Knight Shifts

After Hopper's 'Nighthawks'

For the last decade, the self-employed agency model has been the industry's awkward younger sibling. eXp, Ewemove, Keller Williams - growing quietly, mostly ignored by the high street corporates. The established names watched, arms folded. Interesting little operation, some of them seemed to say. Can’t see us getting involved, though.

Then, this week, one of the blue-bloods shifted the story.

Knight Frank announced its new 'affiliate broker' network - allowing self-employed agents to operate under the Knight Frank brand in areas beyond its existing office footprint. No new offices required. No lease. No HR headcount. Just a broker, a patch, and one of the most recognised premium property brands in the world behind them.

To be fair, Strutt & Parker beat them to the punch by about a week with its own self-employed offering - but, with no disrespect, this is a much bigger deal. Possibly the most significant structural move in premium agency for years.

Knight Frank operates from 600 offices across 50 territories, with more than 20,000 people globally. In the UK, its residential high-street presence covers established luxury markets - Chelsea, Windsor, Stratford-upon-Avon, the country house heartlands. Solid. Premium. Expensive to run.

The new network targets 36 expansion markets - areas where Knight Frank knows there's client demand but doesn't have a physical presence. The initial London tranche includes Ealing, Barnes and Putney, Crouch End, Muswell Hill, and Shepherd's Bush. Its Canary Wharf office is being repositioned as a City and East London hub covering Wapping, Shoreditch, Tower Bridge and Southbank.

Brokers in the network are self-employed. They earn commission on sales and can capture additional fees for referring clients into Knight Frank's 150 residential and commercial service lines across the UK, US, Europe, Middle East North Africa (MENA) and Asia Pacific.

That last point is huge. This isn't just about selling houses on a patch. An affiliated broker who closes a sale in Barnes can cross-refer the buyer into Knight Frank's commercial investment desk, or their Dubai residential team, or their country house division. The referral economy is genuinely global.

Because the self-employed model has proved it works – I particularly think that the presence of ‘prime’ self-employed models such as By Design and Moveli, which attract loads of ex-Knight Frank (and Savills and Fine & Country, etc) top-earners, would have been the primary labs studied by the number crunchers at KF HQ. Ignoring their growing momentum for any longer would have been, in the eyes of their stakeholders, commercially negligent.

TwentyEA data now shows eXp UK as the largest brand for new instructions in the UK. That's after arriving just a few years ago, with no offices, no high street presence and a model that many traditional agents openly mocked. eXp UK now has over 900 agents and, under Adam Day’s relentless steam, continues to innovate, lately with traditional high street agents like Benjamin Stevens and MRE coming into the fold. Some industry analysts predict the sector could account for 10% of the UK market by 2030.

Knight Frank, to its credit, hasn't rushed to replicate it. This launch feels less like reactive panic and more like a firm that's been watching the numbers for two or three years, running the internal analysis, and deciding the moment is right. Tim Hyatt, their Head of Residential, put it this way: "Outside of our existing patches our brokers will be self-employed, giving them control of their diary, clients and transactions, with genuine scope for scale and high levels of earnings."

Knight Frank isn't abandoning the high street. But it's making a quiet, significant bet that growth - real growth, in new markets - doesn't always require one.

I presented at the Keller Williams ‘Megacamp’ 2-day conference last week and it was packed with 300 focused, passionate, ambitious - and yes, self-employed - agents that were hungry to make a difference. It was genuinely eye-opening to see the growth in a brand that has tried hard for a long time – and now has clearly turned a corner with Mark and Claire Readings driving it forward.

The established names who've been watching such self-employed models with folded arms since 2019 might want to uncross them. If Knight Frank can see the opportunity, it's genuinely worth asking why others can't - or won't.

The awkward younger, self-employed sibling is now being embraced by the family. The question now is how much the rest of the industry notices the shift before the market does it for them.