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.

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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

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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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