Hello and welcome to Open the Gates to more listings for
Estate Agents with me, Simon Gates.
I'm delighted to be joined today by Mr. Simon Ledbetter.
Simon, thank you very much for joining me.
Absolute pleasure again to be on the best podcast in the
industry. Well, that's a clip right there.
We'll get that out on the on the social.
Thank you very much. So we've done parts one through
to four. So we've spoken about the
market, marketing, tech, salary, people.
Part 5 is all about professionalism and the
consumer, correct? It is indeed, yes, absolutely.
So we've got lots to run through and we've got to be on our best
behaviours today. I'm trying not to go off on a
tangent, which I'm already doing.
So page 15 to start with. For those playing on at home
membership of professional bodies, unsurprisingly property
mark massively leading at the front at 37%.
Is there any surprise in any of that or anything you you take
from it at all? No, I mean, I think again, no
surprises. I think that's a really good
spread of industry. I mean, it's not just poor
professional bodies. There's some networks in there
as well, but they do good things for the industry as I thought
they're worth including. Yeah, it's good.
I think we are lucky to have an industry body that has so many
roots into government and actually produces so much data.
I just wish more of the industry was part of it.
OK, is and there's a, it's quite straightforward really that
being part of it, they essentially to put their hand up
and put themselves forward to want to be part of it, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, there's a great book by Tim
Ferriss called The Four Hour Workweek, quite popular about 10
years ago, I think it was. But in there, what he does talk
about is if you have one in your industry, join it.
If you want to be an expert, join your industry body because
there'll be so much information coming out of the industry body,
you know, yes, of course, the qualifications are important.
We'll talk about that later. But just the connections that
you'll make and the information you'll get out of your body
allows you to speak with more authority about what's going on.
But also you tend to find this is true of marketers, this is
true of any profession is you can't really call yourself a
professional unless you're part of a professional body.
Which is why I think we have this strange thing of I always
refer to it as the industry rather than profession, if that
makes sense. Yeah, that's true.
I suppose that's fair. That's fair.
The property industry is an industry.
Marketing isn't an industry because it crosses in, because
it crosses industries. I like to see it as a
profession, but I think estate agents have various issues with
trust for the industry, perception of how estate agents
are perceived by the world. I think it's in your interest to
be part of a professional body that then gives you letters and
gives you other benefits that just mean you are not just
someone who's just become an estate agent.
You've actually become qualified, you've actually
become recognised for you that you know stuff and I just think
it's part of raising the game of our industry, especially as
we'll see later when you compare it internationally.
Yes, we are definitely coming on to that.
So in terms of qualifications to page ATI want to go back to a
previous conversation we had in Part 4 and I got into a state
agency at 16. So I was done with the education
system. I wanted to go out and whatever
reason, being an estate agent, I just wanted to go work, learn on
the job and earn money. So I was like brilliant, low
barrier to entry, no qualifications needed, which is
fantastic. So there's some brilliant people
coming into from that. But then at the same time,
because it's such a low barrier to entry, you can get some
shocking people at the same time.
So it's a double edged sword, isn't it?
Yeah, and you'll always get this.
Ah, but what about Harold Shipman?
And yeah, God, yeah. The thing is, there aren't 40%
of doctors are Harold Shipman, Of course there are rogue
operators in. But what it does do is it
creates some sort of, it creates a minimum level of education
about what the industry is actually about and the rules
that apply to it. Because there is this thing
called the law that touches the industry, requires certainly
lettings, but it does a state agency too.
There are rules, there are law, there's ombudsman, there are
guidelines, there's best practice.
You want to learn some of that rather than just do your job
because you want to be better than the rest.
And that's how you're going to win business.
So having these qualifications, having this professional body,
of course there are qualified people who will scrub up, There
are qualified people who will be dishonest, but the likelihood is
they're less likely to be there than in the population as a
whole. Yeah.
And you know, I just, I just think the industry will benefit
from professionalising. Yeah.
Because at the end of the day, you know, and there's an old
line and we all set ourselves, it's people's most expensive
asset. Don't we want people to be
regulated, qualified and part of a professional body to do it?
Surely that should be a minimum requirement we should expect
when someone's got literally got, you know, Clay Yates talks
about this. You literally give them the keys
to your house. So, so on your point that so,
and I've used this before and I will use it many times in the
future. And this maybe says more about
my choice of friends than anything else.
But when you think over the years I've been in thousands of
homes where people have given me the keys and alarm code within
30 minutes of me to me to Claire's point, yeah, would I
trust my best mate with my alarm code and my house keys?
I'm not sure I would. And I've known in my home, so
like. No, no, I mean so very good
friends of mine. I wouldn't cross my mind to give
them keys, alarm codes, tell me where all my most important
documents were, give them a layout of the house, show them
where all the precious bits are. Just it's very strange coming
from outside the industry to understand that there isn't a
minimum requirement because it feels kind of like there should
be. And if you run an agency or
you're self-employed, why wouldn't you be able to want to
have your qualifications and your accreditations and your,
you know, your references visible to say, look, you'll get
people coming into your house, you're going to give them your
keys and you're going to give them your security codes.
Don't you want to know a bit more about them?
Just say that and you've wiped out half your competitors,
Scarlet. That's effective.
I'm sure, so I think this might be I should really know this,
but and I can't remember what the letters are you're going to
know on this, but I'm pretty sure within the FIA or something
of being what's the what's The thing is it DS checked?
What's this? What's?
Oh, DBS. DBS, that's it.
DBS being DBS checked and like if I was owning an estate agency
tomorrow and I said like all of our team, our DVS get and as I
don't know a certificate for that or you have a, a lanyard or
something, I don't know. But it's like, look, we, we take
this very seriously because you can, I mean, it's been proven,
but you can't literally go into prison for dealing drugs, come
out and be an estate agent and you're like, well, that's, I
mean, a money laundering industry.
And then someone who's dealt drugs and then they can go and
crack on with that, OK? Good choice of words in terms of
crack, but they literally walk amongst us.
You know, people who would fail the most essential checks to be
near children or handle expensive property, but we give
them the keys to our houses and they it's sort of, it's sort of
slightly blows your mind when you don't want to think about it
too much because you're mad. But it is kind of a strangely
surreal situation. The, you know, the we have.
What was it here? Oh, yeah.
