International agency giant launches into UK market

A successful European self-employed agency business has entered the UK market.

With annual revenues of more than £500m and 20,000 partner agents, iad is already highly successful in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal and Mexico and is now looking to conquer the UK by offering its self-employed model in England and Wales.

Its launch has been helped by the acquisition of estate agency David Lee, the self-employed estate agency platform founded by Lee O’Brien and David Kirby in 2004.

David Lee will re-brand to iad with Lee O’Brien taking the position of managing director of the expanding UK business whilst David Kirby will as ‘head of constellation’, lead the existing team of 21 agents as the first iad agents to list and sell homes in Britain.

O'Brien said the first goal is to get to 100 agents.

The new proposition covers sales, lettings and property management. 

A number of high-profile names have already joined including former easyProperty chief operating officer Jason Bull as head of coaching and training. 

He will head the online university programme.

Addittionally,‘super agent’ Nicholas Le Ny-Clarke is moving from his adopted France back to the UK to assist the senior team in their growth. 

Nicholas becomes iad’s first ‘sponsor’, a term used to describe an agent who encourages and mentors new agent recruits.

The iad model offers partner agents a commission split of up to 87.8%. Additionally, agents can earn significant sums from encouraging other agents to join iad by way of ‘revenue share’. 

Existing iad agents have already grown down-line ‘constellations’ of more than 500 agents by way of revenue share.  

Clement Delpirou, president of iad, said: “The United Kingdom is a key country for our expansion as the world’s fourth largest market in value terms and one that we recognise as one of Europe’s most valuable.

“Our brand of estate agency provides the ultimate support and financial opportunity to our partner agents backed by one of the fastest growing companies in the property sector. Our ambitions are fuelled with annual revenues of over half a billion pounds which will provide substantive reassurance to potential agents thinking of making a move to being self-employed or that wish to move from their current self-employed platform.

“Our goal is to become the dominant estate agency across Britain. We’ll do this simply by being the most attractive business to work with for good agents, not just on commission split and revenue share but on genuine support and with our unique revenue share approach also.”

O’Brien added: “There is a significant opportunity for a well-funded and credible player to lead the expansion of the self-employed model in this country and as we’ve seen in the US, Europe and Australia - but not here yet. 

“David Kirby and I have laid decent foundations with our personal, culture rich approach to agent recruitment and support over the past few years and we were looking for the ‘rocket fuel’ to take this to the highest level. Our decision to do a deal with iad was a no-brainer in that respect and we are incredibly excited to be leading the iad expansion in the UK now.”

iad UK will operate from David Lee’s offices at Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire.

Agent enquiries from those interested in being part of the iad platform should contact lee.obrien@iadgroup.uk.com