Property leaders join Rory Sutherland in backing BestAgent founder Charlie Lamdin’s mission to fix Britain’s broken home-moving process
Verona Frankish, Simon David and Daniel Daggers appointed to BestAgent’s advisory board alongside advertising heavyweight Rory Sutherland
25 August 2026: Some of the property industry’s best-known names have joined BestAgent founder Charlie Lamdin and advertising heavyweight Rory Sutherland, to support his mission to shake up Britain’s notoriously frustrating home-moving process, with the bold ambition of halving transaction times and dramatically reducing fall-through rates.
Verona Frankish, CEO of Yopa (former Senior Managing Director of Purplebricks); Simon David, Group CEO, Thomas Legal & Equilaw; and Daniel Daggers, founder of DDRE Global and star of Netflix’s “Buying London”; have joined BestAgent’s advisory board, bringing expertise spanning estate agency and property technology.
They join Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK for 20 years, now President Emeritus Ogilvy Consulting, who is supporting BestAgent as both an adviser and investor, alongside Alex Groundwater, Former Programme Director for FT, Sony, Cisco and The Crown Estate; Jo Henry, Property Acquisition and Operations Specialist at Jess Simpson Property Search and Stoneacre Advisors; Andrew Tillard, Founder of Animos LLP; and Nick Armstrong, Retired Partner at Charles Russell Speechly.
The group will advise BestAgent as it seeks to challenge some of the behavioural problems that make buying and selling a home unnecessarily slow, stressful and likely to fail, starting with one of the most important decisions a seller makes: which estate agent to trust with their move.
The housing market isn’t working
The scale of the home-moving problem is significant. The Government’s own June 2026 Home Buying and Selling Reform Roadmap shows that once an offer has been accepted, the average home purchase takes around 120 days to complete – 60% longer than in 2007 – while around one in three transactions fail, costing buyers and sellers approximately £400 million every year in wasted costs.
Lamdin has identified the problem as the way housing market incentives have evolved and the adverse behaviours they reward. Agents are incentivised to win listings, property portals generate revenue from advertising and leads, and the numerous professionals involved in a transaction are largely focused on their individual part of the process. BestAgent will shift the focus towards greater transparency and the outcome everyone ultimately wants – a successfully completed move. Its goal is to halve transaction times and fall-through rates, making home moves faster, more reliable and less costly for buyers and sellers.
Putting the seller back in control
That starts at the very beginning of the process with Find Your Agent, which is designed to change the way sellers choose an estate agent.
Rather than relying on a traditional valuation appointment or simply choosing the most prominent local estate agent brand, sellers can use Find Your Agent to invite local agents to pitch for their instruction, watch short pitch videos and choose the individuals they feel more comfortable inviting to their home to discuss the sale. Agents cannot pay for preferential positioning, and only the agent ultimately chosen by the seller pays.
The aim is to shift the basis on which agents compete for business away from advertising spend and the highest suggested asking price, towards the quality of the agent, their approach and their ability to successfully get someone moved.
BestAgent says the model is designed to benefit good estate agents as well as consumers, giving strong independent agents the opportunity to compete alongside larger corporate businesses and creating the conditions for agents who deliver better outcomes to be better rewarded.
All agents, especially those focused on delivering a high-integrity service, are invited to activate their free BestAgent BackOffice account at BestAgent.co.uk, so they do not miss out on Find Your Agent seller leads.
BestAgent already providing a working solution
The approach underpinning BestAgent’s model has already been put into practice at family-run Kingston estate agency Carringtons. Since adopting the new approach in February 2025, Carringtons has seen its average fee increase by more than 50%, while average time on market has fallen from more than 100 days to 28 days and time to exchange has dropped from 115 days to under 70 days.
Its fall-through rate remains close to zero for all new instructions taken on under the approach, while its appraisal-to-instruction rate has risen to more than 90% among clients it accepts, with the agency rejecting sellers with unrealistic expectations.
Charlie Lamdin, founder of BestAgent, 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.”
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather UK for 20 years, now President Emeritus Ogilvy Consulting, and adviser and investor in BestAgent, said:
“The housing market doesn’t just have an economics problem, it has an incentives and behaviour problem. If you reward agents for winning listings, you shouldn’t be surprised when the system becomes very good at winning listings. That isn’t necessarily the same thing as getting people moved.
“What interests me about BestAgent is that it changes the incentives. Instead of asking who can promise the most attractive number or spend the most to get in front of a seller, Find Your Agent gives people a different way to choose the person they trust with their move.
“Often you don’t need to replace the people in a market to change its behaviour; you need to change the scoreboard. That’s what I think is particularly interesting about what Charlie is building.”
Verona Frankish, CEO of Yopa and BestAgent adviser, said:
“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.”
Simon David, Group CEO, Thomas Legal & Equilaw and BestAgent adviser, said:
“There is no good reason a well-prepared home move should take months to complete. When the seller, buyer, agent, solicitor and everyone else involved is ready and working towards the same outcome, transactions can move remarkably quickly.
“The opportunity with BestAgent is to start creating those conditions from day one, beginning with choosing the right agent and getting everyone properly prepared. If we can do that consistently, there is a real opportunity to reduce both transaction times and the number of sales that fall apart.”
Daniel Daggers, founder of DDRE Global and BestAgent adviser, said:
“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.”
The advisory board will work with Lamdin as BestAgent develops its marketplace and builds partnerships across the property industry.
For more information, visit: BestAgent.co.uk
About BestAgent
BestAgent is a new kind of housing marketplace built around one outcome: successfully completed home moves.
Rather than replacing estate agents, BestAgent is designed to make good agents easier to find and give them a fairer opportunity to win business. Through its Find Your Agent service, sellers can invite local agents to pitch for their instruction, review their pitches and choose the individual they want to work with. Agents cannot pay for preferential positioning and only the agent chosen by the seller pays.
BestAgent’s wider marketplace is designed to bring movers, estate agents and the other professionals involved in a transaction into one environment, encouraging better preparation, greater transparency and collaboration from the beginning of a move.
Founded by property industry entrepreneur Charlie Lamdin, BestAgent’s ambition is to make moving home faster, safer and more likely to successfully complete.