As Rightmove continues its ruthless strategy of hiking fees by 20% or more a year, regardless of the financial position of its ‘customers’, I often speak to agents who wistfully reminisce about ye goode olde days (the ‘90s/00's). Back then, they say with an occasional catch in their throats, there was a much more balanced relationship between themselves and the media they advertised in.
In fondly-recalled battles of yore, they vividly describe early-evening meetings in the upstairs room of The Dog & Duck pub, where all of the cut-throat local agent competitors would down their combative clipboards and commit, en masse, to boycott a particular publication unless it agreed to do what they wanted (cut ad costs, increase property editorial, etc). Thus, the dominant (often monopolistic) local newspaper was tamed and uneasy truces maintained – until the next time one party decided to try and change anything significant.
These reminiscences sprang to mind this week, when reading about a UK property portal facing the exact same sort of agent pressure to stop a hefty price increase. This is #PropertyPal, the dominant portal in Northern Ireland, where an agent-led posse strolled up to the new CEO and told him that they’d stop putting all of their new properties on the site, unless he reconsidered price increases of up to 45%.
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For context, the monthly fees seem to be around £550 per branch per month and the hike was going to take it up to between £650 and £1,000 – not quite yet Rightmove’s £1,500+ but a significant shift in tone, nonetheless. Agents – including market-leading players CPS, Simon Brien, UPS, Reeds Rains and Donnybrook – felt ‘bullied and coerced’ by the portal, a feeling not unfamiliar to many agents on this side of the Irish Sea.
What’s interesting about this story – which made #BBC News – is that it worked.
In a fascinatingly-worded release, the agent ‘steering group’ announced that it had secured “an undertaking by PropertyPal that if ANYTHING happens it will be discussed in advance of it happening and our opinions sought” (my emphasis). ‘Anything’ is a lot of ‘thing’ that could ‘happen’.
PropertyPal was brave-faced about the situation, celebrating a “mutual desire for a positive resolution and to move forward constructively.” You can almost picture the bloodied CEO stumbling out of that meeting, frantically calling the Finance Director and telling her, between sobs, that they know where he lives – and they were going to make the images look AWFUL if he dared to try and sell it in the future, unless he agreed to their demands.
(I have my own lived experience of this: Just before we launched Zoopla, I was MD of a luxury property magazine business that was market-leader in north west London. An over-enthusiastic colleague had agreed a long-term deal, worth a lot of revenue, to one agent for them to secure the all-important outside-facing back page for multiple months. I turned up for what I thought was a meeting with one unhappy agent, only to be ushered into a small, downstairs basement room where over 90% of my advertisers stood around the chair I would sit down in. Many of these guys would cross the road to avoid each other under normal circumstances yet here they all were, making sure that their '“mutual desire for a positive resolution and to move forward constructively' was heard. The back page deal was, needless to say, reviewed … )
Of course, the success of the PropertyPal anti-heist drives dreams that – perhaps? – this might also be possible with Rightmove. History, however, tells a very different story. From the once-fiery ‘Boycott Rightmove’ Facebook Page to the hundreds of WhatsApp agent groups, there have been no shortage of attempts to gather together to cut off RM’s supply of homes. No fresh property content to look at, the reasoning goes, no traffic to the portal.
But there’s always one. The agent that nods along and promises to come off too, then turns tables and uses their competitors’ absence from RM as a marketing tool to win them more valuations. Further – and surely this must fall foul of some regulation or other – those agents that then decide to go back onto Rightmove are faced with a much higher subscription fee than their old, legacy one.
Yes, it’s a matter of scale. Getting enough agents to commit – and then to actually follow through, as all of these agents in Northern Ireland did – is hard in our fragmented market. But there is a lesson here – if you can make it stick, then it works.
Rightmove’s 70%+ margin becomes a risk if enough agents just refuse to pay more. With CoStar’s #OnTheMarket becoming more of a compelling platform – and even #Zoopla making a decent recent play based on its (in my biased view) unmatched data chops, perhaps there is hope that RM’s determination to grab almost all agents’ profits can be resisted.
It would take a heck of a lot of coordination. But, if it worked in one part of the UK, why couldn’t it work in another?
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