One in five estate agents don't believe they should have
qualifications. Now, we're going to do that
later, but imagine that you've asked a number is how many of
you have DBS checks on your staff, any background checks at
all to ensure they're not? You're not essentially putting a
a threat to people's safety and security inside people's homes.
That has to be a minimum requirement, does it not?
Yes, it does. Why does anyone disagree with
that? I love a state agency.
And also just on the qualification points, so on page
18, essentially whether you're an agent or a consumer 3/4, then
qualifications should be required to be in the state.
Yes, you know, one in five don't of agents and that kind of
worries me. Why don't they?
And I think you could. I do understand the fact you
reached, you know, you're in your 50s or your 60s, you've
done a career of this. You don't want to go on sit on
an exam. You can grandfather people in
it. It's got a sexist term.
You can grandfather people in you say based on your experience
in the industry and the fact you've not been prosecuted for
anti money laundering or data protection or any of those
things. The fact you've got a clean bill
of health and you've got some testimonials and you've run a
successful business. You can be grandfathered in and
you'll get the qualification as an automatic, but entering the
industry up until maybe mid 40s, you've got to do the
qualifications. I'm afraid.
I know we make, you know people, more mature people.
We do redo their driving test. So there's an argument to say
that just because you've been very good in your career for 30
years doing it, maybe what you know is out of date and possibly
you should be kept up to date. You probably should be refreshed
on what the latest rules are and there should be something just
to check that you haven't just got.
Oh yeah, I know that. Do you actually do know that?
Yeah, I think on one of the episodes we were recorded
previously a while back, study around outdated knowledge and
you need to do 250 hours of studying every year to stay
relevant in in your field. And on you said we come onto it
pages like 21 through to 23, if I'm reading it correctly,
basically highlights that in the other countries where
qualifications are required, they tend to charge higher fees.
So is it not a win win? It stays?
It's kind of a strange correlation.
That is, you know, the more regulated and the more qualified
and the more licensed agents are Realtors, the more they earn.
And on and in the previous podcast we recorded for Part 4
when we spoke about wages, I'm pretty sure if you looked at the
right side of it of the highest wages, it kind of goes on the
correlation of qualifications and.
It's funny that, isn't it? Yeah, The more qualified you
are, the more you earn. And it's a bit, so it's a bit
like then actually just from the staging perspective.
Funny enough, those who invest more in the right people, the
right tech, the right training, the right marketing tend to be
more likely to sell a property in a quicker time, not fall
through and get a better price, rather than the agent who sticks
it on right move a cheat fee, take shit photos themselves, and
have a floor plan to take. Yeah, and you know, and training
qualification. It doesn't need to be form as
exams. There's things like continuous
professional development, but it needs to be serious continuous
professional development. If people want a master class in
how to do the job. I mean, they're not going to
both smoke it, but just listen to what Simon Gates says.
Stop it. I mean, genuinely, I've learnt
tons from you about your side of what the engineers, you know.
I'd like to think when it comes to marketing, I know my stuff.
But when it comes to genuinely the industry, selling houses,
doing the right thing, the tech around it, I lean massively on a
network of people around me who know more and I learn from them.
So I continuously professionally develop my knowledge because I
want to talk to the industry I need to talk to with some
authority. Isn't that true of all people?
Yeah. And don't you want your staff to
be qualified? And don't you want them to earn
more and understand, fortunately fundamentally, how you can earn
more in an unregulated environment?
Yeah, agree. So page 31, and I love talking
about this all the time, so I'm going to have a bit of a geek
out on this. So the 2025 Veracity Index, I
think the Rasti index has been going since 1983, and estate
agents first entered it about a dozen years ago.
I think it was actually, yeah, a dozen years ago now.
So for anyone who's not familiar with the Rasti Index, basically
members of the public read a list of different types of
people and for each they want to know if you generally trust them
to tell the truth or not. Now, Simon, you won't see this
on your screen, but I've got the Veracity index measure for
estate agents from when they first went.
Oh yeah, I love that chart which tracks over time again, nicely.
About that is, if you want to know more about it, Google Ipsos
Mario Veracity Index and all the data is available for free.
You know, if you wanted to pause this now and go and look for
that data, it's all available online.
So since 2014 basically across that dozen year period, it's
averaged 29% and it currently stands at 32%.
So it's really always around one in three, let's say.
So one in three members of the public trust an estate agent.
To tell the truth, that's the that's the critical line, isn't?
It sorry. So isn't it so isn't it funny?
Actually I use this line a lot. Isn't it funny how we don't?
As members of the public, we don't expect estate agents to
tell the truth. The only time we expect that
they're telling the truth is when they say our house is worth
more money than what it actually is.
Yeah, yes. We don't trust them to tell the
truth, but we give them our keys.
Yeah. It's a strange kind of world we
live in. But you're absolutely right is,
you know, people don't expect, but the agent who flatters you
on an overvaluation, you trust them immediately.
I mean, we are, again, you know, monkeys in shoes.
You know, we're looking for the confirmation bias that tells us
what we want to hear. And it's just in that
environment of low trust, you want to be qualified.
You want to have letters after your name to link back to the
previous point, in an industry where it's low trust, you kind
of want to maximise the things that give you some sort of
credentials and trustworthiness. And as you said at the charts we
talked about in the last report, we talked about Part 4, this is
a direct correlation between amount of qualifications you
need and how much you earn. In our industry, there's amounts
of the correlation between how regulated stuff and how much it
earns. It's like, how many data points
do we need to know to actually work out how you earn more money
in an industry? Yeah.
And then on to page 32. And I think this is, I don't
know, I think it's each, well each year you've done this.
But again, if I read it correctly, those that have a
more recent interaction with an estate agent actually do tend to
trust them. Is it?
Is that where maybe what I'm trying to say here, still
struggling with that 1980s stereotype of estate agent where
second hand car salesman, double glazing salesman, where your
parents or grandparents tell you don't trust estate agents.
So you've got that perception, but then when you deal with
them, you go, actually you're right.
Yeah, you know, only I think 1/3 of people in the industry from
part 4 of 2025 have had a problem with the process of
buying house and had someone to blame.
So that's kind of the research we did in terms of who do you
blame for things going wrong in the property.
Only 1/3 of people actually had something right.
So more George people actually they sell the house.
