Self Harm

Do me a favour - get yourself down to the shops. In the snacks aisle; pick up some popcorn - maybe you prefer salted, maybe sweet, maybe a combo. Regardless, you’re going to need a large bag. Because a self-on-self-employed model war has just broken out spectacularly.

As you crunch through the first few morsels, you’ll note Adam Day - a guy with genuine claims to have ignited change within the industry twice, with Hatched being the first online agent and then eXp hoovering up nearly a thousand individuals and companies into its hierarchical, self-employed model - teasing competitor TAUK that its agents were about to be co-opted into the refactored Purplebricks.

What could be the reason for this startling claim? Well, Kenny Bruce OBE, drawn back to undead Purplebricks by Sir Charles Dunstone, has invested heavily in TAUK (‘The Agency UK’ to give it its slightly odd name). And before he can even slip back into those sweaty slippers, Day put an editorial piece into Property Industry Eye this week stating that he thought it was obvious TAUK would be absorbed into PB, with all its personal (local?) expert agents donning the lilac livery and being pushed back out to pitch free / cheap agency packages.

Now, we all know that you’re not supposed to respond to obvious, transparent digs that are clearly designed to get you to reveal something about your business model and strategy. The sensible answer here would have been for KB OBE to stay schtum on the socials, call an internal company meeting and circle the wagons. “Go and beat them to every instruction,” he would say, emphasising that TAUK would never attach itself to PB and that this divisive talk showed eXp were scared of their progress, creating a siege mentality amongst the self-employed troops that they were under attack from a huge competitor.

Instead, Kenny launched a rather emotional and ill-thought out response (that he then had to add to in his own comments to clarify what he really meant) which took some snide potshots at ‘downstream commissions’ at eXp (which you have to be quite in the weeds of the self-employed models to really understand the vagaries of) and asking rhetorically “I wonder how much said person had to pay for that advert?”

Referring to Adam Day as ‘said person’ is probably the icing on the clickbait cake that the said person was looking for at the start. Day also now has;

• Sight of what TAUK is planning

• A Kenny quote - “The brand stays, the model stays, the ambition stays; nothing about that is changing” - that Adam can use as a recruiting tool should even the +tiniest+ bit change

• Knowledge of how to wind TAUK up

It’s a masterclass in generating a story out of tying two completely separate events together (Bruce back to PB, TAUK trying to compete) and spinning a very thin assumption off the top of it. Now TAUK looks wounded and tetchy whilst eXp looks like it’s very much in control.

One assumes that Day is going to bide his time for a bit then observe something that TAUK +has+ changed over the next month or two and blame Kenny’s association with Purplebricks for that change. He’s certainly got nothing to lose – and, if this week’s entertainment is anything to go by, he’s likely to gain even more headlines, confidence at eXp and nervousness within the TAUK ranks.

However it shakes out, you’ll be wanting that popcorn. This self-on-self harm is a show that’s likely to run and run.