Press Release: London – 22 January – For Immediate Release

BestAgent, the forthcoming housing transaction marketplace founded by moving industry pioneer Charlie Lamdin, has appointed finance and operations specialist Joanna Monro FCA to its board as Chief Financial Officer.

This is in preparation for the first external investment round since its inception in 2016.

BestAgent is now in its early launch preparation phase. The funding round will grow the existing product team and recruit a new leadership team, with key roles opening up for a Head of Product, EA Industry Relations Manager, Product Partnership Manager (for the multiple partner businesses participating on the platform) and a Head of Communications to manage the extensive PR activities being prepared.

With 20 years in finance, accounting and operations, starting at global accounting network Baker Tilly, including 10 years at board finance C-suite level, with a stint at 17-branch estate agency Andrew Grant as Director of Finance and Operations, Joanna’s breadth of financial reporting, operational strategy and industry-specific knowledge lends itself to her new role at BestAgent.

Quotes

‘I was introduced to Joanna with a personal recommendation after I put out a call on LinkedIn for “the best accountant in the industry”’, said Lamdin.

‘I have had 30 years’ experience working with accountants at all levels. Joanna is in a league of her own and I genuinely can’t wait to see what we can achieve working together.’

‘First and foremost, having such an experienced, steady hand on the tiller will be of great reassurance to investors’, he added. ‘But what I’m most excited about is having someone who understands the financial workings of estate and lettings agent businesses with me to help develop BestAgent, and in particular BackOffice, into the biggest value-adding product agents have ever had available to them.’

Joanna said: ‘Charlie’s vision for the widespread benefits of faster housing transactions for society as a whole, and the potential benefits that has for social mobility and the economy, is as exciting as it is challenging. Building a thriving marketplace business on the back of helping home movers and professionals in the moving industry is an ambitious plan, but the benefits for all involved are obvious. The financials will be complex, given the number of different revenue streams, partners and products on offer, and that’s what attracts me.’

Advisory Board

BestAgent also has an advisory board of high-profile, well-known senior figures from both inside and outside the moving industry, including more than one with international recognition for being world leaders in their field.

Details of this major lineup will be announced in due course, along with provisional details of all the product partner businesses already working with BestAgent to create the transaction platform that intends to deliver on its strap line, Move Faster.

Ends.

Notes for editors:

BestAgent is a start-to-finish housing transaction platform built with the goal of halving transaction times in the UK.

Joanna Monro’s LinkedIn

After beginning his career as a derivatives broker in the city, Charlie Lamdin has been serving estate agency clients in both the UK and Australia since 1999. He is the only person to have conceived, designed and built three estate agency CRM systems, cumulatively handling millions of buyers’ and tenants’ home moves. This gave him unparalleled insight from an overview perspective of the dynamics of the home moving industry, including extensive involvement with all property portals going back to 2000.

He is also host of the popular social media channel Moving Home with Charlie, known for its blunt reporting on the harsh realities of moving home.

He is a father of three, and a private seaplane pilot.

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With a week to go, 81 attendees from independent estate agencies have so far registered for BestAgent’s “No Valuations” event.

The London 6th Nov event, sponsored by award-winning conveyancers Thomas Legal, is fully booked, with just one space left for Manchester on Tues 4th, and 3 spaces left in Bristol on Wed 5th. (If you’d like to grab one of the last places, please email events@bestagent.co.uk).

Founder Charlie Lamdin will be talking through the results already achieved by the BestAgent process, which centres around the mantra “Talk Process, Not Prices” and starts with vendor advice meetings where “No Valuations” are given, and instruction rates have increased as a result.

The strategy, first adopted by Carringtons estate agents in Kingston, has succeeded in completely side-stepping the overvaluing plague that’s slowing down transactions.

Deal times halved, fees up 50%

As a consequence, transaction times have halved, fall throughs have been all but eliminated (still zero fall throughs at the time of writing, since adopting this process in February 2025), fees are up 50% and the sign up ratio on pitch is over 90%, with little or no pushback on higher fees.

Commenting on the selection of agents who have registered, Charlie said “There are some very good independent, owner-managed agents around the country, who aren’t getting the instructions or the fees they deserve, almost entirely because of the widespread practice of wild overvaluing by desperate agents.”

As has been shown with Carringtons, the BestAgent process completely sidesteps that problem.

With the same number of new leads, but with higher instruction rates, larger fees, and better sales rates, the results are transformational not only for Carringtons, but for their staff and clients too.