You know, Christopher Walken does this date on how many
houses sell within 4 weeks. And there's lots of really good
stuff and then there's a long tail of stuff that drags on
forever. I used to get the Ipsos when I
like you, I'm I geek out on it. I I download the full tables and
I'm into every single nuance, every level.
But it kind of bothered me because it's like this doesn't
reflect my reality of my lived experience of dealing with
estate agents or the people I work with hands me kicking off
the research said not just how do you feel about estate agents.
How do you feel about the estate agent or letting age you
actually dealt with? That was the critical difference
to me. It's like, you know, no one
likes politicians but like their local MP if they've written a
letter to them and been helped out by them.
Yeah, yeah. Almost regardless of party
transcends party. Sometimes, you know, you have a
Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem, Green, Reform, whatever MP.
But when it comes down to a constituency issue, if you write
to your MP, almost all of them are really good people to deal
with because they'll often be able to make things happen and
it changes people's view. So that direct interaction with
things, it's like, you know, we're not good with strangers
and estate agents feel like strangers generally to people.
And there's the the constant running jokes and sketches about
estate agents and what they're like.
But we would deal with it. 2/3, It was pretty much about because
every single group in terms of landlords, tenants and home
movers, they all went, yeah, 2/3 Almost a reverse relationship.
State agents in general is 1/3 trust them.
Estate agents and Latin agents, I know 2/3 trust them.
And even the numbers that I trusted them a lot completely,
15 percent, 17% and 17%, it was kind of like people are going,
yeah, I trust these people. I do trust them.
Question on page first see the different colours remind me one
is. So I've just noticed it's fallen
off the charts. We'll update that from memory in
order. It is home movers, landlords,
tenants, right? OK, but that that yeah, well
spotted that that's that's an error.
I like it when we do a life proofing 6000 people to find an
error in the document. But the nice thing is it's
available online and we can update it easily.
So it will be an updated version.
I will I'll I'll check that and get it fixed.
So from a. Marketing point of view, let's
say you know, we average 1.2 million transactions typically
across across the country. So call it 5% of people buy,
sell a property each year a transaction takes place.
So 95% of the public are not transacting in a year just on
those figures. So how can an estate agent go
from the veracity index of public don't trust us to tell
the truth to that small 5% who have actually done business with
us expect us think we tell the truth.
How can they like make that gap, if you see what I mean about 95%
of people who who are not doing business with right now, how can
they kind of do the work so that those future movers build that
relationship and trust them? So don't say you're trustworthy.
Interesting. OK, because the only people who
say. That trustworthy are the liars
so I'm. Going to cut across you very
quickly on that. When someone says if I'm being
honest with you. So what that tells me is that
everything you said before that statement is dishonest, Yes.
It's like, not to be rude, but yeah, it's like, you're going to
be rude now, aren't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
OK, I get it. Right.
No. So you can't tell people your
morality. You only show people your
morality. And the best people to share
your morality are the people who you've helped.
So things like Verify Trusted and Net Promoter score and the
esters and all those things that are external verifications of
your quality as a company and how you treat people, double
down on them and share them widely.
The best people are it's not me telling you I'm amazing.
It's a person over there telling you I'm amazing is the best
possible thing. So you want to, with every
single person you deal with, you're going to do a Net
Promoter score. How likely would you be to
recommend us? Why are you going to ask that
question? Because if they're not going to
recommend you, find out why and deal with it.
If they are going to recommend you, ask them to recommend you.
But get that recommendation turned into a testimonial and
plaster it everywhere. This is what genuine customers
think about us. Interview them, put them on
video, put them on social media. If they've had a great
experience with you, You want to basically create enough noise of
the positivity about you and the scores and the awards.
Now, it's interesting when you look at the data from Part 3 or
4 of 2025, that's naughty. I don't know a survey of how
what the awareness of awards was very low.
You're not aware of industry awards, but having an award
affected 1/3 of people's decision to use an agent.
So they didn't know the names of the awards, they didn't know
about the esters or masters, because the only 5% of the
population is in the industry at any one point buying or selling.
And they'll, the award you've won is a minor part of their
general review of things as a population as a whole.
But in the process of, OK, I've got an award, would it make a
difference in you choosing me? Yeah, 1/3 of people say, yeah,
actually it would, knowing you've got an award.
So you want as many external references of your qualities and
your values and your trustworthiness to be out there
as well. Hey, guess what?
Get a qualification DBDBSDBDBS checked you know have a higher
standard on everything you know is it Perry power?
He basically has I literally. Was just thinking that David
Adams at Cavendish is a good example.
And they literally like advanced negotiation.
Yeah, yeah, they do all. The courses, and they share the
fact they've got all the courses behind them.
I mean, that's what you're trying to do, is to address the
fact that if people don't know you, they won't trust you once
they've dealt with you or they trust you once they trust you,
get them to accelerate that trust to as many people as
possible. Yeah, it's a simple thing, But
you can't go out and say I'm incredibly trustworthy if
you're. Going out and saying I'm
incredibly trustworthy or I'm amazing, That's bragging.
But if someone else doesn't owe you that social proof.
Exactly, 100%. And consider your outfit, you
know, genuinely, you know, I was told a very, very long time is
don't trust someone in a tie because they're trying to sell
you something. And you've got to make a
decision what's right for your brand and your business.
But authenticity does come through.
And if your suits a bit tight and you're kind of wearing a tie
and, you know, if you look a bit shifty.
And when I was on a stage in front of a big conference and
they got two people from the audience, one of them had kind
of like a little mustache and a little goatee beard.
And one of them was clean shaven.
And he said just by show of hands, who trusts the person
with the goatee beard? Very few hands went up.
Who trusts the person without the beard?
Most of the hands went up. Now, I'm not saying your facial
hair or anything should be part of the kind of necessary
thinking of this, but just to consider that people make a
decision on your trustworthiness within a second of seeing you.
And you've got to consider, is there anything about you that
you do or look that conveys an element of shiftiness?
And it's very hard to do this, but it's kind of you've got to
go through the process of take your photograph and put it into
a large language model and say, is there anything about my
appearance that makes me look less trusty, trustworthy?
Yeah, because it might go. Get a haircut.
It might say no, you look fine. It might say just out of
interest. I mean, I had a friend.
These are real glasses. I'm blind as a bat.
