The £27M Estate Agency Lesson (With Russell Quirk)

What happens when an estate agent raises £27 million to reinvent the industry?

In this episode of the Estate Agency X Podcast, Russell Quirk shares the story behind launching one of the UK’s early online estate agency models and the lessons learned from scaling, and ultimately, losing the business. The conversation explores leadership, raising investment, scaling challenges and the realities of disruption in estate agency.

Russell also shares his perspective on the future of the industry, including the rise of self-employed agents and the growing noise around proptech. If you’re an ambitious estate agent or agency owner, this episode offers honest insight into what it really takes to build and grow a property business.

Follow the podcast for more conversations with industry leaders and share it with other estate agents who want to build better businesses.

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Transcript

Family Roots In Estate Agency

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to this episode of Estate Agency X.

Speaker 4 0:02

Today I'm talking to Russell Quirk. I'm sure you all know who Russell is. He'll give you the background on himself, but we dig into what it's like to run an estate agency from a small scale to then starting the online estate agency models, raising £26 million.

Speaker 1 0:18

The learnings from that, the things that he sees in self-employed models today, what he sees as the future of estate agency, we go all around the houses with it. There's loads of gold in there. Hope you enjoy.

Speaker 0:28

Estate Agency X, the UK's number one estate agency podcast discussing the future of Estate Agency, entrepreneurship and business.

Speaker 4 0:40

Okay, Russell, thank you for coming in. Uh, for anybody that has no social media and has never uh left living under a rock, can you give us a little bit of a background on yourself in terms of a how you got into agency uh and what happened after that?

Speaker 1 0:57

Goes back a bit, goes back to childhood and be before that, really. So my dad was an estate agent, my granddad was an estate agent in London, so for the 1950s on Roots. So my grandfather was uh, if there was such a thing back in the day in the 1950s, my grandfather was probably one of the first truly kind of British entrepreneurs. So he worked for the cooperative survey company, so the co-op, but the survey arm, which obviously doesn't exist anymore, and in I think it was 1956, 1957, in fulling in London, decided to go out on his own, so it did, opened an estate agency with a partner in Lowton. That was the first one, and then over the next 20 years opened offices throughout it. So Grays, Stanford, Basledon, organized places, Canvey Island, um, and so on. So proper sort of the earth bases. So went from being the eldest of eight kids whose dad abandoned them, as is the story. Uh he, I guess probably as a survival team more than anything, decided to go on his own start business. And by the time I came along in 19 uh something, um he had built with then my dad and his two brothers, my uncles, what was at the time in the late 60s and 70s, a phenomenally successful estate agency business called Quirker Partners. So I think at its peak, it had something like 14 offices. You know, back in the day, they'd have like a separate shop next door to estate agency office for commercial, then they had a separate one for mortgage, and it was a big deal, you know. And it was back in the day, people remember when Bearstow Eaves was run by the Bearstow family, uh, before it was countrywide. So the guy running Bearstow Eaves, which originally was funny enough, Mr. Bearstow and Mr. Eaves, the sons then, John Bearstow and so on, they were my grandfather's literal competitors on the high street. When I say on the high street, I mean they were opposite each other, you know, bogging each other out across across Grace High Street. Um, so I grew up, literally grew up, with a family, grandfather, father, two uncles. All they talked about was they stayed. Oh, I mean, that that was it. We had three big houses in a place called Walsley Road Billaricki, which is apparently the best road in Billaricki. My grandfather chose to buy a plot of land there in whatever it was, the late 50s, early 60s, as he started to earn money, built a house, loads of land either side, gave one side of the land to my dad, the other side of the land to my cousin Anthony and Simon's dad. So we had, it was like, it was like a 1970s version of Dallas, before Dallas even came along, three big houses, interconnecting driveways. So my memory as a kid, twofold, one of the more relevant political state agency, was me and my cousins would go on the driveway with the houses set up from the road, and we had our own little race track. So our bikes and our go-karts and so on would just race around the driveway between the three houses. And at five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, you know, that was kind of normal, which of course it wasn't, it was, you know, it was uh it was, you know, I guess it was kind of new money, um, you know, and the first kind of inference of new money back in the kind of sixties and seventies, I guess. It's um but where it gets relevant to a state agency is that I would go to my grandparents' house in the morning before school, as would my cousins, and would be running around, you know, being a pain in the ass, like, you know, because there were 11 of us, 11 grandchildren. Uh and every day, literally every morning, my dad, his brother Doug, his brother Roger, and my grandfather Albert would sit around the table like the mafia, talking about that was their morning meeting, 8 a.m. in Nana's house, around the table, and it would be right, what we're doing about that Tulsa of Canada. Now we're gonna sack X from Greys. Seriously, I used to hear all the time. So they they would talk about the day-to-day operational challenges of their estate agency business and I guess strategy or whatever. So I'm not five, six, seven years old, then that's all I'm hearing. So when I left school at 16, and um I'd cocked up my uh my O levels, got two GCSEs or O levels as they were. My dad said to Class of Bear, what the fuck are you gonna do? And he said, You fuck that up, didn't you? So she always said, You fuck that up, didn't you? And I went thanks for your support. Uh I said, Well, I want to be an state agent anyway. I don't have any qualifications, do I? And he said, Well, yeah, obviously you you knew that, which is why you didn't bother. So at 16, he put me into the last remnant of that business, quirk and partners, because a lot of it had been sold off because my grandfather had died, my other, my uncles digged on the nose, and my dad ended up with the last robbery, so that was long story short. And so we had one office left, maybe two Greys at Stanford Hope. So I started at 16 years old in 1984 as a junior estate agent in Quirker Partners Grays, making the tea, doing the send-out, remember that? Um, and that was my first foray into a state agency because I was determined that that's what I wanted to do.

