Joking aside, we at Burton Matthews haven’t actually posed that question of our smart speaker but it goes to the heart of our considerations when setting up our new independent estate agency in recent months. With nearly 40 years experience between us of the Elmbridge residential property market, all of which was from traditional ‘High Street’ offices with shop windows, this question was candidly, one of the very easiest we had to ask and answer ourselves.
Having a nose in Estate Agents windows as we all know, is something of a national pre-occupation (we do it too !) but the advent of the digital age and growth of property portals plus tablet / smartphone ownership over the last 25 years has fundamentally changed the way in which most buyers now search for their next home. Similarly, anyone looking to sell a property is far more likely to do a search for local estate agents online to draw up a shortlist of possibilities.
The traditional estate agency ‘model’ noted above has been facing a process of evolution and challenge for a long time then so when setting up our new brand, we felt it was important to have office space to work from in our historic locations that enable clients to come in and meet with us, but our experience is that commercial and personal ‘visibility’ within one’s community doesn’t any more have much if anything to do with having a ‘shop window’ with property window cards in the traditional format.
As a new business, we’ve worked hard from the off to engage deeply with our local community and be out and about on a daily basis and in all likelihood have been (and will continue to be) far more ‘visible’ than we would have been in our previous offices. Communities are underpinned by a myriad of local networks and understanding this is key to running a successful estate agency in 2025. My fellow Director, Roly Matthews and I are lucky to be extraordinarily well connected locally but we’ve also made our own luck over the last few decades by delivering great service to very many clients, sometimes several times over. It’s this connectednesss with the local community, allied to our own personal ‘visibility’ and agile use of social media which we believe mirrors the changes.
The road ahead – whilst it’s true that there are still a couple of higher profile players in the ‘online only’ market, they only account for a fraction of property sales and house moves nationally and the real growth has been in agency models evolving away from the traditional experience. Hyper-localised, very long term local experience and knowledge-led client advice is now at the heart of many independent agencies like our own and who have opted to eschew the old way of doing things as we know it’s not the future.
This is arguably why the larger online only names such as Purple Bricks et al have really struggled to make a dent in the residential market over what is now quite the long term. People, whether buying or selling want to know they’re dealing with people they relate to with maturity, ample emotional intelligence and demonstrable long-term local knowledge and market ‘history’. The next ‘elephant in the room’ for agents is of course the march of ‘AI’ and we’ll for sure write more on this in due course. Our experience is that the relationship-building and personal networks that are at the heart of the way we operate our business will ultimately prove a step too far for AI learning to replicate. Dealing with the acquisition, sale or rental of residential property is a serious business and one which is continuing to evolve into an agency model that better suits today’s discerning consumers.