I had a friend who used to wear glasses which were basically
staged glasses. They were clear glass because he
said it always makes people say it makes him not more
intelligent. I'm not suggesting you trick
people, but I'm suggesting you rather than trying to do things
that would be inauthentic that make you more trustworthy.
Don't do things that intrinsically make you less
trustworthy and then get a qualification.
Right page this this this. Podcast is sponsored by Property
Mark. No it's not.
I just bloody believe in it. Page 35 approximately how many
estate or letting agencies in your local area have listings
all for sale slash to let bourge you've noticed in the past two
weeks? Go on.
Sorry, it's the fact that I can't remember any is 2222% and
none is 10%. 1/3 of people. Page 35 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 35% of
people when asked to name an estate agent they've seen in the
last two weeks can't name a single one.
I saw something on social media today so this will be a few
weeks ago when this comes out. But someone had posted the
actual take up of course of AI across the population of the
world to all 8 1/2 billion people.
And like there was 1000 dots or whatever and only one of those
dots were people using AI agentically and coding wise.
But if you on LinkedIn, for example, you think everyone was
using agentic AI. Yeah.
And it's this kind of everyone's got Asia, everyone's got clawed
teams and everyone's doing this and everyone and it's like,
yeah, everyone's saying this and they're writing it from their
bedroom. No one, very few people are
doing it now. We think everyone knows every
single estate agent. I'm staggered as it's like only
90. Whatever percent of people have
heard of right Move. Who hasn't heard of Right Move?
But you know, there's a number of people who don't operate in
the world that we operate in. And unless you're thinking of
buying a selling house, you will see 1000 for sale balls.
You don't remember a single one. The moment you're looking for a
property, they'll start sticking in your mind.
But for most people, you know, and that's where most people on
their journey thinking of things, the ones that will stick
in the minds are the ones that are doing things other than just
for sale abroad. So they're out in the trade,
they're out in communities, they're out doing things,
they're doing sponsored events, they're present, they're putting
letters through people's doors, they're walking around.
They are perceived by more people to be part of that
community. And therefore recall when
someone goes and pick three estate agents to value my house.
Yeah. Is that all marketing?
The app. Remind me from previous reports
it's the average person can name three to four.
It's between. It goes between 3:00 and 4:00.
And if and and again, it's about a dozen agents typically you're
competing with, right? Yeah.
Yeah, 1212 seems to be the long it's on this way.
It doesn't vary that much, but I might think it's kind of quite
solid. When you ask people who compete,
they compete with it tends to come in at 12 every year.
So I've probably. Said this in one the previous
podcast we've done but try and be I'll try and have some quick
maths here. If the average agent is
competing with 12 of our agents and then you've got 3 or 4 that
people know, so there is a, call it a. 20. 5% chance, give or
take of you being known and say someone gets 3 agents out, so
you're you're in that there. And then basically split it
again, you've got a fair 33% chance of winning that business.
So in reality, if someone's thinking of selling, you've got
about an 8% chance of winning that business as a rule, yes.
Does that make sense? Yeah, look that.
That's the maths. But then we look at the data
from 20 EA from the end of 2004. We've got every single post code
district in the unit, UK, United Kingdom and the top 2 agents for
those, Every single post code district and the average was
37%. So while they are the top
between the top two, yeah. So while the average is
absolutely everything else being equal about 8%, the reality is
there's some sucking an enormous amount of attention and
everyone's getting the long tail drags.
So what you want to try and do, especially if you're a smaller
business or you're starting out, is you've got to get your
attention out there to as you need to be as loud as you
possibly can. Be frequent, be familiar and be
favoured by the audience by as many people as possible, because
otherwise you know your chance of getting across really.
Really small, and I'm not sure if I've shared this on a podcast
before, but I think it will. I think it will be a very valid
point for what you've just been talking about.
A lot of agents I speak to and I'm like just, you've got to be
relentless like with marketing and I don't want to piss people
off. I'm like, I promise you, like
they're not seeing most of your stuff.
You're the only person who sees all the stuff you post.
You need to do more than you think.
And to give you an example on this, I was at an event a few a
few months ago and someone came up to me and was like, Oh my
God, it's Simon Gates. I listened to your podcast.
I can't believe I meet you in person.
Can I have a photo? I'm like, I've made it.
Someone was asked for my photo of a podcast.
It's really cool. 30 seconds later someone said to me, are
you an estate agent? Are you looking at joining Exp?
And I was like, OK, that shows you that you feel like in one
moment you're doing so much marketing that someone's asked
for a photo with you. I can't believe they're meeting
you. And if someone doesn't have a
Scooby who you are and is trying to recruit you.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know, random strangers will know the few people out there
who do a lot of publicity and a lot of marketing, a lot of
content. But they'll still be a.
You've just got to move beyond the.
You've got to move yourself into the three or four people that
the majority, the enough of a group of people know about who
about to do something is that. Essentially be a loud voice in a
small room, Yes. Exactly.
You know, you only really need to know that 510, twelve, 15% of
people are actually going to move in the next 2-3 years.
That's who you need to know. But because you don't know who
they're going to be, they'll self select.
You know, the classic with social media is the 1% of people
create, 9% are kind of like engaged and then 90% lurk,
they're just watching. That's true.
This way is you got to be part of that 1% of creating content
and being present so that when the 9% are going kind of be
interested what they think they think of you, not your
competitors 100%. And the reason?
Why this industry is particularly and I remember
doing a presentation this at the Knight Frank because I used to
work in investment banking and pensions trying to make that you
could annoy people talking about pensions because it's boring as
hell. You can't make people bored
about property. You can't you know 20 million
people are are users of right move.
How many transactions are there? 1.2 million.
We love probably after the weather, sorry, Christopher
Walken stealing your line, but after the weather property is
number two of our interests. So again, just as we've said in
Part 4, AI slightly, this is just slightly insulated from AI,
you're insulated from Borden. In this.
Industry because people love property.
Just on a couple of the numbers there as well on the portals, so
Zoopla just hit the 6,000,000 mark in terms of number of home
owners tracking their home. So that's over 6 million people.
Yeah, as you said, 1.2 million transactions.
And then I don't know what the number will be now because this
is a few years ago, but right mover producer stats, whilst
obviously there's lots and lots of traffic on the website, over
5 million people had alerts set up.