Speaker 3 6:05

Yeah.

Early Career Detours And Sales Hustle

Rebuilding With Traditional Branches

The Birth Of eMoov And Fixed Fees

Investment Waves And A Crowded Market

Collapse, Aftermath, And Hard Lessons

Speaker 1 6:05

And at the same time, other members of my family that were lamenting the fact that we had this big estate agency empire back in the day, now it'd been kind of squandered by my dad and his brothers, who potentially wasted everything that my grandfather had built, frankly. Um, you know, kind of again, because of their the the new money, if you like, becoming a bit too easy and then not being very hungry. Yeah, not really understanding how to strive and graft and why it's important and take risks. So they've had it all handed over a plate. So my cousin Anthony, funny enough, who um I later went into business with, uh, he was going through exactly the same thing where he got work for Leicester's, as it was, obviously it doesn't exist anymore, as a junior, same age as me. So we're all doing this kind of parallel thing. My other cousin Simon, uh, when he was only about 19 or 20, started in his day ages he office in Belaricki, which is still there, uh, opened any Whitford and stuff. So you've got this kind of stirred generation, kind of almost desperate to rekindle the family business. Yeah. Because our dads fucked it up. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I got into it. Interesting. And then, like, so so then you're working as a junior in uh Grays, and then at some point you open a new office in Canby, right? What well a few years, so I I then my dad then sold. This is what my dad was like. Lovely guy, but just very um uh yeah, not very thoughtful, should we say. A man of his generation, a bit just selfish, really. Uh one day the manager of the office I was working in walks in and says, Um, has you done told you what's happening to the office? I said, Well, what I have a refer? What do you mean? I'm 17. I bought it. What? Without you. Yeah, yeah, why? He said, What do you mean? And he said, I've bought it. He said, I've done a deal with your dad, I'm buying it. I went, okay. So I rang my dad and said, Kind of what? I mean, I don't want to do that anymore. The estate agency. And I went, oh wow. I said, and I didn't say it because I didn't have the bollocks, to be honest. But I'm thinking, your dad would be absolutely speed fellas, and my grandfather. But my dad had gone at cars, motor trade, he went into business with a guy in South End, owned a Mazda dealership, then I opened a Mazda, which was late in Nissan dealership at Cheltsford. And so I followed my dad into cars because I was 18, 19 years old, loved cars because he did. So I thought, I can go and do the car thing. So I did that for a few years, ended up selling Ferraris and Porsches for Lancasters, as it was in Colchester, then in London. Um, I did a few other things, did some food trading, uh, sold a Ferrari to a guy, this really called boat that um when he picked up his Ferrari from Lancaster, Colchester in 1990, whatever it was, 1996, 1997. I'm thinking this 30-year-old boat has picked up his brand new Ferrari 355, 90 grand to paid cash. So you know you're thinking, I kind of want to be him really, rather than seeing you earning 30 grand selling cars. So I said to him, I'd love to see what you do. He said, Well, yeah, sure you can. So we went and he said, Well, why don't you come up and have a word with the boss on the desk and see if I can get you uh a job as a trainee? So he rang me a few days later, said, Right, can you come up on Friday? He said, Your interview will be five minutes with uh, I remember the guy's name, Hutch, right? Everyone had a nickname in Celeste Bob Rolly. Um five minutes with Hutch, make sure you're not a complete basket case. He said, Then we'll go out and get pissed. If you don't fall over, he said you'll probably get the job. And I said, I was built for that. Okay, so between me and this bank, this guy from Deutsche Bank, uh, because obviously his brokers, foreign exchange brokers, which is what he did, they their whole existence really was smoozing relationships with their bank clients. So took to the popular tour, got pissed. Uh, and then on the Monday, I kind of went to work and the this boss Hutch rang and said, Yeah, okay, when can you start? So I did about a year and a half in foreign exchange as broking, hated it. It was a horrible, horrible existence. Um, and then uh when I was uh when I left there, I went back to Lancaster's actually to sell cars because, again, my love. So I started selling portions to uh to the rich and famous, so sold cars to Sidoing from East Enders, sold my car to Pete Townsend from The Who, went to his house to deliver it. That was an amazing experience. Anyway, so I had all this kind of experience, but then one day my dad rang me with four and a half times, uh, because he wasn't really good in business, and he said, But I've got the opportunity to buy an estate agency. He said, You've actually getting back into agency. I said, I thought you never asked. Yeah. He said it's 30 grand. He said, I haven't got the money. You've got an opportunity to buy an estate agency. Yeah, yeah. So you don't want me, you want my confidence. He said, I'm scraped together 15 grand. And I said, I think I can do the same. So we uh rocked up some weeks later after completion to what was a business called Green Deacon in Billeriki that had been there since the 50s. Again, this guy Neville Deacon that owned it, good old friend of my grandfather's. But he he'd he'd ended up just neglecting the business. So we bought it, turned it around, um, did quite well out of it. And that was the start of my entrepreneurial kind of ownership career in the state agency. Where then the catalyst was Anthony, my cousin, like I mentioned earlier on. I rang him and said, Look, kind of my dad's a little bit of a, you know, turn up after ask nine, leave at three o'clock, doesn't want to work weekends kind of guy, which you're not really conducing with how we would want to work. So I said to Anthony, why don't you come into the business, stick some money, we'll go and open another office? That was Can Vie Island. So I know I'll get the reventure. That was Can View Island. So our process of trying to find an office to open was we'd go to a town, in this case Canva, on a Sunday, we'd walk up and down and see what your shit has in estate agency windows. We came across this business, I think it was Amos Estates, and the window looked awful, but all the photographs of the property details were faded, some had dropped off onto the floor, the owner had his car for sale, scribbled on a bit of paper and that. So gold the bloke that owned it on the Monday and just said, because obviously it's obvious that he was out of game, he just didn't want to do it anymore. So we um offered him some money, funny enough, 30 grand again, which he accepted. So we bought it, both in Canby, and that was for us as a serious couple of dismissaling entrepreneurs, estate agents. That was our catalyst. We absolutely smashed it. I mean, we became within 12 months Canby Island's number one agent by far, pushed all the competition into the sea, really. Um then we opened Basledon, Stanford Hope, Grays, Langdon Hills, and in 2008 hit, yeah, and we nearly lost it, but we didn't go bust. Um and then I then split, he did his own thing, I did my thing. And then a couple of years later, um, some people might be familiar with the business called eMove. Um, I decided that because I was sick of the traditional estate agency ups and downs and losing deals a week before exchange or day or on the day of exchange, I started the eMove as this digitalized, commoditized idea around the whole kind of uh stack em high, sell them cheap principle. Uh and the rest, as they say, I guess, as you think you go, is history. Well, it's interesting because, you know, it doesn't seem like that long ago for, you know, people like us, I guess, old people. Um, but you know, I guess there'll be a lot of people whereby like a lot of that stuff is just it's just like it's like talking about ancient history, right? So there will be people listening that like aren't actually familiar with eMove. Like, you know, maybe they think that you know PurpleBooks started all that stuff. Maybe they think like that's all there was. So like the principle of eMove, and you correct me where you need to, is similar with a similar concept to how Purple Brooks started, right? So you you charge you pay some money for the service and we advertise the property, yeah, essentially. