In an effort to find out the size of the online estate agency market, we asked The Property Ombudsman if it could take a look at its own membership figures.
We are told there are 196 online agents registered with TPO.
TPO further tells us that it received 58 initial inquiries against online agents between January 1 and June 30 this year. Just five cases were actually considered and all were closed within that period.
TPO supported four of the complaints, with awards totalling £4,475.
How the figures compare with the mainstream membership will become clearer at the end of the summer when TPO will issue his interim report covering the first six months of the year.
So I make that 0.3 complaints per online agent.
Interesting news would be a comparison between online and traditional agents. Looking at previous stories on this website, it looks like the first 6 months of 2014 saw 2,828 initial enquiries against all sales agents. They had 13,125 offices registered, however that would not be a fair comparison as onlines don’t have offices. To get to an ‘apples and apples’ comparison you’d need to know their average office per firm number.
Given that the larger agents are more likely to be registered (Countrywide have over a thousand for example), I’d say the average must be around 3, maybe 4, suggesting 3,281 to 4,375 firms.
If this is true, the average complaints per traditional agent is 0.64 to 0.86.
So even if the average office per firm number is half that, at 1.5 offices, they would still have a higher complaint rate than onlines. Obviously if the complaint rate is higher for traditionals in 2015, the picture could be even worse.
Ros, maybe you could look into this a little deeper?
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Yes but the volume of work each office does is a factor. 10 fold business activity is a higher risk of complaint if one was to compare to a number not doing anything! You observations is meaningless, it should be compared on volume of workload. Incidentally we score zero (with a high workload), so someone has more than your average!
Strange that this story should be redirected at high street agents by you.
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