Now I appreciate that could be people who've moved a few years
ago and they're happy in their home.
They're still getting alerts in their e-mail, they're still
clicking on it. And so we're 5 million people
getting notifications from, right?
Like, it's insane. Location Location Homes under a
hammer, bricks and mortar. All the property listings. 10's
and 10s of millions of visits to the portals.
We are interested in property whether we are moving or not.
This is an advantage to this industry and it's just to think
you will bore people about this industry is delusional.
Yeah, if you're talking. About property, people go, oh,
people are suddenly interested. If you say you work in the
property industry, use that, leverage that, don't abuse it.
Obviously don't be boring about it, but genuinely, if you create
interesting content about what's going on in the property market
in your local area, people will wrap it up.
I was going to say property. Market and then also local area.
So we've got the Newport Pagnell chitchat group and someone will
every so often take a picture of a sunset and people are like, Oh
my God, I'm so happy to live in Newport Pagnell.
We'll get thousands of lights. I'm like, that sunset literally
is the same sunset from like outside the Newport Pagnell.
But it just so happened someone took it who was in Newport
Pagnell. Like it's mental, right?
Page 37 How important would you consider the following services
when choosing an agent? So interesting because obviously
there's various different surveys out there, whether it is
from Property Academy, whether it's right move doing it.
And I don't know how like some of the surveys can maybe slant
it or ask questions in a certain way so that it's getting the
answers they want. Because how many times do
surveys come up and go see, no one's interested in the lowest
fee. It's always down at the bottom,
people not interested in the fee.
Yet it came up quite high in this.
And what tends to always come up when I've seen previous FOIC
agents is always seems to be #1 or near the top.
They want their property listed on multiple portals.
Yeah. It's a hygiene factor.
People would like to be seen on multiple portals. 10s of
millions of them are visiting, you know, nearly half the
popular adult populated in the UK is visiting portals in any
given year. Everyone knows these portals.
Yeah. And therefore, when they sell a
property, they, they'll have found a property through a
portal. Why would they not want their
property on a portal? And if there's more than one
portal, why would you not want them to be on all of them?
Because you want to sell your house.
So if you're. So if you're an estate agent
listening to this, I don't know what the numbers are and if you
know this, Simon, but if you are an agent who is on Bright Move
Zoopla and on the market, you should be shouting from the
rooftops how you were on all three portals.
Yeah, you should you know, you could, you can logically say I
am with this portal because we believe this is the best portal
to be on and it allows us to charge the most competitive
rates because we're not paying for the fees.
You you can justify the strategic decisions you made
that are right for your business.
But what the data tell us is what consumers Jenny would like
you to say is you're on multiple portals.
So if you are leaning to that, so.
So let's say I'm sticking my neck out here.
I'm going to say from my time as an agent when it came to portal
leads and I I'd been on all three portals, 99% of leads came
from right move. So like like waste of time from
an inquiry point of view being on the other two.
From my experience, however, whether you get inquiries or
not, the fact that you can say to a seller, we list on all
three major property pools, you might not even get an inquiry
from some of them, but they are like, oh, that's amazing.
They're All in all of those because that's what they're
looking for, yeah. Definitely.
And everyone has different experience.
I know different types of property in different locations
have different experiences. Yeah, with different portals.
They all serve their own purpose.
You know, on the market came out some of the higher aided
agencies. I know Zoopa's particularly
striving in lettings and London, it was a few years ago, right.
Moves generally across all of them.
But the other thing as well is if we remember the whole
principle of marketing is what's it propinquity.
The more someone sees your message, the more favourable
they are, the more familiar they are.
It is if you want 3 portals, you've got three opportunities
for people to see the property and there's a group of people
who will be going into all three portals that's in one.
Of the previous voice of the agents, yeah, there's a there's.
A it's called the portal verse and it's like the three overlaps
and there's a core in the middle who are genuinely interested.
Guess who that core in the middle is probably going to be?
The people are moving house. Yeah, they people are going to
buy a house. They're trying to go.
I don't want to miss a house because I haven't looked at all
the portals. They'll look at all the portals
to go. So on a general rule of thumb,
maybe someone's a Zoopla customer or an on the market
customer or a Right Move customer and they're just
looking through them. That's what they look when
they're looking to buy a house. They're going everywhere.
They're bringing in one Dome and Jitty and my Porter and Right
Move and Zoopla. They're doing all their
research, possibly using an LM to do it, to actually kind of
find the property they want because they don't want to miss
the dream property that they have.
So if you happen to be on all three portals and the person
finds the house that you're selling on all three portals,
that's three opportunities to see.
Yeah, so. Ebbinghauser's forgetting curve,
propinquity and all the science we talked about in 30 years of
marketing and you know I've talked about at length is you're
maximizing the chance of that property being bought at the
best possible price at the best possible speed.
And as we've said before multiple times, there is no
property market. There's a market for property
you might get most of your leads from right move, but what was if
the one person who's willing to pay the highest price and is a
cash buyer happens to be on on the market?
Yeah, very true. Right.
Moving forward, page 43, how do you think the value of property
in which you live would have changed 12 months from now?
Why are we looking at home movers versus private landlords?
Why that split there? I'm intrigued because.
It's just the two big markets in terms of estate agency and
lettings are the people who are actually putting their
properties on the market. So you could include tenants
there if you wanted, but it was just, I was, my initial thing
is, you know, there aren't massive differences.
There's a bit more difference. There's a bit of difference, but
it was just our home movers more confident or less confident than
landlords, then not really the the majority of both groups are
expecting to see higher prices and a small group of both groups
tend to see lower prices, slightly more people expecting
no change or landlords. It was just an interesting
point. Occasionally we'll do these bits
of survey to go like, are there massive differences between
these groups? No, there isn't.
There's some subtle changes there, but also it's just worth
knowing when you're talking to a landlord, they're expecting, no,
they're more likely to be expecting no change in a
property price than a home mover.
So bear that mind your conversation about asset values
and investments and all those kind of things is they're not
necessarily seeing the capital realized in owning a property in
the same way that a home mover will.
OK. And moving forward to page 45 S
thinking about looking for a new property.
How do you tend to look? So landlords tend to well the
data shows they're more likely to search offline or equally
offline as they are online. Is that because I'm being
stereotypical here now? But landlords in this vision we
have tend to be of an older? Yes, demographic.
