Online estate agent easyProperty has appointed a creative and PR agency to manage an ‘above the line’ advertising campaign ahead of its launch into the residential sales market later this year.
Following a pitch process, easyProperty has announced London firm The Red Brick Road as its retained creative and PR agency.
Tess Tucker, easyProperty’s chief marketing officer told The Drum that she was “confident we have a partner who will help us to land effectively, with prospective vendors and landlords, the real benefits which our service provides.”
David Miller, CEO of the Red Brick Road, told the same publication that easyProperty is exactly the kind of ‘market disruptor’ that his firm likes to work with.
The agency launched to relatively little fanfare last autumn, despite securing large sums of investment via crowdfunding.
easyProperty’s previous marketing campaign, which was bankrolled by its crowdfunding efforts, allegedly cost in excess of £4.5m.
It currently only deals in lettings but has announced plans to expand overseas alongside its entrance into the sales market later this year.
The Red Brick Road’s roster of clients includes Savills, Suzuki and Godaddy.com.
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Worked well with the letting side, didn't it? What happened to easyProperty's takeover of the industry?
Will be interesting to see how they get on. Again, like with the lettings launch, they've got plenty of financial might behind them. But the success of that operation seems to have been underwhelming at best.
We haven't really heard that much about them, after the initial launch. Do we have any facts and figures on how well they've been doing? From what I've read on here, not very well at all.
£4.5m is a phenomenal marketing burn rate if those figures are true. With Easy Property having indicated a desire to float it will be interesting to see what profit figures are produced. Ultimately that is the only true test of whether they will be a market disruptor that is here for the long term. It will also be interesting to see their pricing model compared to Purple Bricks - price led models only result in ever decreasing squeezing of tighter and tighter margins.
Interesting points, Glenn. I've always thought with EP that it is a case of 'sizzle' with no meaningful 'sausage'. They get lots of press coverage but still have relatively few properties...
The Emperor seems to have more and more new set of clothes these days.
Plenty of column inches and PR talk, but very little action. What's that old saying, 'they can talk the talk, but can they walk the walk?' So far, the evidence would seem to be no.
Either easyProperty's doing some fantastic work and they're being very modest about their levels of success, or it's bombed and they're trying to sweep it under the carpet with a snazzy launch for their sales venture. No matter how much money you have, achieving in an industry in which you have no knowledge is never going to be easy.
It's like a football manager suddenly becoming a cricket coach, or a banker becoming a surgeon. It just doesn't work very well.
They've certainly got some serious financial backing, which must mean some people have faith in this venture. Let's see how they get on first before writing them off.
Haven't they already had enough time to prove themselves with their lettings business, Tom?
No, you can't argue with the financial muscle they have on board. But unless there's something they haven't been telling us - and I'd be surprised if something with the "Easy" brand attached to it would be so humble if they actually had success to crow about - then their venture's so far have been distinctly underwhelming. Unless, as I said, they have been doing a roaring trade and have just been keeping very quiet about it.
An INEA agent sent a copy of an EasyProperty advert which was aimed at private landlords and read:
Get on Rightmove for less than a tenner.
Ouch. Not good for traditional agents. Maybe RM and Z allowing 'under a tenner' models in will mean RM and Z drop their subscription costs to below a tenner. Or maybe traditional models will start walking.
Hi Trevor - it will have an appeal, to price led ,'DIY' landlords, are there are lots of them. Certainly enough to support low cost operations like EasyProperty, but there are myriads of others, doing it for less and less every month. However the majority of landlords own between 1-3 homes, worry about the tenants in their homes, legionnaires regulation, PAT testing etc. They want a local expert who they can trust (52% of respondents to Property Academy Survey said this was the reason they chose their agent). They can look a prospective tenant in the eye and work out if they will be a good risk, or a tenant from hell. Sacrificing this expertise for a hap-pence of tar - placing at jeopardy their biggest asset? Most landlords prefer to play safe. Our best USP is our tenant pre-vet. We visit tenants in their own home before we let them into our landlords house. I've not found a computer based risk model credit report that beats good old shoe leather and face-to-face interaction.
I'm a bit bemused about the whole Easyproperty 'thing'. Apologies if this sounds cruel but unless I'm very much mistaken, Robert Ellice is no big time CEO with years of corporate experience to fall back on.. Clarke Hillyer was just a couple of of branch offices??? ..and he runs a number of equally small-time 'Arthur Daley' businesses. Seems he got a slice of silver spoon (parental money) and an 'in' to the family business, Ellice Investments!
Again with family help he got an 'in' to Clarke Hillyer, a small comm and res letting agency that had a couple of branches (which have now closed). Seems the company now exists from a small industrial office unit these days (The lock-up, as Arthur would have called it!!!).
Check out Kingsley Wilson. He crops up as fellow director in a number of Ellice's enterprises and Wilson is also the man fronting the pitch for the crowd funding from his company Chrystal Capital. In fact, apart from buying the license from Easy, the whole easy property 'thing' is 'my dad knows your dad'..
Chris Welch has resigned from two of the (three) easy property companies and one wonders if hes still around, Harry Hill resigned early on (after the valuation of £66m). Stelios has no interest in EP apart from charging his fee for the use of his brand and a regular check on RM and Z shows EP has just 500 listed properties.. nowhere near the 1000s that were predicted, leaving their sales/turnover targets (as available to view as PDF on cube crowd), impossible to reach.
Unless some fantastic business is going on which they're keeping secret, their targets of £20m+ and £37m+ turnover in a couple of years is just pie in the sky. Also, it looks like they're trying to bring forward the IPO... is that in order to strike at investors before the actual truth (sales figures) are out.
Surely any business is ultimately only as good as the business it bring in? or can we all go up the route of continual fund-raising without providing a return to investors?
Easyproperty - so far - equals a big fat "?"
I wonder if Ellice (and Kingsley) will be sipping champers on their yacht somewhere off the Caribbean coastline long before the market - and the investors - realise they've been scammed???
Whole thing stinks of 'lets raise money and run'.
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