Successful Town Hall initiative expanded by OTM after growing demand 

OnTheMarket has revealed it is expanding the scope and scale of its successful Town Hall initiative in response to growing demand from agents eager to share their thoughts and feedback as a collective.

Following the first sessions of 2022, ‘fully-booked’ within hours of being announced, additional dates have now been added to the original schedule of events. Attendee capacity has also been increased to cater for rising interest from agents.

As well as continuing the virtual events, a series of in-person Town Halls will also take place for the first time later this year. 

Launched in early 2021, during the third lockdown, the Town Halls aim to provide all OTM members with the chance to join a meeting chaired by chief executive officer, Jason Tebb, in which they can directly discuss any topic they wish.

Until now, the firm says the sessions have enabled representatives and business owners from more than 1,000 agency brands to share their thoughts openly.

In addition to adding an extra set of dates to the virtual Town Hall series, each virtual event due to occur throughout the rest of the year will now have double the capacity of previous events, with each session doubling from 25 to 50 attendees.

Tebb will host an in-person tour later this year, with the capacity of the events expanded to give a greater number of agents ‘the opportunity to come together and engage with OnTheMarket’. More details will be confirmed closer to the time. 

“An inspired move by the CEO to hold such meetings is rarely seen in this space. Jason is fearless about what he may hear and he is acting on the issues that really matter to agents,” Andrew Dewar, joint senior partner at Curchods, who attended one of the virtual Town Hall events earlier this year, said. 

Tebb said he’d originally only planned to run events with agents so he could understand what they wanted and where they felt OnTheMarket needed to do things differently.

However, ‘it became clear very early on that it wasn’t only me who found them useful, they did too. The key topics debated and discussed in those initial Town Hall sessions included what agents thought about the TV advert, our previous Market Appraisal Guides and the need for more functionality and services around lettings’.

“As has been evident by our actions over the past few months, the team and I took all of this on board, leading to the launch of our new brand, website and TV advert in December, alongside our commercial partnerships with Sprift and Canopy that were announced earlier last year,” Tebb added. “All of these announcements were direct results of our Town Halls.” 

He went on: “With our last round of Town Halls selling out, and a growing number of agents registering interest in attending the next series, it’s clear to me that now is the time to expand the series to meet this demand.

“I’m really excited about launching our in-person sessions across the country later in the summer as well as doubling our capacity for the ongoing virtual events, giving agents more choice in how they engage with their portal throughout 2022 and beyond. At its heart, this is a listening tour, and I can’t wait to hear what agents have to say.”