“It’s made our job fun”

“My favourite unexpected outcome of working with Carringtons has been how they say that this process has removed virtually all the usual stress they endured, and it’s made their job fun. The feeling of knowing that all their sellers are genuinely happy and have enormous respect for what this agent has achieved is the icing on the cake.” Charlie added.

BestAgent will now be expanding the project with agents in other areas, on a one-off basis, to prove that the approach works in any market, and that good agents no longer need to overvalue to win business.

Agents, not conveyancers, are at the centre of all transactions

“Estate agents are at the epicentre of all parties to every transaction. As such, they are the only industry in a position to fix the housing market congestion, more than conveyancers, government or lenders. The key to returning transaction times to the sensible 10-week time frames of the 90s is to help the public find more agents who understand how to deliver these results.” said Charlie.

“That’s why the website is called ‘BestAgent’. We want to put the idea into the public’s head that their choice of agent is pivotal to their move.”

Email events@bestagent.co.uk to reserve one of the last places if you’re an independent agent owner-manager

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Transactions took half as long, and there were 70% more transactions in 2007 than in 2023.

Sole agency fees were 2%-2.5%, transaction times were typically 10-12 weeks, and there were more of them, making it easier for movers to find homes.

Since then, despite 25 years of industry events, there’s been non-stop decline in fees, deal volumes and times.

BestAgent Day marks the turning point when we get back to better agency, led by agents and other moving industry pioneers operating from a base of integrity.

I’ve called BestAgent Day the ‘greatest agency event yet’, said it will be ‘a turning point’ after 25 years of decline, of ever-lower fees and ever-slower transactions.

It’s not just sales guff; I really mean it.

There’s a special thread that joins all the guest speakers, all giving us their time for nothing; they all have something special in common:

They’re all striving for change.

Without change, we can only expect to see fees fall further, and deal delays worsen, both in our own businesses and as an industry.

This helps no one, especially not the moving public.

So how do we make the change?

That’s where, I hope, BestAgent comes in.

Our goal at BestAgent is to form a new, unbreakable alliance of businesses across the moving sector who operate with integrity as their central value.

What does that mean? In simple terms, it means always putting the customer’s interests before our own.

It sounds simple, so why hasn’t it happened? Something has prevented it from happening. What is it?

This is where we get into the substance of the talks on BestAgent Day: confronting the decades-old hard-wired habits afflicting most agents, brokers and conveyancers, and breaking them.

The first, and worst, habit is the monster we aim to slay on BestAgent Day: deliberately excessive overvaluing.

I’m not talking about the few extra percent that’s down to innocent over-optimism, but the 10, 15, even 20% deliberate excess that is often used as the oldest tactic in the book to trick sellers into signing their future away.

The worst thing is that this tried, tested and terrible tactic only serves to trash transaction volumes, sucking sales out of the pipeline for the rest of the industry.

At BestAgent, we have a plan, and a product built with the sole purpose of restoring fee levels, transaction times and volumes back to where they were decades ago.

70% more transactions, in half the time, at twice the average fees of today.

That product is built on transparency, which is the bedrock of trust.

Trust is what movers need, and they’re prepared to pay for it. They can’t currently identify truly trustworthy agents; that’s what we want to change.

If you’re an agent who welcomes the sound of this change, I hope BestAgent Day will be a turning point for you too, which you will look back on and say “That’s when we turned the corner and things began to get better, for everyone.”

If you haven’t already booked your free place, don’t miss it, book here: BestAgent Day 4th September 2024

The post Why BestAgent Day will be a 25 year turning point. appeared first on BestAgent.

A uniquely passionate lineup of moving-industry change-makers gather to discuss how agents can double transactions and fee income, in a way that will spark change across the housing market and bring the improvements most agents and all movers want to see.

The Event – Agents Only

Every agent in the UK can attend this online conference at no charge and engage live with the speakers. Registration is essential and only active estate agents can attend.

Its sole purpose is to be the most valuable day of insight and inspiration agents have ever had. It’s aimed as much at ambitious employees as it is business owners and directors. The target audience is all agents who care about customers and want to see better service levels across the moving marketplace, along with rising fee income and transactions.

The live online event starts at 9am and runs throughout the day. “Agents time is their most valuable resource, so as a thank you, we’re offering ‘Lead Credits’ that can be used for buying leads from BestAgent to agents who register early and use their time attending the event.” explained BestAgent Founder Charlie Lamdin.

“Whether you’re a seasoned pro, or a junior negotiator just starting out on your agency career, you can attend free and put your questions to the live speakers.” said Lamdin.

The Best-Ever Speaker Line-up.