Yeah, there's a, there's a. There's a maturity demographic
in there, absolutely. And they are, you know, a lot of
people who are either accidental landlords who've inherited
property later in life or they have reached a point in birthing
where they're accumulating A portfolio, blah, blah.
They'll be older anyway and therefore they may have more
traditional habits. The interesting thing is, you
know, 51% of home movers are saying I just entirely online.
I'm not looking anywhere else. Yeah.
So that's kind of like it's the world has moved, it's done.
So in terms of where the world has moved on to page 46, we're
cooking on gas now. We're flying through you.
You can tell we've got a time deadline to hit for everyone.
How do you keep up to date with news and current events?
So I'm going to merge these together for high movers and
landlords. But the news and websites comes
up high, unsurprisingly. But in terms of and like social
media, but radio and TV, are radio and TV massively
underutilized by even smaller estate agents?
Yeah. Absolutely.
And especially in a world where there's local radio and regional
TV, you know, again, we know property is click bait.
Everybody wants stuff that's interesting.
You know, if you can get broadcast coverage, you will
reach far, far more people than any other channel.
It's it's a, it's, it's called broadcast for a reason.
And it gives you broad reach and credibility of being on the
local BBC. Forget the word local.
When you mention as met, as seen on the BBC, as seen on ITV News,
as seen on whatever it is, is a huge credibility thing.
Remember this point about trust, this thing about credibility and
qualification we talked about last time, but also trust this
time. TV really, really kind of is up
there for the maximum reach and it has a huge amount of
credibility. So don't neglect it.
And the other advantage of TV is you're not necessarily going to
do a Sky ad smart advert, but if you can get one piece of media
coverage on TV talking about the local property market, it'll be
worth thousands to you, literally thousands in terms of
its reach. Did say radio and radio is much
easier to get into than TV. So befriend your local when you
they're often more fragmented than TV.
You sound regional TV, you've got local radio and you know,
hospital radio, student radio, all radio in fact.
And there's a technology I know a guy I know he worked with
countrywide. He runs an organizing called
Klaxon dot AI, which has found a way to really break down to your
advertising to be the cheapest possible.
So about 1200 kids, you could have a radio advert that's
highly targeted at your audience and your locality.
And it's, that's a, so it's much more for TV's expense to do
advertising for, but PR is cheap return investment wise, it's
incredibly powerful. So send in each other and say,
look, if you want someone to comment on what's going on in
the property market, call me. I'll always pick up the phone.
So imagine you're sitting on the sofa, you're selling a house,
you're getting someone to sell a house with you.
And the BBC calls you. You've got the journalist name
in the phone number. And you say, I'm really sorry, I
want to take this call. It's actually the BBC.
He'd like to talk to me about the property market.
I guarantee when you leave the house, you've got the
instruction because you've instantly proven that you are a
genuine property expert and not just another anybody try and
sell a house and. The the untrustworthy estate
agent who obviously wouldn't listen to his podcast or do
this, would save a friend's number as BBC journalists and
get them to find them halfway through evaluation page.
Possibly comments Simon. I can see the way.
Your brain works, yeah. Absolutely.
Page 47 think about something you might buy in the next two
months. If you're an advertiser, where
would you advertise have a chance of catching your
attention So again online, so social media etcetera, then TV
adverts then sort of radio. So again, that kind of
highlights my point there of yeah, and this is.
The thing is, brand is different to sales activation.
So for those who have been on 30 years of marketing or whatever,
brand is about just long term branding, building for the
people who are not in the market.
If you want to build your brand so people know about you, become
one of the three or four. The big things like obviously
online because that's everywhere now, but TV, radio, cinema,
billboards, they're brand building exercises that make you
more present in people's lives. They're not the things that can
be able to buy or instruct you, but the other people who get,
you know, I've heard of Cornwell's estate agents because
they've seen you or they've heard about you somewhere.
And it's just putting that message in the mind before they
actually get ready to instruct. Because the next page, I think
it is then switches to what actually gets people to buy.
It is always e-mail, social direct mail, social media,
direct mail. I mean, it is always those and.
Again, going back to the kind of, I guess the age demographic
thing of landlords, if you look at that, the average home mover
is more likely to prefer a text to a landlord and a landlord is
more likely to prefer face to face.
That makes me look back to, or makes me think back to when I
was an agent, when you just know there's a certain landlord of a
certain age who if you wanted to, if you wanted to chat about
his property, he's coming to the office.
He's not finding it, He's not e-mail.
He's, I, I will come in and have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee
and, and talk about it face to face.
Absolutely. And you want to be talking to
someone the way they want to be spoken to.
If they say they'd rather talk by WhatsApp, don't call them.
Yeah, but if they prefer to meet you face to face, go and have a
coffee with them. It's much more valuable to
interact with someone the way they want to be interacted with.
And that's what this is really about it.
It's a. Classic when you're younger and
parents say to you treat others how you want to be treated.
Yes, exactly. Exactly, Exactly.
What's the golden rule doing to others that you have done to
yourself? Yeah.
Right, we're we're flying through these Page 51, which if
any of the following brand communications have ever LED
directly to a purchase, it's the same.
Again, it's brand I'd love to find.
A piece of research says this is wrong.
I talk about the four writers of the marketing apocalypse.
PR, e-mail, social and direct mail.
It's always from a genuine generating money for your
business. It's e-mail, social media and
direct mail. Add in PR and you've got your
brand. So if you don't do those 4
consistently, relentlessly, and I like the word you added now,
occasionally patiently, you're missing a trick.
You just want to keep doing the may not work instantly, but PR,
emails, social media and direct mail.
They will drive results in the end to set enough marketing
budget to do them. So to give you a quick.
Example on an E like I am a I'm a sucker for e-mail marketing.
People say to me, how did you find out about this really
intimate private event that only 50 people said I'm on an e-mail
somewhere and I found it. So I'm a sucker for e-mail
marketing. But at the same time I, I
started a sub stack journal and I've released it every Monday I
reckon for about 30 weeks now, which might sound like a lot
might not sound like a lot to to people.
And people can read it online or they can subscribe to it and I
get their e-mail. Very Long story short, I think
most people would start some SAT journal and after one or two
entries go, this is a bit shit. I've got nothing from it.