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. And and that and that, like you say, that's come out of the frustration of you know, you've had a state agency, it's worked really well, it's been brilliant, but then we've had the financial crash, and then we've you know gone on from there. But either way, we're still looking at the model thinking, we're doing a lot of work for free here. Um and that it and the internet the internet's picking up speed. I know, like, you know, obviously like the internet had been around a long time, technically, by the time like you know, Purple Brits and Nemo and all that came along, but still, it's really picking up speed in terms of you know how the world's changing. So is that it? It's that it's a combination of those things where you sit down and think to yourself, you know what? Did you think to yourself, you know what, does anyone really need an agent? Um my view is that you would always need an agent to go to as a brand, I suppose, that would do the heavy lifting. So whether that was portal representation, organizing the viewings or whatever. So I I never went as far as the private sale websites. I mean, back in the day, people might remember a business called Seekers, which was back in the 80s, I think maybe to the 70s. Yeah, green light, green. Yeah, which was just do it yourself, write your own description, take your own pictures, stick them. I mean, actually, before the internet, you know, stick them uh in a brochure, we'll put them in the paper, and we'll put them in the window, and we'll have a mailing list and so on. So I I never thought that even with the advent of the internet, that that would be a thing, because I think you still have to have an element of agency to do not just the heavy lifting stuff, but the stuff that perhaps the consumer doesn't know how to do. Then of course we came across the there was the challenge of right move saying, hang on a sec, you've got to be an agent. You can't just effectively be allowing people to come on here as private sellers because the rest of the seller fraternity, uh sorry, agent fraternity is going to kick off. So we we had to find a balance. But the the the motivation was definitely the frustration about losing 35% of our deals before exchange and completion. Yeah, the valuations that came to nothing, so there was definitely that. But what was happening at that time, so this is 2008-2009, everything was starting to become commoditized by the internet. So this was the early days of Amazon and you know, way before Ethan O'Biddle for an Uber and so on. But but it was, you know, lastminute.com was that was the post child for the internet. And so some of us were thinking, well, if you can commoditize retail and the delivery of things from a warehouse while they're going to shop, if you can commoditize travel, you don't have to go to a travel agent anymore, or sit on the phone waiting for someone to, you know, fumble through a load of kind of bits of paper and the travel agents while you wait to see what holidays are available. If it could be commoditized, automated, and made quicker and easier in those verticals, I'm one of them with the stadiums, it's it. And so, you know, looking into it, I thought, well, I don't think anybody else is doing this. It turns out, just a little bit before us, House Network had launched, but very, very quietly, they'd had the same idea. So it was us, House Network, and Adam Day from EXP in a business he founded back in 2007, eight, called Hatched. We existed as the only three online estate agencies back at that time, where we'd all had the same idea. Um and for me, being really honest, that there were two things, there were two motivations. One is I did not want to be an estate agent anymore. I didn't want to go out and value houses. I wanted it to be, I wanted to do something bigger than that. But I was convinced that if we could run a business and make it scale, the almost kind of disrupted as an overused term, but kind of changed the way people saw estate agents. I thought one day somebody's going to come along and either buy this business as a trade sale, or maybe country wide, maybe Foxons or whatever, which did nearly happen several times, or maybe we list on the Soft Exchange. So I then got talking to, long story short, lots and lots of people that knew about investment. I knew nothing about investing. I got introduced to James Khan and his uh inner circle, I suppose. He invested, raised a bit of money. I was we even were the first people to raise what I would call venture money, investment money. So we raised half a million quid in 2011, I think. Um that then, because I was probably too gobby, funnily enough, uh, shock horror, uh, about that raise. Everybody else got raising money. So Adam raised money. Mark and Graham Lock, House Network raise money, then along comes House Simple, then along comes TEPLO. All of a sudden, you'd walk into an investor meeting and they'd say, Well, tell me why you're different to the three that we had in yesterday. Right, great. Anyway, so we raised in total EMO 27 million pounds of funding from nine different funding rounds, combination of family offices, venture capital, crowdfunding. I mean, we went through the card in terms of you know, high net worth individuals. We we did the whole thing. And famously it didn't work. We went bust in December 2018. Since then, I think the only two left standing in that sector are Yoker, which of course Ronald Frankish runs very, very well. Uh and yes, you mentioned Purple Bricks, but at Purple Bricks literally did uh, and and for those that are only listening to this, not watching, the peak was kind of they shot for the stars and then literally crashed out of worth when Michael and Kenny left uh to become a business that ended up getting sold to what was House Simple for a pound. Uh and when was the last time anybody heard about Purple Brits? I mean, two years ago, three years ago? I mean, it's just it's into gold. I mean, I know it still exists, it's not robust, but that that business is annoying, it's finished. So I think we can probably conclude that I wouldn't say online estate agency or what I would call fixed fee estate agency, because of course anyone, anyone can say they're an online estate agency if they're on white news or if they're on a website. But fixed fee commoditized estate agency, it hasn't worked except the the last one standing, which I think is Yopa, will benefit from the five, eight, maybe ten percent market share that is dictated by um the public, the selling public that might want to take apart and that are quite content to take a risk that they might not sell and then hate, and that want to do an element of the job themselves, although in defense of online estate agency, the good ones, never just left it to the public. It was never a DIY service. I think with some of them it was, but certainly with House Network hatched, Yoker, eMove, it wasn't right, you've paid your money, now do it all yourself in terms of description, photos, viewings, feedback, and all that. Um but I think it's fair to say it it hasn't hadn't worked for the majority because it got too crowded, it was too busy. And but you know what? And you and I were talking about this before you turned the cameras