Online agent HouseSimple, backed by Carphone Warehouse founder Sir Charles Dunstone has a new CEO – he is Sam Mitchell, who will be joining in the New Year from Rightmove.
HouseSimple told EYE this morning: “Alex Gosling, CEO and founder of HouseSimple.com, is moving to the role of President from the 2nd January 2018 and Sam Mitchell has been named as his successor. Mitchell is moving from his role as head of lettings at Rightmove.
“Alex founded HouseSimple.com with his partner Sophie in 2007. In his new role, Gosling intends to focus on the marketing strategy and product evolution, working closely with the executive team, as well as taking an advisory role on the board.
“Over the past decade, Gosling has overseen the impressive growth of HouseSimple with listings in the last 12 months ranking the company as the 2nd largest online estate agency in the UK.”
Gosling said: “We’re now well positioned to take HouseSimple to the next level, with a fantastic platform for growth. It’s an exciting period for the company and the perfect time for this management transition ahead of launching our new marketing campaign and strategy.
“Having grown the company to 100 employees and a UK network of 160 local agents we’re immensely proud and excited to be able to attract someone of Sam’s calibre into the company, his experience and industry knowledge is impressive and his ambition and passion are exactly what we want as we enter this next phase of growth.”
Before Rightmove, Mitchell was the youngest ever director at Foxtons, regional MD for Your Move as well as CEO of UK Sotheby’s International Realty.
Mitchell said: “I am delighted to be joining the HouseSimple team at this exciting time in their journey. Thanks to Alex and Sophie we have a great platform to build on and I look forward to working with the team to take the business to the next level.”
Mitchell has been Rightmove’s head of lettings since April 2015. Before that, he was briefly CEO at UK Sotheby’s Internal Realty and previously regional managing director at Your Move. Before those roles he was with Foxtons.
HouseSimple had £5m from Sir Charles Dunstone and his business partner Roger Taylor in 2015, and a further £13m last year in a funding round led by the pair.
HouseSimple charges £695 upfront, and £1,495 on a ‘pay only if you sell’ basis.
Another Trustpilot client, I see. But not, on the face of it, as ‘successful’ as Purplebricks – with 10% of their reviewers rating them ‘Poor (4%) or ‘Bad’ (6%). With 150 negative reviews one might expect them to follow the PB/allAgents line except – wait for it – they are paying Trustpilot.
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/housesimple.com
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Not sure where they get their league tables from. I hade it at PB 1st, Express Estate Agency 2nd and House Simple 3rd.
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Newsflash worthy…. not
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Best of luck to Sam. He’s a scholar and a gent
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Well… he’s had two years at Rightmove to learn the ins and outs of #portaljuggling.
He’ll fit in champion with a call-centre agent.
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I’ve just looked at the HouseSimple site, what I first notice is that the emphasis is to get your property on the market with them, rather than the more tradition approach by estate and letting agents who wish to show case the properties on their books. This is best way to have happy clients from my experience.
Given HouseSimple have been in business since 2007 (over ten years), they appear to have in SW11 only one property for sale and 2 properties to let. It’s somewhat debatable as to whether one of these is actually in SW11, the EPC, says its in SW8! The other flat again I believe to be in SW8 however there is no EPC for this property, so difficult to check. The HouseSimple website tells you that one of the properties being offered for rental is held on a lease for 993 years at a ground rent of £500pa. All fairly meaningless for a tenant looking for an AST. It’s bluntly a rather amateur site, and in London in my opinion, pretty worthless for buyers and tenants.
The HouseSimple site also tells us a lot about how you can sell your house on Globrix, http://www.housesimple.com/globrix given the Globrix site was sold to Zoopla in 2012, do we really have much to worry about if 5 years later their website appears to be so out of date.
The internet has changed the landscape for agents however in the same way that no-one would want to be operated on by someone following instructions from Google, I suspect that the new entrants will have their 15 minutes of fame and things in due course will go back to normal. We have clients who often live abroad, how does the cheap DIY service benefit them? It will suit some people and not others, they have a place in the market but nothing like as large as they think.
The move to the USA of one well known internet estate agent I shall watch with interest. The USA is a very different market, it’s lots of markets and consumers are uncompromising in their demands about service in particular. A do-it-yourself business model will be a hard sell. Tesco lost $1.8bn when they tried to enter the US market. Foxtons entry in the US was nothing short of a disaster.
Time will tell.
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