I can categorically say I picked up a new client who read my
substat week in, week out and after about 2025 weeks of it, so
several months have gone. Yeah, I like this.
I'll sign up with you, yes. 100% is Just because people don't
respond immediately doesn't mean they're not going to respond.
They're just not in that phase of buying the thing that you're
doing. But if they keep opening it,
what you're looking for is opening.
Or do they keep engaging actively with something because
it means they're consuming it and at some point they may go,
you know what, that subscribe I'm reading with Simon Gates.
He actually mentioned something like this a few issues ago.
I could scroll back and try and find them.
I could just give him a call 100%.
Yeah, absolutely. And that.
This blows my mind, Simon. And I was, I was talking about
it the other day as Christopher and I was talking about it is it
blows my mind that all this information is available.
You talk about it, I talk about it.
Christopher Watkin talks about it.
Loads of brilliant people talk about it.
Why doesn't everyone just do it? Yeah.
I mean, it's kind of obvious what you need to do to be a
successful agent. And I don't understand why more
people don't do what it is to be a successful agent.
And why do you make it hard for yourself?
I think, yeah. I mean, we could go down a
massive rabbit hole. Sorry, I know.
We're on a time limit. I'm, I'm trying to, I'm
deliberately trying to take you off thread, aren't I?
That's my plan. That's what you're doing now.
Right, page 53. So content marketing, think
about how brands engage with customers digitally, which types
of content, if any, it's more like to catch your attention.
So again, from the age demographic side of things,
unsurprisingly, I'd say older people AKA private landlords
prefer quizzes, polls, articles, interviews, images.
But then the average home movers are perhaps more likely to be
younger very much in the short form video content.
Hence why I mean I've done loads of short form video content
recently and why I've got involved with Digital Sparks and
obviously other providers out there.
But as an estate agent listening to this, if you're not doing
short form video content, freaking do it.
That that list there is what should be in your marketing
strategy in terms of content integration.
You should be doing them all. I mean, it doesn't take long to
create an image and infographic as well, especially with ChatGPT
and Gemini, you can create infographic real easy.
Christopher Watkin produces ladies like this and they're
coming out, going out of fresh. I mean, the, the, the, the
wealth of data that man produces is insane.
So, you know, use it. I mean, quite frankly, because
people say they love it, so why wouldn't you use it?
But you know, OK, so only 8% of home movers say they would be
captured by attention by quiz and poll.
But why is it the one though 8% happens to own a £2,000,000
house and loves the quiz so much They instructed you?
The thing about it, It's all of the above is what you should be
doing. All of the above.
And obviously focus your time to do the what what you can
reasonably do well. But short form video is always
going to have it. The classic line.
If a picture tells 1000 words, a video tells 1000 pictures.
To so to mix in like quiz polls and short form video content.
Some of my most successful videos I would say is so short
form video, but it's blind ranking.
So like Simon, you're going to blind rank from one to five best
marketing methods. Yeah, let's, you know, first out
direct mail. I'm like, oh, where am I going
to put that? It's amazing.
But it's something better going to come out.
I'll put it #2 and then people are hanging on to be like,
what's he going to put #1 So works very well.
In terms of page 55, which are following social networks, do
you currently use? I'm going to go straight into
YouTube because we just need to think about short form video
content. You've obviously got shorts on
YouTube as well as long form content.
And I think people forget YouTube is owned by Google and
like the amount of people using YouTube is insane.
I'm on it every day, but then also on LinkedIn as well.
I don't know if you've seen this on your device this week, Simon,
but on LinkedIn now at the bottom, it keeps confusing me.
I'm actually going to go on to it now as we record on my phone
now it's home network notifications, video jobs.
There's now a video bottom of LinkedIn.
So I can literally click video and treat it as if it's reels on
TikTok and just scroll, scroll, scroll.
It was a clear. Indication of which?
Direction it's going, I was at a.
Presentation in September last. It was September last year and
August last year, and they had a senior vice president of
LinkedIn and he said their entire focus was moving to video
first. Yeah, because they recognize
that we consume video more than we consume anything else.
So yes, video and across all channels.
And again, the rule of this chart is there's probably 4-5
you should really consider being on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram,
TikTok and LinkedIn. Still five.
Yeah, repurpose the content, change the messaging slightly,
but you should do all 5 because again, the more frequently
people see you across more channels, the more likely they
are to buy from you on. The what you just said there,
when I have the videos that go out for me 3 * a week, they go
out on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and
Threads. Yeah, you know, I'm not really
using that. But I'd also say to any agents
listening to this, don't make the mistake of just hanging out
on the platform you like because your client might actually hang
out on a different platform. So before I launch the my
business, I spent a lot of time in the like the essentially
Facebook groups and LinkedIn because you're kind of having
conversations and it's maybe data heavy and charts and stuff.
I was like Instagram, like I'm not a visual.
Like my stuff is not visually pleasing on the eye per SE, but
my God, I'd say if you said to me now, Simon, what's 1 channel
you couldn't drop? It'd be very, very.
I'd say LinkedIn probably be top now.
I would not. Thought I'd said that three
years ago. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely agree entirely.
Right. Where are we?
Page 57 One but last customer service Which one of the
following channels, if any, is your preferred way to contact a
business? So as much as we talk about
people don't want to answer the phone and that sort of stuff, I
get people don't want to answer the phone, but actually when
they want to go contact a business, the clear winner there
is to they want to actually phone.
I definitely fall into that camp.
Yeah, I. Mean the quickest way to get an
answer should be phoning a business.
Yeah, because instant. Normally you're on the website,
you just click a number and you phone it.
It's really simple and you're going to speak to a human being
ideally, especially in smaller business, and they're going to
give you an answer. I don't have to navigate some
complex kind of technology to kind of get through to you.
People don't want to answer the phone, but they bloody well want
a phone. And therefore you've got to be
built to be able to handle that. Now, if you're big enough, you
know a service like Money Penny is brilliant for that if you
want to outflow kind of overflow to catch calls when you're not
around. But the worst thing you can do
is not answer the phone or the person who answered the phone
says it's not my job. I used to irritate me if I
walked into an office and someone went I'm secretary.
I like it's not my job of like if you're a barbecue and you say
you work in the state agency, they're going to say how's the
market? And don't just say it's not my
job. I'm secretary.
You should like doesn't matter if you're the cleaner or the
Lister. You you should know like have a.