on, the microphones on. Even though we crushed and burned and it was horrendous. I mean, the the day we went past in the aftermath for me, you know, it was pretty stressful, it's fair to say. You know, yeah, for all sorts of reasons. Emotionally, ego, money, you know, didn't have a job, no money coming in. I expect no money out of e-moves apart from salary, so there was no kind of secret stash anywhere. You know, I'm thinking, shit, I don't think I could pay the bills until that's time, you know, because I was taking him enough as a salary to live, but that was it. Um but looking back, I had to have a go. I'd have a pump, as did Mark and Brian, as did Adam, and so did the the Barclay twins. You know, the Barclay, the Barclay twins that owned the Rips and the Telegraph, it was their family money that started going back. So it was the nephew. You and the grandson Andrew and somebody else, David, I think, that started yoga. We all had to have a dope. Because you just didn't know, right? We could have been the next last minute. We could have been the next, you know, Amazon or the next um, I don't know, Accado. Who knew, right? So I've got no regrets. And for anyone listening to this or watching this that says, that's a bit harsh. What about all the people that got laid off? We all got laid off. I got laid off. I was the biggest loser. I was on the most money. So, but we were in a startup environment. Actually, people ended up being owed money because obviously there was um investors that got uh that got caught out, although they'd gone into with eyes wide open. That's what investment is. But it was it was something that had to be done to find out, I suppose. And ultimately, I think lots of people learned a lot about not just the sector, but I learned a lot about marketing, about investors, about running a business with a hundred staff and eight million pounds a year turnover and a massive board of very, very smart but annoying people. To the point that those things that you learn educate you in terms of what you then do and don't do in the in the future, right? Um, I still get castigated. I mean, so emo failed nearly eight years ago. I still get castigated online from uh, you know, the point of view of people saying, someone called me a failed estate agent the other day. Okay, fair enough, if that's what you think. Obviously, you know, should we talk about the businesses that I've had that have been rather successful, including the card PL business? Um so I still get stick. Um, but I think it shows a really sad naivety from people that probably haven't gotten the bollocks themselves to put best foot forward and ever start a business. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, dig into some of that, but you know, it's the same with you know, for my sins are a Manchester United fan, but it wouldn't matter which football club you support, like there's a million people telling me how they should be doing it, how the manager should be doing it, like you know, like it's a simple, like it's a simple thing. Like they never thought, I bet they never thought of that. Do you know what I mean? They spend their whole life dedicating to this idea, but they never thought of just doing that simple thing. So um what I really wanted to dig into there is some of the things that you mentioned there, like the learnings, like must be incredible, and we won't have time to cover them all, but like you're you're running a first of all, let's go all the way back, right? You're running a state agency in a couple of locations in the traditional way, and you scale that up to be in six, six times, six branches. That in itself brings learnings, right? Because you've got the dynamics of the team, the new people, the old people, like you know, the HR, all of that sort of stuff. And so at that point you're thinking, like, I'm pretty good, and I had to run a company now. You're looking at the one branch agency thinking that I've learned a lot since then. And then you go and raise 26, 26, 27 million quid. Yeah. Like in chunks, in chunks, in chunks, of course, but still the total amount, 27 million quid people are putting on the line, they're putting on your back. Yeah. Um the board, I mean, obviously it's not just me, yeah. It's a board, which is a whole different podcast in terms of how you deal with a board of investors. But the things that that that come to light that somebody says, what about this, what about that, things where you think, oh, I don't know nothing about that, I don't know what you're talking about. And when someone eventually explains it to you, like, how did I ever get here without knowing that information? What what do you think some of the biggest learnings you had are whereby they could translate down, back down to your one or six branch of state agency where you go, which is I never knew this, and if I did things, I would have done things differently. Biggest learning from the traditional business, the court taking business was uh this is gonna sound obvious, but so many people listening to this are doing it. In the good times, don't spend all the money honestly. And that sounds so obviously, I mean, so many estate agents. Because you want to scale, right? But they also want the trap in this, right? I think estate agencies are one of those sectors where there is a an element where people show off because it's very competitive in an age of social media, particularly. An agent that starts their own business, they've got one, maybe two, maybe three offices, maybe a business partner, uh, you know, they've maybe opened up opposite the company that they used to work for. They want to show that they've just bought one of these, you know, a watch, or that they're driving a buck rather than a Mondeo or whatever. So there's a temptation in good times, particularly when there's, let's say, some temporary stamp relief, uh, statute relief, or you know, the whole COVID dynamic in 2021-2022 when the market went crazy. I remember saying this four or five years ago, a property industry eye, don't spend all the money. Do not rush out and buy the Rolex and the M4 BMW and a bigger mortgage, because this ain't going to last, right? Because property is definitely one thing for sure, and that is cyclical, right? It never gets better and better and better. It might do for a period, but then it falls off a cliff, right? So I think we, when the market turned against us as traditional state agents in late 2007, 2008, you know, those pictures on Sky News about people queuing around the block of Northern Rocks to take their money out, and and literally just a tsunami of bad financial news that translated through to probably the worst crisis of consumer confidence that we've ever seen in Britain since the 1930s. Anthony and I spent all the money. So we'd had some great times, six offices making profit, but we divvied up the profit every quarter. And I took my bit, he took his bit and spent it. Yeah. Holidays, cars, watches, number plates, yeah, proper Essex estate, I guess, because you at that point in time you're thinking, well, this is what we're doing for. Yeah. But you're not already. We've been living the living the dream, aren't we? You know, and and also probably, I mean, if we want to get to the psychology of it, you know, hey grandad, we're doing all right, don't worry. We've got this. Your son is white fucked up, but we're all right. You know, you can rely on us, kind of thing. There's probably an element of that going like you're doing it all. Yeah, or you do the grave. No, I've never spent it all. So so that that was a big learning. I think the the learning for me moves, I mean, you're right, a completely different dynamic. So, you know, I am on my own, I've got no business partner, I've got no anti, he and I, you know, to kind of riff off of and you know, shoulders to cry on. And he was very, very good, just still is actually saying, calm down. No, no, no, should we not