New online letting agent easyProperty.com was officially launched this week at a glitzy party at the Natural History Museum in London.
Sir Stelios and easyProperty CEO Rob Ellice took to the stage to explain to attendees why “now is the right time to bring the traditional estate agency model into the digital age.”
easyProperty.com will initially focus on the lettings market, offering a ‘pick and mix’ range of services such as photography, viewings, deposit handling and tenancy agreements. This unbundled pricing model, which has been pioneered by the easyGroup, offers landlords complete choice and control and will allow them to create a bespoke package to suit their individual requirements, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional estate agents.
easyProperty will charge 0% commission and claims to already have 10,000 homes pre-registered by landlords. Its target is to let between 4,000 and 5,000 homes each month with most income being generated by selling additional services.
The site will ultimately expand to handle room rentals as well as its current lettings offering.
Ellice says in a video released on social media that his service will significantly expand its activity from residential lettings.
Early next year the service will start handling online residential sales, followed then by commercial property. Online room rentals and property auctions will then follow. And if that is not enough, Ellice promises to expand with a similar offer for the property markets of France, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.
The room rental pledge is particularly interesting, as this market is tipped to expand in London in particular as planning restrictions are eased on the short-term letting of properties and rooms by non-professional landlords. This particular online market is now dominated by Airbnb, which handles room rentals in no fewer than 190 countries.
Ellice’s video also reiterates what he sees as the advantage of the known brand of easyGroup “well known for choice and no frills”.
Ellice also specifies that his business model - which allows landlords to advertise for free on his site only or for a fee if the properties are to be listed on Zoopla and Rightmove - works by securing “a small margin” on additional services offered to landlords.
Aidan Rushby, CEO of online community platform for property rental Movebubble, dismissed easyProperty as “just another online lettings agent”.
“With a small management team, Stelios only as branding support and more established players in the online lettings agency game, this isn’t the future of property rental as far as we’re concerned,” he said, “easyProperty markets itself as offering more for less, but it just offers more of the same. Unlike Movebubble it’s another online agent in a race to the bottom; this time dressed up in orange. easyProperty isn’t cheap for renters and it certainly won’t be cheerful. It’s simply more agents and telesales focussed on closing the deal, with no real focus on the end user. We know the ‘easy’ business model; make things as cheap as possible, but an uncomfortable short flight is very different to an uncomfortable 12 month tenancy.
“Viewings with up to eight tenants at a time (probably by someone in a shiny suit who knows nothing about the property) is going to make searching for a home even more pressured and stressful. What renters want is direct contact with a friendly landlord, not another middle man looking to skim money from the transaction.”
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