'Our ambitions are not related to broker numbers but rather quality of service provision as well as brand reach,' says The London Broker boss.

Property entrepreneur Rupert Collingwood has been at the forefront of a major shift in the UK agency sector, pioneering the US-style brokerage model and assembling a growing roster of top dealmakers building their own brands. In conversation with PrimeResi, Rupert reveals what’s been happening behind the scenes at The London Broker, why property marketing needs a rethink & how worldwide collaboration is delivering real results for clients…

Full article here: https://primeresi.com/

How important is social media for your brokers? Are actual deals being generated via the various channels or are they more useful for personal brand-building?

As with all routes to market, they have their uses, but one really needs to understand them in order to capitalise on the investment, be it time and energy or spend. I can certainly confirm that deals are indeed being done via social media, both sales as well as valuations.

Our broker David Adams sold a country house for over £6mn as a result of a social campaign. We now contribute towards paid campaigns for each and every new property we list and in some cases these campaigns are generating more leads than the portals.

However the data appears to show that this is somewhat listing and market dependent, i.e. the demographic that the property appeals to has an impact on whether a social campaign will be of any real value or not. We were recently instructed to sell an exceptional development on the Kent coast, Shoreline

in Folkestone. We ran several campaigns on the different properties and generated a number of viewings, time will tell if they convert to sales, however the reach was significant. For many of our brokers and indeed TLB as a whole, social media is primarily a brand building tool and it can also act as validation for our brokers and the wider team when clients or potential clients are making a choice as to who to work with. Social media is however only a part of a much larger whole when it comes to the marketing reach we provide for our brokers and their clients.

Are there any other new tech advances/features that are proving especially useful to the brokers or the business in general?

I love a bit of tech and we are regularly approached by new startups with curious and interesting new offerings. Of course, a good tech provider is a little bit like a good plumber, you don’t want to tell everyone about them as you might then lose your advantage. However, in the interests of the wider community I will say that Listing Logic, our social media platform is excellent and the team we deal with including Matt Goddard are great. LL essentially helps us create the social ads I mentioned above automatically, it then feeds the leads back to the brokers without too much manual intervention. It essentially synchronises with our CRM enabling us to “fire and forget”. Whilst we’re on the topic of tech I do think that it is worth talking about a relatively noticeable phenomenon.

Much of my role involves working with software providers, joining the dots between the various systems in The London Broker “stack” and I would say that I have started to notice a rather unattractive trend of diminishing service alongside increasing bills. I talk to a lot of brokerage and agency owners, and I know many are experiencing the same thing. This is now such a noticeable trend across the whole tech space that it has been given a name “Enshittification”.

The UK market is not easy at the moment, and it is a real test as to the quality of your supplier partners as to how they treat their clients in tougher market conditions. Of course, suppliers will look at RPI or CPI to justify increasing their fees each year, however whilst their costs go up our income may well drop, with slower market conditions and longer transaction times. I think it is important that we make them aware of this at every opportunity. Especially as the prop tech space is now so wide ranging that, much like the agency market, there’s always someone willing to do the same job for less. Those I’m talking about will no doubt know who they are.

We hear there’s a portal in the works; can you tell us what’s being planned, and what are your thoughts on the current portal landscape in the UK?

So I wanted to tell you more, but I have since been sworn to secrecy so I am sorry to disappoint.

The current portal landscape in the UK is not great it must be said. It saddens me every month when I see how much we pay for portal providers to effectively sell back to us leads generated by them thanks to the information we provide to them for free. Honestly it’s insane. What’s more the public and indeed the industry’s reliance on the portals is actively damaging the marketplace. Buyers, tenants and indeed some agents now spend their time hiding behind their screens simply booking in viewings with little to no qualification in the middle.

This means that no end of time and money is wasted carrying out viewings with little to no prospect of success, either because the buyer is not in a position to purchase or because the property is not suitable. What’s more the CRM systems are sending out details to prospective applicants and buyers based on the loose information imported into those CRM’s by the portals.

It saddens me every month when I see how much we pay for portal providers to effectively sell back to us leads generated by them thanks to the information we provide to them for free...Honestly it’s insane

If the information going in is of poor quality, then the information being sent out won’t be much better, and so buyers will understandably become frustrated with the outcomes. I do wonder how much better our industry might be for all stakeholders if we took all of the money we collectively spend on the portals and funnelled it into other marketing streams which focused on quality rather than quantity. Similarly we could focus on promoting our own successes rather than driving traffic towards portals which by their very nature favour those with the most listings.

I also wonder how much better it might be for vendors if we moved away from the current matrix of success which seems to be based simply on “number of viewings” and focused again on quality.

Given the advances in technology over the last 20 years it does seem as though we should have cracked this nut a lot sooner.

Contact Book

Rupert Collingwood

Founder of The London Broker & Agentsonly

linkedin.com (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupertcollingwood/?originalSubdomain=uk)

thelondonbroker.com (https://thelondonbroker.com)