just need your thing to do that not to vote in seven offices next year? Just fucking calm down, right? So at eMove, I in hindsight, I this is gonna sound crazy because they were experts, but I listened too much to investors that didn't know the industry. So I had lots of investors, lots of board members, and often the biggest investors were on the board. They knew a lot about startup capital, they knew a lot about EIS, they knew a lot about uh, you know, how to scale a business. You know, one of my investors and board directors was the chief technology officer at wonga.com. One was the former marketing director of Prime Location and Finder Property, one was the ex-chief product officer at Groupon.com. I mean, yeah, huge players, right? They all knew their stuff. They didn't know anything about estate agency and UK estate agency. So I had this little kind of thing on my shoulder if I look back in the early two or three years of emu raising money. So for the first two or three years I didn't raise any money. So I just bootstrapped it, and funny enough, year one, year two, we made a little bit of profit, that 20, 30 grand. Come year three, four, five, and six, that's when we're on this kind of this express train to try and get to a destination which is a big check via raising money. Yeah. With all of these people, all of this noise and so on. And I listened too much. You know, I I'll give you an example. One of the board meetings that I was, because the chief exec I was chairing, I talked about what we now would call, I think I did call it this, uh the the path to profit as a startup business. Now, you have to remember that this is 2012, 1314. You've got Uber and Deliverum and the like that are scaling like crazy, growing at 40, 50% a month. They've just raised another hundred million, just raised another 100 million. Uh, you had WeWork, you know, the Saudis have just stuck a billion quid into a business that makes no money. Uber famously at the time said, Oh, we'll never make a profit, but we're gonna scale, and it eventually will have an IPO worth a trillion dollars or whatever it was, right? We were caught up, believe it or not. Um and so I had people that had invested in eMove that were determined that we would scale the top line, if you're right, revenue, they didn't give a toss about the bottom line. No. And I was sitting there thinking, well, okay, well, if we lose 500 grand a year, as we did at first, and then 500 grand a month, like we were at the end, we've got to keep raising money. And the person that has to raise the money is me. It's hard because I'm now all in investment meetings and people saying, yeah, there's 50 of you now are while estate agents. You're all trying to raise money. Yeah, why are you different? So that was hard. But also, you have to focus on the business. I'm supposed to be doing scratching, I'm supposed to be keeping the troops happy, leading by example, being the general, you know. Um, and actually, big learning is whoever you are, and you can't do that. And and I had a great team, so I had a great chief technology officer, Ivan. Uh, I bought in Lucy Mill, who was a fantastic marketing director. She was ex just eated. So she did all the early kind of just e campaigns. Phenomenal, phenomenal person. So I had a team, but they were doing peripheral stuff. I was doing the troubleshooting, the investment raising, and the running of the business all on my own, no partner. And a big mistake I made. There's a great book without mything too much, called Rocket Fuel. I don't know if you've read it. Yeah, do you know? Yeah, which is the combination of getting a CEO and a COO, or a CEO and CFO, whatever, where there's an absolute fit, but it's a fit on the basis that you're honest with yourself and each other. So if it was you and me, I'd say, right, Mark, I'm gonna tell you what I'm good at. Hopefully you already know that. I'm gonna tell you what I'm shit at, and you're gonna do the same. But hopefully, if the bits I'm shit at, you're brilliant at, and vice versa. That's what if you're yeah. The problem is, often CEOs, founders are not very honest with themselves. They think they're super people, but they do whatever they want. Oh, I know I can do the technology stuff, oh, I can do the marketing stuff as well. I'm a COO and a CEO. No, you're not. As the business scales, and you've got a thousand new listings a month, which is what we do in EMU's, and a hundred staff, and dozens and dozens of investors that want updates and want to be at the board, um, and so on. You you just, I mean, honestly, I can't I can't now comprehend how I managed to kind of keep all that spinning earth on my shoulders, certainly for the last two or three years, um, because it was it was a pretty heavy burden, really. So, so I I guess what does that boil down to? Trust your instincts. Your investors aren't always right, even though they think they are. Build a team, but build the team before you need the team. So I should have bought in a COO in 2014, probably. I bought in a COO who didn't work out actually in 2017, but the business was way too established and advanced. And and I had such a handle on it, I'd have a COO on 200 grand a year sitting in the office, and Ryan, who'd worked with me since day one, would just walk up and tap on my door and go, I've got a problem with this person on reviewing. And I'd go, Ryan, mate, really? And he'd go, what? And I'd go, hey, it ain't it ain't like it was. Go and ask Guy, go and ask whoever, right? And I'd have that uh I'd left it too late. So that that was a big, big learning. If you really want to go down the scaling of business group, I'd done. Honestly, don't, because it's absolutely torturous. Build a team and invest in that team in terms of raising money to build a team almost before you need them. And that that's a hard thing to do. To hire someone on a hundred grand and you think, but we're only doing something with 50 grand, it's hard. Well, even if you can't, even if you can't afford to hire just the structure. Do you know what I mean? Like, we I talked to a lot of agents about that. Like there's uh, and I think Daniel Priestley talks about this part of a business called the desert. You know, you either get prepared for the desert before you enter it, and it seems like overkill, because you're only a small business, who needs all this stuff, you know, or you enter the desert and then try and figure it out, and you're either going to come back out of the desert and then prepare, or you're just gonna die basically. I think have a partner, have a business partner. Um, you know, your partners can be perilous, you know, but if you pick the right one where one is absolutely operational and one is strategy, or one is absolutely numbers and the other one is technology, great. But then the other thing I think, and I'm not sure that this startup technology type dynamic really exists in this day anymore. I don't think anyone's trying to do what we were trying to do 10 years ago. In prop tech, maybe, but I think, you know, first of all, yes, definitely have a partner that you can do the rocket fuel thing with in terms of kind of competing and complementary skills. But also, yeah, be honest with each other in terms of you know what you're good at and what you're not good at. But also, I think sometimes the founder that automatically becomes the CEO sometimes needs to realise that that isn't their role. Yeah. And that's because that's really hard. That's a good one. Yeah, just bringing a CEO doesn't give you a place on the organisation. So if you look at all the successful businesses, I mean Uber now that lost money for years and years and years, now makes loads, so they didn't make a billion good last year or something. Or and Google, right? What do they do? Well, they're good at certain things, but they thought, actually, we're not very good CEOs, let's be honest with ourselves. Why don't you bring a CEO in?

