The new owner of easyProperty has said that the brand is as strong as ever in the eyes of the consumer.
David Brierley was speaking after his company, Evolve, bought easyProperty from eProp Services, the parent company of the Guild and Fine & Country.
The online agency had a chequered history, making huge losses, before its merger with eProp Services in a deal backed by Toscafund.
Brierley said: “The estate agency industry might see easyProperty as being a sad state of affairs, but the public don’t know. The brand is not damaged at all as far as the consumers are concerned.”
Brierley said that while the industry knew about the notorious ‘funeral march’ through central London, the public did not. The march was staged by then easyProperty owner Robert Ellice and was intended to depict the ‘death’ of the high street agent.
Brierley said: “I thought it was the crassest thing I had ever seen, and I told Robert Ellice that.”
After easyProperty passed into the hands of eProp Services, Brierley said that there was an in-built problem for agents belonging to the Guild and to Fine & Country, and who took out easyProperty licences.
He said: “There was a conflict of interests for them, because they were trying to promote their own business brands, but at the same time promote someone else’s.
“Having a dual brand was flawed from day one.”
Brierley said that it was the ‘easy’ brand itself which had attracted him to the proposition.
He said: “I watched it from the start, and I thought that if anything was going to make it as a modern estate agency, easyProperty was it.
“When I met Sir Stelios [Haji-Ioannou] that clinched it for me as an acquisition. It was pivotal.
“He is hugely successful, and has built up easyJet and the easy group, where there are a lot of other very successful businesses.
“He has his views on easyProperty and wants to be part of it and to see it succeed.”
The acquisition – for an undisclosed sum – means that Brierley has inherited some 58 licensees operating the easyProperty brand.
He says he is not concerned “in the slightest” that a number have already given notice that when their contracts are up, they will leave.
He said: “There will be some who will think that there is a new broom who has come in, and want to give it a chance.
“There will be others who just want out.”
His strategy is to recruit new licensees, and give both them and existing ones the support and mentoring he feels they need.
Brierley revealed that Toscafund will still be a shareholder in easyProperty.
As revealed by EYE, Toscafund is in the process of acquiring the eProp Services business by buying out other shareholders – a process that still has two or three weeks to run, but which should see it end up with a stake of around 80%.
eProp Services is one of four shareholders in the new easyProperty set-up.
The others are Brierley and his wife, and Sir Stelios.
Brierley intends to run easyProperty as a subsidiary of Evolve, but while keeping the two separate there will be obvious synergies, since Evolve supplies services and products such as photography and floorplans.
He is confident that easyProperty will flourish under its new ownership: “We will be growing it organically, first concentrating on certain areas and then rolling it out with a programme of recruitment.
“We are excited about the future.”
Easy property I think you need to RIP. The brand is just too cheap looking for the property market.
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How are they going to grow organically, if he admits the public dont know who they are? Cant see him and Stellios door to door leafletting
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How much did the Guild pump into this? Surely one of the worst business decisions of recent times in the industry – send there’s been some!!
Essentially the Guild kept going an online offering that cheapens their fee/brand and b) was failing anyway and would have failed on its own accord
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Good luck to David. He is well aware of the challenges ahead but the British public like the easy brand. 80m flights per year.
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Selling your home of course is a very different circumstance than choosing who to fly with. If people liked the Easy brand, surely it would have been a success already?
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Buying cheap flights has got nothing to do with it. Can’t knock the airline, they do what they do well in the market space they operate in.
easyproperty doesn’t do well in the space it operates in.
5 years, millions on advertising, million upon millions in investment, funerals, mergers, resignations, disposal / acquisition and the public still don’t want it.
Good luck indeed, but just because 80m people buy flights each year, doesn’t mean I can stick an easy logo on my ice cream van and start selling ice to the Eskimos!
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Literally, you have more money than sense. Has anyone ever seen an Easy Property for sale board? Old Stellios definitely has the pedigree when it comes to cheap flights however, why not enlist the opinion of an estate agent, ask them about how much it costs to sell a property and more importantly, how long it takes….then do the maths…hope you have a 14 day cooling off period!
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“We will be growing it organically”
i.e. Stelios & Toscafund/eProp are not actually putting any cash into this exciting venture.
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Give it 12 months max
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I wish we could post GIFs in the comments
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“the brand is as strong as ever ” is pretty damning.
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New owner of easyProperty says ‘brand is as strong as ever in eyes of a consumer – although we dont know his name‘
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Been there, bought the tee shirt, thankfully burned it a long time ago!
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I suspect the business plan will be to ‘sell’ licences and operate on a franchise model. Lets see if any of the marketing to potential license holders uses phrases such as ‘no experience required’, ‘full training will be given’ ‘create your own work/life balance’ and ‘make the most of your skills with this highly recognisable brand to build a sustainable income’.
Not sure there will be many currently in the industry who would be tempted by this tarnished brand, so I can only assume they do not have any real choice but to look outside of the industry. Good luck, everyone will need it.
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“…….growing organically?”
……..that’s more dung then?!
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