Have a view? Absolutely.
And you know, and if again, you know, small businesses, small
numbers of people in an office, not everyone can answer
everything, but let me take your number and I'll get them to call
you back straight away. And there's people like Calwell
and there's terms of tech out there that can handle these kind
of calls and process them in all right and turn them into an SMS
for someone who's out in the field.
So there's, there's many ways around it.
It's just there's no excuse when 40% of home movers say, I would
like to talk to you on the phone, make sure your phone is
answered. I remember she had a fans and
her detractors, but Allison Platt was my CEO at Countrywire
and I was the CMO, that marketing director there.
And I remember talking about all the data club we were doing.
I was working with Michael Bolton, who was amazing digital
expert. We had, we had Google come over
all that really clever digital stuff.
And we did a presentation and said, that is amazing, Simon.
Yes to all of it. Is there any way you can get
people in branches to answer the phone?
That was her biggest frustration.
She knew in every test they did, when people phoned branches, no
one was answering the phones. Yeah.
And people want to speak to people on the phone.
So number one priority is make sure your telephone strategy
with everything else we've spoken about that your telephone
answering system works. And yeah.
So a couple of points on that is that it's like that speed to
lead, isn't it the business that's quicker to respond to
lead is more like to get the business.
And then also make it so easy for someone to find your phone
number, be it social media, website, whatever.
Because like, you know, large organisations, like I'll use Sky
as an example. If I wanted to ring Sky up for
whatever reason, if I went on the website, I'd be a freaking
pain in the arse to ring them, probably because they don't want
people ringing them because it's I'd like, I'd like to cancel my
subscription, Oh God's sake. But yeah, fully with that right.
Last one, page 58. How often do you use AI tools?
And it is quite clear that the public are using AI so and
actually on the so multiple times a day for the average home
move of 36%. That's that's a high, high
number that that. Is that is high.
That was when, when we did the work on The Voice the agent
conference 2025, these numbers exceed where we thought we'd be
at the end of 2026. OK, interesting.
And that's in May, that's been in May.
If I did that again now, it'll grow even further.
It is genuinely becoming the, the adoption of AI essentially.
And in most cases this is a reality.
It's a glorified search engine. Tiny percentage of people are
using it for clever stuff. I mean really clever stuff.
What it's actually genuinely, I use it to create an app for the
other day. This is a prototype for
something I'm working on. And it took me an hour and a
half to do something which the developer would have taken
probably a month to do. And it's amazing what you can
get to do with things like Claude code and stuff, but the
average punter, 1/3 of home movers, people who tend to buy
or sell in the next 12 months, are using it multiple times a
day. That.
So there's a quote. I've just been trying to find
someone. I can't remember where I wrote
it down. I'm going to butcher it, but it
was something along the lines of AI has got idiots acting like
they're geniuses or something. Yeah, yes.
But then. And, and I'll have to credit
this to Ben Marley and I don't know if he's OK with me sharing
this, but sorry, Ben, he said a line to me yesterday.
AI isn't coming for your job. It's got your customers.
I like that. And that how?
To be very true based on the data we've just talked about is
for yeah don't worry about coming for your job you're like
it's got your customers so think about how you can deal with
those show up in AI searches and also if they're using AI to try
and negotiate a fee with you negotiate a price make sure that
you're ready and able to. How?
How have I gone from relatively unknown four years ago when I
used to sit behind the scenes of working in companies and I never
put my brand above the companies like my personal brand above the
companies I work for? How to go from nowhere to being
standing at Property Mark One and doing a talk and doing on
all all the best podcasts that are out there?
Well, I assume. Like a lot of others, you just
slip fivers like you do to me. Is that it's?
More than that, Simon, you probably should never tell
anyone no is a long time ago. I basically applied everything I
teach in marketing to myself is you need to be out there with a
ton of content that shows you know what you're talking about.
That was events, that was reports, that was articles,
everything to be as prolific as possible.
And now if you research the voice of the, if you insert the
state aid industry, the voice of the agent comes up as a source.
I was contacted by a PhD student at UCL who was doing their PhD
and they wanted to cite the voice of the agent as research
in their PhD. And it's only getting some of
the technical details about sample sizes and methodologies.
Once you're being cited in university study, research PhDs,
you've arrived as an authority. Now, I'm not suggesting for
everyone out there you need to do massive reports and appear on
every podcast, but a local level you need to do the same.
You know, I delights me every time you go on to LLM and you
type in tell me about the state agency industry.
It's not every time, but more often not the Voice of the Agent
survey will be surfaced as a piece of research about the
industry. So I'm researching like trying
to find the answer and it quotes myself back at me, which is
really annoying because I was trying to find a third party
verification and it's going the Voice of the Agent 2024 said
this like that way I already know that I need someone else to
say that it's like. It's funny, yeah.
You say that when I, when I'm on calls with agents and we're
going through something, can I read something on their website
or social media or a letter and I go.
Where'd you get that stat? From and they're like you.
I was like, I was like I I I was like, yeah, I do I I'm like
recognise that data like yeah, you gave all right OK, yeah,
that's good then right. So whistle stop tour of part
five of the voice the agent. We've we've managed to do that
in, in good time. So before signing off as usual,
please do take a very quick moment Simon for your plug.
Two very quick dates of the diary, the excellent Joe Bourne,
Claire Yates and Danny Nash and I coming together to do a couple
of training courses. The first one's going to be on
the 14th of October, location to be confirmed.
If you're interesting, watch out for the dates.
They're all going to be available on our website,
wearandchain.co.uk. But just watch out for that.
It's going to be basically for people who do great day long
training sessions, doing one bumper session together over the
course of the day. So 4 for the price of 1.
And then the 20th of November at the University of Oxford.
The second the voice of the Asian Conference is being held
and if you want to really know what's going on the industry,
you've got to be in that room. And it's not going to be
expensive, but it's going to be brilliant minds in the room.
If you don't don't want to know what's going on the industry,
don't come the double. Negative.
I learned how to find and learn better from going to First
Business Marketing. If you don't want to open the
gate to more listings, don't get in touch with me.
So for everyone listening, please do like, review,
subscribe, follow, share the podcast.
And that just leaves me to say Mr. Simon Ledbetter.
As always, thank you very much for being an amazing guest.
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much Simon.
Have a great day.