The estate agency business is a potential disaster for many of its present participants and the number of estate agents currently operating in Britain is likely to be halved within the next eight years.
In Primary Contact’s update on their 1987 report, The retail marketing of houses, Alan Wolfe reiterates this hypothesis and says that by 1997 the large multiple agencies will take 80% of an expanded market. Although the volume of sales is likely to increase by two-thirds, commissions may fall as low as 1/2%.
The remaining independent agencies will be left to play a more specialised role dealing with more complicated transactions.
It seems very likely, the survey claims, that there will be some rationalisation among the major agency chains.
“A major bank may justify a nationwide chain of branches because most people who have a bank account use it every week. A typical home owner, however, uses an estate agent perhaps six times in a lifetime: for such purposes, 500 branches seems a large chain. Certainly the High Streets that were full of food shops in the 1960s, shoe shops in the 1970s and estate agents in the 1980s will be full of something else in the 1990s.”
