Senior property industry figures have joined an advisory board set up by BestAgent founder Charlie Lamdin. The business is targeting shorter transaction times and fewer fall-throughs.
Yopa chief executive Verona Frankish, Thomas Legal and Equilaw group CEO Simon David, and DDRE Global founder Daniel Daggers have joined the board. Their backgrounds span estate agency, conveyancing and property technology.
They join Rory Sutherland, president emeritus of Ogilvy Consulting. He is both an adviser and investor in BestAgent.
Other members include former FT, Sony, Cisco and Crown Estate programme director Alex Groundwater. Property acquisition and operations specialist Jo Henry and Animos founder Andrew Tillard have also joined. Retired Charles Russell Speechly partner Nick Armstrong completes the board.
The group will advise BestAgent as it develops its home-moving proposition. The company aims to halve transaction times and reduce fall-through rates.
The move comes amid continued concern over the speed and certainty of residential property transactions.
The government’s Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap was published in June. It said the average transaction takes around 120 days from offer acceptance to completion. That is approximately 60% longer than in 2007.
Around one in three transactions also falls through.
Lamdin argues that some delays stem from incentives within the housing market. Agents compete for instructions, while portals focus on advertising and lead generation. Other professionals are responsible for separate parts of the transaction.
BestAgent wants to place greater emphasis on completed transactions and transparency.
An initial part of its strategy is its Find Your Agent service. This allows prospective sellers to invite local estate agents to pitch for their instruction.
Sellers can watch short videos from participating agents. They can then decide who to invite to their property for a valuation and further discussion.
Agents cannot pay for preferential positioning. BestAgent says only the agent ultimately selected by the seller is charged.
The company says the system could also help independent agencies compete for instructions against larger corporate businesses.
Lamdin said: “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.”
Verona Frankish, CEO of Yopa, commented: “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.”
Daniel Daggers, founder of DDRE Global, added: “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.”