Speaker 3 37:24

Yeah.

Speaker 1 37:24

And and Google, with um, who's the famous Google CEO, Schmidt? Yeah. That business just went, wow, gangbustles. So, yeah, for what it's worth for me as a failed businessman and a failed estate agent, um, some little nuggets of advice. Unwrap any successful person, whoever you want to count on one hand in terms of you know, worldwide uh business leaders and entrepreneurs, they've all had failures you just probably don't know about them.

Speaker 3 37:54

Definitely.

Speaker 1 37:55

Um, okay, so we could talk about this all day, but obviously we've got a limited amount of time. So I want to fast forward now to today's first stage. Um you've got this self-employed model, you've got the traditional model, right? All of that learning that you've got inside your head, what do you make of it, or what do you look at and think to yourself like, I'm not sure that's gonna work, or that seems fragile because of this, or that seems, I feel like that's that's the way it's gonna go. I'm a massive fan of the whole self-employed agency thing. I think from my exposure to it, particularly I had a three-year foray into Keller Williams, where I put the team together to launch and run what they call a market centre uh for a period of time. That and you know, knowing the likes of Verona and Adam Day and Adam Holton and whoever, um the self-employed estate agency thing, I think it solves a lot of the problems that were caused by the online thing in terms of the perception that the online estate agency sector didn't really deal with or care about the consumer. Because, of course, the on the the self-employed approach is very much about being foot on or hands-on.

Speaker 3 39:10

Yeah.

