in a market to change its behaviour; you need to change the scoreboard. That’s what I think is particularly interesting about what Charlie is building.”
AGENTS COMPETE ON VALUE
Frankish says: “Choosing an estate agent is one of the most important decisions a seller makes, but consumers don’t always have the information they need to understand who is genuinely best placed to get them moved.
“There is a huge amount of expertise and commitment among great agents. Creating a fairer way for those agents to demonstrate their value, while giving sellers more confidence in who they choose, has the potential to improve the experience on both sides.”
David says: “There is no good reason a well-prepared home move should take months to complete. When the seller, buyer, agent, solicitor and everyone else involved is ready and working towards the same outcome, transactions can move remarkably quickly.
“The opportunity with BestAgent is to start creating those conditions from day one, beginning with choosing the right agent and getting everyone properly prepared. If we can do that consistently, there is a real opportunity to reduce both transaction times and the number of sales that fall apart.”
Daggers adds: “The best estate agents don’t simply list properties.
“They understand people, create markets around homes, and manage complex transactions all the way through to completion.
“BestAgent gives individual agents an opportunity to demonstrate that value directly to sellers.
“It’s less about which company has the biggest presence or marketing budget and more about who the seller believes is the right person to deliver their move.
“That’s a shift I think the industry should welcome.”
