The wars of the portals

I have recently been touring the country delivering seminars on property shops for Update and this has given me considerable new insight into the levels of services we are providing in our estate agency departments.

As estate agency is going the way of so many services (i.e. into the ether of the internet), this article will concentrate on what is happening now in some of the vital areas and what will happen next.

Many smaller firms are producing great websites, and for some good examples, have a look at those of Gillespie Gifford & Brown (ggblaw.co.uk), McCash & Hunter (mccashhunter.co.uk) and @Home (smiths-athome.com). These are not the only good sites around, but they are certainly interesting ones, with some great ideas for you to steal. Apologies if your site is even better, but I haven’t found it yet.

The important aspects of websites (from the prospective client’s point of view, which is what counts) are that the site is easy to access and navigate and is full of interesting information, which does not include the senior partner’s golfing habit or the fact that the firm has been around since 1870.

Prospective purchasers (who are all prospective clients, of course) want the fullest particulars of your properties and, to avoid clogging up your site, it may be a good idea to start with very short particulars, leading to a more detailed description, which in turn leads to a very full description with floor plans and all the extra bells and whistles you can come up with.

Keep them coming

It is not a good idea to be sending the site visitor to another site to get particulars of a property you are selling. They are less than likely to return to your site and you want them to return, again and again if possible.

One way to entice them back is to include changing information on your site, particularly a regular market review of what has been sold locally in the last month or week and how the market is likely to progress. If your site is sufficiently interesting, visitors will return, and are therefore a little more likely to become your clients.

A few dinosaurs have still not switched on to the net, although they are reducing in numbers (perhaps they are dying off because they are getting no new business). Practically every potential housebuyer or seller now starts off by going onto the net. If you are not there, you are invisible to them and extremely unlikely to get their business. Who will be impressed by the firm which has no website? Do they do email? Have they a telephone? Or are they still using forked sticks to convey messages?

It would help matters if one or more of the SPCs, or an intelligent website provider, would provide website templates designed for Scottish solicitors selling houses (and doing other things). That would help those few who still do not have a website and those many who need to upgrade their websites to a reasonable standard. What was state of the art five years ago is now very uncool and unattractive.

Vandals at the gates

Another distressing feature is the lack of any proper training facilities for estate agency staff. When I asked one of the government bodies whether they had estate agency qualifications or training courses, they replied by asking me if I would like to get involved in creating these.

Again, this is a fairly obvious market for the SPCs, Update and Central Law Training. There is a market there with a reasonable level of demand, and it is one which we neglect at great risk. The vandals are approaching the gates of our citadel and we have to be ready to fend them off, largely by providing a high quality service to our clients. For this, we need estate agency staff who are properly trained and skilled.

The processes you have been applying for the last 20 years are no longer sufficient. I can tell that from the pricing process applied by almost every firm I have spoken to – a straight percentage of the selling price. While this can be fruitful in a good market, it is not exactly subtle as a marketing tool. Indeed, many firms are knowingly under-pricing their services by charging less than Re/Max or Your Move etc. When our service is (or ought to be) better than the service provided by our competitors, why would we charge less than they do?

The bad news for all solicitor/estate agents is that new threats are emerging from the woodwork, in the form of Re/Max franchises and the Your Move agency, which is renewing itself as a franchised system. Some of the new franchises are badly run and will disappear as quickly as they have emerged; but others will succeed and will take business we have become accustomed to calling our own.

Close combat

To a large extent, the recent good years have eroded our ability to fight for new business, and there will be some tough hand-to-hand stuff ahead. Not only the estate agency business is at stake, but also the conveyancing that goes with it. A new Re/Max agent may guide your client to a conveyancer 250 miles distant, with good IT and low prices.

For those SPCs who have been dominant in their localities, the days of easy pickings may be drawing to a close.

But there is a bigger danger than Re/Max and Your Move. The “portal wars” in England are largely over, with triumphant firms such as RightMove, Fish4Homes and Vebra consolidating their positions and finding new ways of marketing properties for their client members.

Up to now, these sites have had little impact in Scotland, although some innovative firms are using them and, doubtless, attracting new business, particularly from English-based purchasers looking for property in Scotland. They may not buy the house you are selling, but they might decide to use you in their purchase.

The portals have around 1.8 million properties advertised through their websites (although this undoubtedly includes an element of double counting), and are having the same kind of effect in England which the first SPCs had in Scotland 25 years ago.

Sooner or later, their baleful gaze will be turned on Scotland, and they will look for ways of enhancing their position up here.

First portal of call

Before that happens, we need to have our defences in place. In particular, we need to have a nationwide property centre portal, containing details of all the properties in Scotland which are being sold through Scottish solicitors. Such a portal will be our new Hadrian’s Wall, this time keeping the barbarian southern hordes away from our peaceful Scottish tribes.

This has been discussed from time to time and, for various reasons, neglected. The time for action is now and the need is urgent. Already some Scottish firms are drifting into the English portals and this will increase and multiply, as greater use of the net demands it.

If it takes £1 million to set up the site, so be it. The SPCs can finance that from their reserves or from higher charges for the brilliant level of service which they are providing to our customers.

So press your local SPC committee members to demand that they set about the process of constructing a Scottish-wide portal containing details of all the properties sold by Scottish solicitors (either Property Scotland or Scotland’s Property would be a good title, and I claim no copyright on that).

Such a portal would soon become the first port of call for anybody thinking of purchasing a property anywhere in Scotland, and would be of huge value to us in the forthcoming battle against the army of estate agents who want to take our most valuable service away from us.

Brian D Allingham is an experienced solicitor/estate agent, now operating as a management consultant to small and medium-sized law firms throughout Scotland. He can be contacted at brian.allingham@virgin.net