The speaker line-up, including Daniel Daggers of super prime agent DDRE Global, Nathan Emerson (Propertymark CEO) and Richard Donnell (Zoopla research director), as well as industry regulars Christopher Watkin and Russell Quirk, is a striking one.

Lamdin said “The sheer level of passion for change among all the speakers is palpable. My hope is that, perhaps for the first time, when agents hear what they have to say, they might actually start to believe that change is possible, after 25 years of total stagnation in our industry’s progress. No one here has been paid to speak or is trying to sell anything. They are all generously giving their time and sincerely want to help agents and the market as a whole to improve.”

“I have attended countless industry events over the years, always enjoyable, but never resulting in much change or improvement. It’s time for a breakthrough.” added Charlie.

With speakers from agency, industry bodies, marketing, PR as well as conveyancing, lending and broking, all bases are covered on the goal of halving transaction times.

Speakers also include: Adam Day, leader of eXp UK; Perry Power of Power Bespoke agents; Arjan Verbeek, Founder and CEO of Perenna Mortgages; Ash Borland, mortgage broker business coach; Katie Griffin, owner manager of Sawdye & Harris estate agents; Martin Stewart of London Money FS; Katie Fox of Katie Fox EA Poole; and Simon David, CEO of Thomas Legal.

The Call to Action: End Excessive Overvaluing and Double Transactions, by participating with BestAgent

Lamdin says the potential exists for all agents in the country to double their transaction volumes, and that any agent that wants to can start on this straight away without having to wait for others. “The combination of price transparency, well-informed movers and better prepared agents can transform pipelines within weeks.”

Richard Donnell will share data showing the potential demand for double the current transaction levels, as well as how badly overpriced properties cause a slowdown in pipelines, increase fall throughs and take potential sales out of the running.

Founder Charlie Lamdin will unveil how any agent can use BestAgent to help end excessive overvaluing and double fee income, alongside whatever they currently use.

Charlie will also share details of how business owners who choose to join BestAgent Club can participate in future dividend payouts.

How BestAgent enables agents to force change for the first time with the new Public House Price Index

BestAgent is the “biggest piece of tech the residential property market has ever seen” claims Lamdin, who says he will reveal why on BestAgent Day. “The vision is a fairer moving marketplace, free from corporate control, where agents who consistently deliver better results for clients will be easier for movers to find. The goal is 10 week transactions for forward thinking movers and agents, by building the transaction process into the platform.”

“But the only way to break the current stranglehold by the worst offenders of mass, excessive overvaluing to win instructions that are then locked into 5 or 6 month sole agency contracts, effectively taking those listings out of play for transactions, is to shine the spotlight of transparency on them with a public house price index, of exchange paid prices.”

“We already have conveyancers and agents agreeing to supply their exchange prices to the index on an ongoing basis. We will be calling on all agents to submit their exchange prices to the index through their BestAgent BackOffice account, in return for early access to index data for their area.” explains Lamdin. “Agents who participate will get a ‘transparent agent’ badge on their listings on BestAgent Property.” he added.

Ending excessive, dishonest overvaluing for good

“We’re not trying to take away the optimism of a good agent who wants to get the best price the market will pay for a property. On the contrary, the goal is that agents will be able to achieve best market price for clients more quickly, by listing at more realistic prices and getting competing buyers, which is the only way to be sure best price has been achieved.”

BestAgent is the first property site where movers can go to find moving professionals they can actually trust to provide advice that’s in their best interests, not just be sucked into a funnel and upsold to.

Viewing and instruction leads are offered to agents on a pay-per-lead basis with transparent pricing, where all agents pay the same price and there are no corporate discounts.

BestAgent All Homes Index

BestAgent Club

For agents who want to actively support BestAgent’s endeavours and help accelerate progress, Charlie formed the “BestAgent Club”. A £100 per month, cancel anytime, community who want to share stories on efforts to end overvaluing and double fee income, help shape future policy, and become eligible for revenue share for any referral income generated from their listing on BestAgent Property. Agents who choose to join on or before BestAgent Day will receive double or triple rewards to thank them for their early support. Full details of membership can be found on bestagent.club

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Charlie Lamdin, BestAgent’s founder, has been studying the property industry from the inside since 1998. He knows more about estate agency than anyone else who’s never been an agent. (Challengers welcome.)

The question he’s trying to answer is: if agents and movers interests are aligned (a move needs to happen before anyone gets what they want) then why is it such a godforsaken shit-fight for both sides?

After more than 20 years, he’s reached a surprisingly precise conclusion:

Lead Gen is bad for estate agency and makes movers choose bad agents.

