Two former Territory Owners with Purplebricks have opened in Birmingham.
Stuart Kinge and Alan Hough, who both left Purplebricks earlier this month in the restructure that saw the number of Territory Owners reduced by around 60, listed their first property yesterday through their agency Stuart Alan.
The new business will operate as a ‘hub’ and the pair plan to take on Personal Property Agents as the business grows.
Kinge, who like Hough was a Territory Owner in Birmingham for over three years, told us: “Our time with PB in the Bruce days were the best years of our lives.
“We learnt an awful lot about giving customers excellent service and the brand presence in Birmingham shows that. I think the steepest learning curve was understanding what customers wanted and when they wanted it.
“This will shape how we work our business moving forwards. At Purplebricks I always gave customers the correct advice despite sometimes losing the business due to this, and it served me well in terms of sales.”
He says of the new business: “We will be different in the fact despite being something of a modern-day ‘cliche’ – we will be honest and fair in our approach without silly gimmicks and TV advertising.
“All of our sellers will have access to both directors’ personal phone numbers enabling them to contact us long after many traditional agents have closed. We learnt at PB that this is something customers want.
“We will effectively be offering a very bespoke personal service at a sensible price point for customers with the added option of a fixed fee option should the customer wish to take control of the transaction themselves.
“We will take all of the good bits of PB (fixed fee, cost effective, long opening hours) and all of the good bits of traditional agency (after-sales support, local presence, etc) and combine them in our new business.”
With their website due to go live any moment, we wish them both well.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-89735942.html
I hope they put more thought into the property details than they did the name
joking aside, best of luck to them and I hope it a success.
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Think they will learn quickly that a payanyway offer only works for faceless corporates.
Wait till they get disgruntled hard boys chasing them at 9pm at night.
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Giving customers what they want when they want it.. like photos of their wet towels drying.. killer marketing.. attention to detail.
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Tracey Emin would be proud of that bed 🙂
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Shocking kitchen photo too.
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What absolute nauseating drivel regarding ‘best years of our lives’ with the Bruce brothers. Do estate agents not realise that this company never made any profit, has had hundreds of millions to back it and market it, it was driven by its share listing and need to show ‘growth’ and ‘expansion’ at all costs.
The Bruce brothers have rode out of town, Countrywide with a completely inept CEO and Board wrecked its company trying to ‘compete’, good money has followed bad into the ‘proptech’ industry and other previously well regarded companies and individuals have made massive errors in their bet towards ‘proptech’.
Ultimately, it is the individuals who have suffered and the above has ensured many redundancies and loss of high street agents, as agents move to industrial parks and first floor offices. The industry has suffered given the amount of publicity towards this low cost model with Yopa etc telling everyone who cares to listen that we are all paid too much and can’t be trusted.
The two individuals in question would be making a lot more money as proper independent agents if they hadn’t joined this race to the bottom, but the irony is probably lost on them as they congratulate the Bruce brothers for the ‘best years of their life’.
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When can we have emojis? This has the crying/laughing face all over it! One of those lads couldn’t run a team let alone be succesful with millions of pounds in backing…. hope the lads got deep pockets with all their share options from PB….
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I want to wish this pair good luck with their venture – but I cannot forget their part in the damage caused to our industry by the company of their choice as a workplace – and their obvious celebration of that.
Having no operational website when already up and running is to me a sign that they have learnt nothing about “excellent customer service and brand presence” – but no doubt they will be touting their old PB listings for all they are worth.
They claim above “we will be honest and fair in our approach without silly gimmicks…” – yet their Rightmove profile launches into the usual anti-Agent diatribe that the onlinies believe will set them apart –
“Understandably, some people have a pretty dim view of estate agents, and it seems many have a horror story or two to share – us included. But our mission is to change the profession by example…and hopefully end up being a bit less lonely at dinner parties and the school gates.“Fairness” and “honesty” don’t often appear in the same sentence as “estate agent”, but we’re staking everything on it – which also involves being honest about what you actually need from an estate agent these days.”
In fairness, there is some honesty there…
…’cos with Rightmove taking the proceeds of the first sale or two every month they really are staking everything.
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I am a firm believer that a corporate business structure promotes accountability (while it sometimes leads to slower turn-around times for customers).
At PB, these guys would have been:
– In competition with their peers
– Monitored by their superiors
– Targeted on complaints received
Meaning that they had legitimate reasons to slow down, focus on service and ‘do well’ within their business structure.
It would be interesting to see how long it is that they lose business out of choice, without these pressures in place.
Do you choose insolvency or dishonesty?
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I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
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Tough gig.
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Game-changer or disruptor, I’m undecided.
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The Irony of starting a new estate agency and slagging off estate agents in your RM bio, not sure why it angers me so but cant bring myself to wish them success. Looking at linked in – I can see why they love purplepricks – 3 years is a long stint at one place. Personally never found school gates or dinner parties a problem for an estate agent either, but then I’m 35years in and still trying.
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“…3 years is a long stint at one place.”
Funny, that – I would say that three years is just about getting your feet under the table.
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The great irony of their downer on ‘traditional’ estate agents and appears to have been lost in the reporting of this story is that both of these two guys were nurtured and taught the real basics of estate agency not by the Bruce brothers but with Dixons (Countrywide) where they were both better than average valuers. I hope for their sake they pay more attention to what they learnt at DIxons than they did at PB.
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My warped sense of humour leads me to propose that they could have given themselves a much more catchy name.
I can see it now: ‘Hinge & Kough’
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