Online agent eMoov has denied that it is failing to shift stock.
In an ongoing war of words with Cornish agent Chris Wood, of PDQ Properties, eMoov boss Russell Quirk has responded to a story on EYE last week.
In it, Wood said that online firms were charging sellers for their failures.
Quoting Zoopla Pro statistics, he said that online agents had sold just five out of 49 new instructions between January 1 and August 3.
Of these, eMoov had listed 16 and sold two across 11 different Truro postcodes.
But Quirk – who lists properties equally on Zoopla, Rightmove and his own site – told Eye that in fact eMoov’s sales record is better than PDQ’s.
His own figures also show five properties under offer in the relevant postcodes, out of a total of 14 listed.
That, he said, gives a success rate of 36%.
In contrast, said Quirk, PDQ Estates has 23 properties on the market, of which six are under offer (a total of 26% of its stock).
Quirk said: “The real picture is rather different to the one painted by PDQ. It transpires that we outperform PDQ by a country mile.
“So not only are eMoov the largest online estate agent in Cornwall, but we totally outperform PDQ, a prominent and successful local agent.”
Referring to Wood’s launch of a budget offering that costs £575 including VAT, Quirk said: “So Mr Wood has seen the light and launched his own online proposition. Now we really know why.
“On behalf of the entire, rapidly expanding and rather successful online estate agency community, ‘WELCOME to the future’ Chris.
“Now, who’s next…?”
However, Wood says he is sticking to his guns.
He said: “The figures I quoted were for the whole year to date and so give a rather more accurate overall picture of performance rather than a snapshot on a particular day which, as anyone in estate agency knows, can be both fantastic or abysmal, within hours of each other.
“In the whole of 2014, in postcode areas TR3,11,12,13,14,17,18,19,20,26 and 27, Zoopla figures show that PDQ sold 75% of all new instructions and eMoov sold just 20% – an 80% failure rate for their paying customers.”
Comments (15)
I’m clearly having a bad day – I totally understood Tuf Luv!
You’re having a good day, it was your super sleuthing the broken board story that has opened a crack on a story of portal juggling. With five more examples all quickly taken down it looks like something is a little perplexing and might be a system of manipulating performance stats. That needs a bit more investigation.
It is a real pity the subtlety of what I am doing is lost on people who think portals is only about what consumers want!
Dude I always cut the online guys some slack but can someone please lock Russ in a jail.Then throw away the jail. Chris, you got less chance of finding trace amounts of common sense with that guy than I got of talking my missus into a s*x tape. Sweet.
Russ is clickbait (Jeez even his broken board got column inches) and the downside is that when talking heads say stupid things, sometimes people repeat them. At least he’s got zero airtime on OTM. Wow I bet he’d pay us a million bucks each to get rid of OTM but without OTM what we got? OK we got a million bucks each but thats not the point. Dude you have to figure that if your performance is subsidised by the cost of failure then failure’s hauling a*se right to the front of your business plan. Not a good look.
Sweet man, sweet.
You can’t blame Russell Quirk for responding to the story last week. But it isn’t good publicity for emoov, whichever way you look at it.
E moov might be doing a whole lot better if they concentrated on positive advertising about what they can offer…….rather than goading and arguing with high street agents, the latter of which clearly isn’t working for them and always highlights a negative. In this instance the negative is the extremely poor emoov sales rate of 36%.
When price is the only selling point, it becomes very hard to find positives to advertise. Being devoid of any discernible USP it becomes very hard to shout anything other than “We’re cheap!”
Once upon a time….. in a portal land far, far away…..
Emoov = Nomoov from what I can see very often!
They can’t spell & they can’t sell!
That’s their clever bit only 34% sold but presumably 100% handed over cash. That’s the point; there is no real incentive to sell.
eMoov…….easy Money off our vendors?
Oh Mr Quirk. This is just embarrassing. 36% = Fail. Using different timeframes to make yourself look better = Fail.
He’s having a laugh. His success rate, if published to potential online only agent customers, would soon send them to a “proper” agent.
I’ve got Rightmove Intel stats that show us as clear market leader…..tweak a couple of criteria and we drop down the list…. This could go on forever….
Concentrate on selling homes and boast to your missus when you get home… not to your competition..
Spot on indagent……those who spend all their time tweaking figures to show they are no 1 are normally lacking in confidence in their own ability / performance.
It’s embarrassing for agents that rely on portal postcode data on valuations as many competitors will be claiming the same thing with the “same” reports but with a slightly different boundary (drawn in their favour). When more than 1 agent claims to be number 1 vendors know one of them must be lying, so trust neither.
Which ever number is correct in terms of ‘Success Rate’, even at the claimed 34% – that leaves 66% – or two thirds unsuccessful. That’s a lot of people paying up front who will not be happy in achieving a result.
That’s why people prefer ‘No Sale – No fee’. It removes the risk, and given a choice, most people would opt for this, even though they may pay more.
Look at ewe Glenn! 7 likes (so far) on Property industry eye, Ewe da man!