The Perils of Multiple Agency
In the good old days of estate agency, multi agency was a tactic that a seller could employ to spread their net wider in their search for a buyer.
Free 30 days listings on:
- ✓ Rightmove
- ✓ Zoopla
- ✓ Mashroom
Different prospective buyers would be registered with different estate agents depending upon where they advertised, where their offices were situated and what their opening times were.
Placing your home on the market was a genuine lottery of ‘which agent will have the best buyers or the most buyers?’ So you took your choice and paid a higher fee to ‘go multi’. And for those sellers in a hurry, it generally worked. The ensuing battle between property agents to seal a deal could prove very capitalising.
These days however, almost the entire property buyer audience looks online. Consequently, by default they treat each estate agent equally and indeed most property portals now operate a ‘send message to all’ facility where every agent with properties for sale in a given area will receive the same buyer enquiry regardless of what their firm is called, where their office is or when they are open.
So multi-agency is pretty much obsolete now.
Obsolete and pretty pointless it may be, but there is also another negative aspect to listing your home with all of your local agents. Because now that the bulk of purchasers look at Rightmove,Zoopla,Prime Location and so on to find their next home, if your home is advertised by, say, five different agents it will be catalogued as five separate ads showing the same property one under the other. Overkill.
You’ll understand why this is far from desirable. A list of properties that is dominated by the same one over and over again smacks of desperation. Multiplied.
If the laws of supply and demand are to be held as true, showing the ‘same product’ over and over to the same, now shrunken buyer audience will simply serve to show your hand. You’re a bit TOO keen to sell perhaps? And that will inevitably lead to lower offers and, unfortunately, some not enquiring at all due to the perception that your home ‘must have something wrong with it’ if it has remained unsold with so many agents.
Multiple agency is a tragedy to be avoided at all costs therefore. It’s unnecessary, expensive and dangerous.
You really only need one estate agent to market your home as long as they advertise in all the right places. Those places are online. That’s why an online estate agent is your best route to achieving a sale.