Scaling Truths: Teams, Boards, And Roles

Speaker 1 39:10

And you can afford to be charging a full fee to the unit economic to work, as I think is being proven by the success of EXP in particular. Um, so I'm a big, big, big fan of self-employed. I think it's great for the consumer, because I think if you're an agent that's going to earn 70% of a 10 grand fee, you're pretty motivated to look after that client and to make sure the deal gets done and it doesn't fall through. So I I like that from both the consumer, as in the seller and the buyer's perspective, but also the agent's perspective. I think the problem with self-employed is that oh, I'm gonna do my first controversial statement now. Uh, I don't think there's that many UK state agents that are good enough to be self-employed. Um, I think 20 or 13% are, because they're focused, self-starters, hardworking, self-motivated, disciplined, they understand marketing, they will make sure that you know their corporation tax, their VAT's pay, whatever. But above all, they know how to create a brand, do the personal brand thing, which I know has been done death, releasing corporate. And as a consequence, they get leads, they get instructions, they build a portfolio of properties, they turn viewings on those properties into other valuations and listings, which is really what estate agency is all about, as it was in the old days. But I just I think that over the last 20 or 30 years, I think the right move and corporate estate agencies made estate agents as individuals really lazy. So if you took the majority of estate agent out of a Bear Stovese or a Connors, a Dexter's agent, whatever, and you stuck them into a self-employed dynamic, then they'd be rabbits in the headlights because they'd go, Where's Maliz? Yeah. Where who's doing the compliance? And and and so there's, I guess, and it's not just that they're the the cream of the crop, but I think you have to be a certain kind of superstar and a dedicated type of animal to succeed as a self-author agent. But would that that small group that you're talking about, don't those people just go and sit out there on a state agency? Well, in the old days, they did what we did. Yeah, but then you've got the Because it's because you're talking about like people that essentially have got a bit more entrepreneurial spirit about them, right? They just find a way they're gonna, like you say, they're gonna figure out the marketing, they're gonna figure out it. But isn't becoming part of self-employed, like, oh, you don't have to do the marketing, you don't have to like so wouldn't they just be better marketing their own company? Well, yeah, but they are marketing their own company, they're they are, you know, James Smith at California or John Jones at EXP or whoever. So I think they are doing that. The difference is when I started Court Deacon in 1999, there was no such thing as being on your own or working out of your house or your bedroom, you have to have a shop front, because that's how people found you, yeah, or from balls, which led back to the shop front. What we've obviously had over the last 20 years is an online presence, whether it's social media, internet, or whatever, the right move portals, the Zupas, and the on the market in this world, that have then created a digital entity, a digital identity, so that arguably the office isn't as needed. Now, we probably haven't got time to debate this, but but the big question is, and I always ask this a lot during eMove, is do you think that the days of the high street escalate a two office are finished? And of course, I used to say, oh yeah, because it suited my purpose as eMove to say so. Now I think the answer is it depends. And I think it depends where you are. But anyway, in the old days, to set up an office, I remember when we opened our last office at Quad Deacon in whatever that was, 2005, let's say, that the there was no change out of 100 grand. That that was then 20 years ago. By the time you've bought the office, refurbished it, done some valuations, listing sales, they might complete six, seven, eight months down the line. You've paid your staff in the meantime, you paid for your newspaper advertising, you paid right move, you're a hundred grand in the whole. As a self-employed agent now, okay, you've got overheads because you've got to pay for you know your shopping and your mortgage and your electricity bill and so on. But you can do it with a much less investment, but also therefore less risk. That's the difference. So I'm not saying that when you look at a supremely successful estate agency with shopfronts like a Foxton's or a course shops work, right? Because they've used their shop fronts, like they have their minis, as a marketing tool and as a branding exercise. But I think what we've seen over the last, it's probably not even 10 years, is it five to ten years, is the rise of the self-employed agent that can create their own little burst of noise and excitement in uh, you know, wherever Hereford or Aylesbury or South End or Salisbury without having to go to that expense. So I I think that the the the outcome is that you end up with uh self-employed do their own thing under a banner, whichever platform they choose, and uh high street offices that maybe aren't as necessary, but if the business that owns those high street offices is smart enough, then they use those offices as a as a marketing tool, as a as a grounding mechanism, if you like. Um, and I think actually in in the provincial high surprints of Britain, those that are busy and frequented on a satellite and somebody by lots of people, I think that high school brand is really important still. But if you're an estate agent that wants to come out of wherever Dexter's and do your own thing, you can. It's still going to cost you a few quid in terms of the money that you need to earn to ultimately pay for that. That doesn't happen for a few months because of completionists. But but yeah, you you can do it and be very successful at it without the efforts. So it it's a kind of combination of both those. I guess maybe nothing. Maybe it's like a priority thing, isn't it? You know, because like if you had all the money in the world, then why not have an office? You know, why not have a billboard? Why not advertise on Teddy? Why not just go to town? You did if if you're, you know, Amazon, you can afford to do any of that stuff. But like, you know, when you're when you're just gonna leave Dexter. And starting a stage, and see you haven't got all the money in the road, so you have to prioritize. And like then, as you start to earn more money, then you start to expand. And you do see a lot of uh self-employed agents that then essentially almost turn into small independents at that point, don't they? Well, you know what's that's true? What is interesting is that there's a load of self-employed agents, so people like Scott Gunn at EXP, but they've almost gone full circle. They've done the self-employed big for three or four years, earned good money, guess what they've done? Open an office. But then that's just extra advertising, right?

Speaker 4 45:51

It's like you were saying, it's like what fits your agenda at the time. If you haven't got an office, you're not going to talk about how great they are.

Self‑Employed Models: Promise And Pitfalls

Speaker 1 45:57

But obviously, any like people say that I'm against uh uh print advertising. I'm not against print advertising at all. I just, if you've got a limited budget, I don't think sending mass mail to thousands of houses is the best way to spend a grand. Do you know what I mean? If you've only got a grand. Yeah, but if you've got a million pounds to spend, not and you'll do it because of the holistic benefit of doing multiple things. So I I think, I mean, I I I famously predicted a lot of things in the property industry, uh, some of which even have come good. Um I'm I'm normally not bad actually predicting year head in terms of the market, you know, transactions, house price, and so on. But I did once predict that online estate agency would be the dominant sector in British estate agency, and I was really wrong, wasn't I? Really wrong. However, I will make another prediction, which you did say all estate agents are online, so certainly there's a hundred. But I guess to fix the thing, but I was also probably playing to an investor crowd where I was obviously probably trying to raise my next five million quid. Um I think the future is the clever hybrid. And what I mean by hybrid, because of course hybrid has been used as a term over the years for uh various types of estate agency. Let me ask myself a question. This is a different way of articulating it. If I had my day again in estate agency, which I'm not going to do, though I am very, very happy and comfortable running um uh the UK's foremost and premier property PR agency. But if I did do estate agency again, I would have branches, but I'd have fewer branches spaced out over a bigger area, and I'd have self-employed agents in those branches dealing with their own areas. So where I live in Essex, I probably have, you know, an office in Cheltsford or Brentwood, but I'd have 10 self-employed agents in there. One's doing Billeriki, one's doing Hutton, one's doing Home Church, one's doing Up and Center. So you've got the comfort and the credibility from a public perspective of a branch, and it might be a super branch, you might have the coffee machine and the crash and all that stuff. Um, but it you have an expanded area, so actually you're dealing with a much bigger territory from that branch, which economically then I think would make a lot of sense. Maybe wrong for all 10 years, maybe that's what the state agency starts to look. I think there's a few that do some stuff similar to that. So yeah, I can I can see that. Um okay. Uh I wanna I wanna just I'm I'm we're running a bit over time, so I want to try and wrap it up, but I want to wrap it up with uh one last question then. So you say you you know, obviously you've got a very successful property PR company at the moment, you've got no plans to get back into a state agency. Um what do you see just as an observer of the industry in terms of something that is I don't know, uh cult and no mickers. Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, you're looking at it from the point of view of I doubt I've been down this from public now, but that's not that's not like there's some something. What do I see that's that out there that's a bit fake? Something that's happening where you think to yourself, like, nah, just I don't buy into it. Well, you might be right, you might be wrong. Well, it it has to be the illusion of prop tech. Now, I'm not saying that property technology isn't it poor, and there are some really cool products out there. There are CRMs that are really, really good, uh, not necessarily the legacy ones. You don't have to worry about offending me because I agree with you. Yeah. But but the but those that have come along in I don't want to be unfair to anybody here, but that there are more modern and recent additions to the CRM space that I think are good, clever, smart. Uh, and you can call those prop tech if you like. I mean, some people still think that like movies prop tech. I'm not sure they've shown particular tech credentials over the last few years, but anyway. But I think prop tech as a thing, um, and Simon Wilder probably tell me off to say this, but I think the prop tech sector is bullshit. Um, what you've ended up with is thousands of people with a stupid idea that doesn't solve a problem, that set up as a prop tech company and think that they're going to do what I tried to do 15, 16, 17 years ago, which is to end up selling to someone for millions or listing on the stock exchange because of their technology product. So I I would say, let's pluck a number out of the air that's a semi-educated estimate. 90% of Prop Tech stuff in bullets.

