Estate Agency News has just reported on a survey conducted by Hotproperty.co.uk where the majority of estate agents who took part agreed their future is not in the high street.

62% said the business would either be online or in serviced offices within 10 years.

HotProperty managing director Shawn Luetchens commented:

“The property market has been steadily becoming more and more reliant on the internet, but there is obviously still a strong demand for high street offices. When it comes down to it, people today still like to be able to browse estate agent windows for houses, but for how long it’s hard to say. With out a doubt the future for estate agents is going to be online, it’s a just a matter of how fast it happens.”

I have some issues

As an estate agent, a couple of things bothered me about this survey

    * Firstly; the agents seem to be in denial about the timescale, it's happening right now. Buyers are way ahead of the agents and already online. 95% of our buyers use Rightmove as their first port of call to search for property. Rightmove is the only window buyers are interested in as it has effectively condensed the number of agents people have to visit to ONE.

    * Secondly; the only justification for expensive high street offices seems to be to allow anyone to browse. Guess what, the browsers have gone to Rightmove as well because it's convenient, efficient, fast and informative. Try getting some of that in an estate agents' office ;)

It's not all bad for us though, we're still needed for negotiation and after sales support, it just doesn't matter if we have an office in the centre of town or 20 miles away. As long as our clients' properties are marketed on Rightmove, we've pretty much got marketing covered.

Now, does anyone want to talk about fees?