Clueless PropTech

Driven by a lack of understanding of how the property industry operates, countless new entrants have been flooding into the so-called “proptech” space with Lead Gen solutions for over 20 years now, and yet the measurable results for movers have got steadily worse. 

Transaction times are at their longest ever. 

Success ratios (the ratio of properties listed to properties sold) are below 50% (outside covid times).

More and more people are making the wrong choice of agent, a problem is made much worse by “lead-gen”. This is disastrous for everyone, because good estate agency is a complex, difficult, nuanced job at the best of times, and is beyond the competence of many agents when things get tough. So choosing the wrong agent because of their lead-gen spells disaster for movers, and lost instructions for the agents.

But why?

Any agent can buy Sparkly Gimmicks, and bad agents rely on them.

Because any agent, even the worst agents, can buy these glossy, sparkly, lead-gen gimmicks, such as “automatic instant valuation” tools (which do nothing of the sort), market data reports, ghost-written articles to show what an expert the agent is (even though they didn’t write it themselves).

So any amateur, money-grabbing con artist can arm themselves with these gimmicks, and a portal subscription, and make themselves look like a credible option for home owners. “Hi, I’m on [a portal], look at my cool market reports, look at my website. Read my blog I’m a guru.” Literally any agent can now buy what they need to say this.

The game has become: “S/he who spends the most on lead gen gets the most leads”. Great for lead-gen businesses, terrible for agents and movers.

Two-tier industry, cornered market.

BestAgent has constantly updating data on all the publicly available properties for sale and to let from all estate agents throughout the country. It shows something remarkable: Just 10% of agents are listing fully 50% of all properties on the market, nationwide. 

Do the maths, and you’ll see that this leaves the other 90% of agents to scrap over the other half of the market, getting on average one-tenth the number of listings of the top 10%. 

With some important exceptions, many of the “top 10%” are merely spending the most on marketing and lead-gen, snatching new leads before other agents can get to them. They are by no means necessarily in the top 10% in terms of results for clients.

With most sellers following the terrible advice to “just pick 3 agents”, most of the time the 3 agents that get picked are the ones spending most on their marketing.

But there’s zero correlation between marketing spend (or market share) and the results those agents are achieving for those clients. 

Awards and market share means nothing to sellers

Charlie has had first hand experience of agents who have won national awards actually selling less than half of their clients properties. Many of them are also members of industry trade bodies. But again this means nothing in terms of what results a home seller can expect.

While there are many complex reasons driving the behaviour of home sellers and agents in the market place, almost anywhere you look, you will find evidence of lead-gen company interests being the predominant factor in most scenarios. 

Lambs to the slaughter

This is bad for both agents and movers. 

90% of agents feel they are forced to spend money on various lead-gen marketing options. But they will not get the same return on investment as the top-10 companies who are carpet bombing their patch with marketing gimmicks.  These agents are losing out on business they deserve to win, for no reason other than they have no visibility by comparison to the carpet bombers.

For movers, most of whom have absolutely no idea how to go about choosing an agent, this means they are lambs to the slaughter of carpet-bombing marketing and lead-gen tactics. They will be sucked into corporate marketing funnels and processed into a signed-contract lock in before they can say “what’s my home worth?”.

Worst of all – no one has done anything about it, until now.

The conclusion to all this is that all the current players, large and small, are crying out about industry problems, while continuing without doing anything about it.

Many good people in property are trying to make a difference through their own businesses. But this is a hiding to nothing as they will, at best, only make a difference to their own clients, but have no impact beyond that.

All efforts to change things have failed. But BestAgent has a plan for a fairer future.

The only way to change an industry is to start a business that offers an entirely different and 100% impartial way for movers and agents to interact.

It boils down to this one thing: If profit is the primary motive, it’s most profitable to play by the current rules and change nothing. 

But, if change is the primary motive, then everything must be different, starting with the absolute removal of any influence that will place profit above change.

This is why Charlie has chosen to refuse all offers of investment into BestAgent, and has ended all commercial partnerships.

It’s why BestAgent is 100% impartial. It doesn’t sell data to anyone. It transparently charges all agents the same for any leads they buy, regardless of the size of agency, refusing corporate discounts, or any brand comparisons. 

It’s why BestAgent is moving the focus away from agency brands onto the individual people who will be delivering service. 

The conclusion is this: there is no reliable formula for finding the best agent for any particular property or client. It’s a totally personal and bespoke choice every time. 