Speaker 3 50:14

Yeah.

Speaker 1 50:14

I've got to agree with you. I was doing a talk the other day and I was just saying, like, you know, statistics have been blessed with all this technology that's going to make their life easier, but it seems like they've got more windows open, more tabs, more tools, more dashboards, margins in thinner than ever, and they're struggling to make a profit. So I went to one agent's office the other day, they had like 12 tabs open just to they're supposed to that member of staff is supposed to be able to navigate all of those and know how to do it. There's definitely some technology that obviously has worked and is favourable and beneficial, particularly around, you know, KYC and AML, stuff like that, particularly in the letting space, uh, and I think particularly with CRMs, but that there's a lot of stuff out there, you know, around you know, digital images and stuff like that. I just that just doesn't seem to me to be a proper product. Um, there's a lot of waste. And the problem with that, of course, is that every state agency principal now is getting 10 phone calls a day from CopTech firms trying to sell them the latest widget or the latest thing. And it's an exitised them against the stuff that they should be focused on. So, for instance, and I'll not just say this to both spoke up your ass, but technology around lead generation and lead nurture, I think is the biggest trick being missed in British state agency in terms of the value of that data and how you nurture it and farm it for weeks, months, or whatever to turn that then into revenue. I bet if I rang tennis day agents now and tried to sell them some kind of lead nurture automation AI technology, they go, No, no, no, don't sell me anything. I'm done with that. Someone was trying to sell me a 360-degree digital camera the other day, I'm not interested. You go, well, no, no, no, no, this isn't the same thing. This is literally going to take your data for the last 10 years and find leads and look after them, make them interested in your product, reheat them, tell you when they're ready, and then you can convert them into listings so that you can put money in the bank. Yeah, and I'm not interested.

Speaker 2 52:05

Yeah.

Speaker 1 52:06

And and that's that's the biggest problem. Because the prop tech thing is it's stopped bona fide solutions being sold to the industry. Yeah. I think it's the same problem that's always been in business, whether you were in business when your granddad was around or your dad or you or people that are there now. Nothing's changed that much. You have to have some USBs, and unfortunately, people are looking at PropTech for their USBs, like forget the Prop Tec for a minute, and you come up with a USB for your company, and then you find the technology that helps you achieve the vision or whatever it is of the company, right? Yeah, yeah. Um, we could just keep going, but Rob's already told me he's a message. Well, no, he's we're he said we thought we started 40 minutes and it's about we're at 50, so I bet a bit of bow down to the pressure. But um, thanks so much for coming in. I loved it. Pleasure. All right, well, hopefully it's been some help to others. Um if people do want to reach out, if someone's thinking I need PR in my company, or you know, I mean you're everywhere, but like, where's the best place that they're likely to get a response from? Yeah, so the message has been on LinkedIn, so I get a lot of DMs from LinkedIn. Um, I I get a lot of requests for help. Uh today, I mean, we're only just back from Christmas already, uh uh a week or two in. I I get a lot of people saying, Yeah, Liz, can you help me with that? I can't help everybody. Um, I'll try. I do try. Like the guy who wanted to talk to the vendor of a lappy with his viewing.

Speaker 4 53:23

Yes. I'm trying to run a company.

Speaker 1 53:25

Yeah, but into ad hoc press releases, intros, and would you just look at this deck for me or whatever, whatever. I can't I can't do it all. But but yeah, LinkedIn, I suppose, is a good way of getting in touch with me, um, or or through Twitter. Uh so I'm on X as Russell Quirk, um, although I I use X more now as my kind of my my playground, if you like, for political commentary aggro arguments and disputes, which is uh whenever I get us about three or four minutes in my day, I go, yeah, I'll have a bit of a round. So I dip into Twitter so uh so maybe not supposed to talk, but LinkedIn I find very, very useful and I'm on it all the time. Oh thanks for it. Great thanks.

Speaker 4 54:03

Thanks for listening to this Estatus in the X podcast. Can you make sure that you're actually subscribed to this podcast channel if you liked the content? Uh it helps us massively to get better guests, and it just helps us generally. So you might think you're subscribed, but just have a double check, whatever your um podcast platform of preference is, that you're actually subscribed, and then that way we can continue to grow the channel and get better and better guests for you.