But if a seller wants to be sure of a sale and that they are getting the absolute best price for their property, there’s no getting around the fact that they must leave no stone unturned in the hunt for that agent. And that’s where BestAgent comes in. 

A fairer future for agents, a better offering for movers. 

Only by eliminating all unfair advantage, all corporate influence, all shiny gimmicks, is it possible to create an industry where both movers and agents get what’s best: the best match between agent and client that will lead to faster transactions, lower fall throughs, higher fees, and a better quality of life all round. 

Every last element of the way BestAgent operates has been designed to prevent gaming by unscrupulous agents, to make it easier for movers to find the good people, wherever they may work, and for an end to the two-tier industry that currently benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Video: Watch Charlie explain why most agents underestimate the importance of what they do https://youtu.be/26WLhfoyG94

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• Agent dirty tricks
• Most valuations are actually too low
• 3 month lock-in contracts are dead

ALSO:

• Shows all agents are not equal (but most will lose you money)
• Shows what to look out for in the agents who come round
• Shows what can happen when you get it right

This documentary by Charlie Lamdin (amateur film maker, YouTuber, home-schooling parent, seaplane pilot and founder of BestAgent) was filmed when his colleague, Samantha, was thinking of selling her home, a 3 bedroom semi-detached house near Taunton in Somerset.

Charlie jumped at the chance to perform an experiment to prove that although most estate agents will lose you money when selling your home (just look at the valuations provided, compared with the price that was achieved) there are always a few who are better than the rest.

The problem is there is no reliable way to identify them, without meeting them all in person, (at least all the ones who accept the condition that no lock in contract will be signed).

In this film, Samantha telephones all 18 of her local agents, 11 of whom accept her invitation to attend the property to meet her, give their opinion of what the property is worth (they’re almost all wrong, one agent even says that she’ll never get the price she did get) and pitch their services.

She whittles the shortlist down from 11 to 3 based on the 2 days of meetings, and finally picks one.

The film goes on to show the whole story of the sale, and eventually reveals the successful agent, who was from an estate agency brand that Sam said she would “never have called”.

“We made this film to demonstrate that picking 3 agents at random is always a bad idea, and is the main reason why most people have such a terrible experience selling their home” explains Charlie Lamdin.

He continued “The end result of this experiment is that Sam now has life-changing opportunities. It also shows that most agents, even the nice ones, don’t fully understand that their job is not just to sell a home, but to achieve the highest possible price for it, in a short period of time. Only 3 of the 11 agents who attended actually demonstrated an understanding of their job and had a credible proposal on how to achieve the highest price. The other 8, while (almost) all very nice people, had nothing to differentiate their approach. Unfortunately this is the reason why agents have a reputation for ‘just chucking it on the internet and waiting for enquiries’. Many agents do nothing more than exactly that, and somehow scrape a living doing it, while underselling their client’s properties, if they sell them at all.

Sam, the owner of the property, said: “It just goes to show that the whole debate on what kind of agent to use, corporate v independent, online v high street, one-man band v team, is irrelevant and a red-herring. None of these are considerations, it just boils down to finding the individual person, the human being, who knows how to deliver.”

She continued “It also shows that taking local For Sale boards and online reviews into account is a distraction. You just need to find that person you click with, who demonstrates a real understanding of what you want, why you want it, and knows how to get it for you.”

“I found all the brochures, presentations and marketing materials deadly dull and unhelpful. Charlie told me to only focus on the person, are they listening to me, do they understand what I want and do I trust them to get it. He said just disregard everything else.”

​​This experiment was filmed to illustrate the approach BestAgent takes to helping sellers select agents. The BestAgent website never compares or recommends any agent.

It offers all agents an equal opportunity to engage with a seller, at no charge, meaning there’s no barrier for any agent. Agents are invited to introduce themselves personally (ignoring brand) by video message which is then sent to the seller via BestAgent, a bit like Airbnb allows messaging between hosts and guests while retaining privacy.

The sellers can then choose which people they feel most comfortable inviting to their home for a valuation, whatever brand they may work at. By stripping out all brand advantage or disadvantage, it makes the sellers choice based primarily on the personal interaction.

In its first year of use BestAgent has found that approximately half of the 20 agents invited each time do not feel comfortable sending a video message.

Of the remaining 10, around half fail to engage and folllow up, and usually 4 or 5 agents stand out in their keenness to meet the clients, and their confidence in themselves and their offering.

So far there is absolutely no correlation between corporate or independent, online or high street, solo operators or companies in terms of who is being selected. It boils down to the calibre of the individual agent, regardless of where they work.

Press and media assets

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