Whether you are thinking of moving home, an Estate Agent yourself, or an investor in the industry, continue on for an in-depth review of the UK property market, exploring who 'won' in 2020 and what picture this paints for 2021.
The above table shows the share of the market of each of our segments for 2019 and 2020.
The blue and red lines show the percentage point increase in the volume of new instructions and suggest the following key take-outs:
The table above only tells part of the story. To understand in more detail the breakdown of market share by segment, the following graph highlights that both Independent and Hybrid Agents did gain market share in Lockdown 1.0. Although this fell away quickly in the case of the Hybrid Agents.
Most agents however get paid commission when a property sale completes and therefore tracking the winning of New Instructions as we have done above, whilst interesting, does not follow the money.
The following table presents the position of the segments in 2020 for Sales Agreed volumes.
While it broadly follows a similar pattern to the New Instruction volumes table further up, Hybrid Agents have actually lost market share in Sales Agreed by a -0.4% percentage point decrease. To put that in numbers, we are talking about nearly 5,000 properties less having a sale agreed in 2020 versus 2019.
Franchise operations have had a somewhat curious year, where their market share of New Instructions had dropped by 1 percentage point to 16.5%.
Putting this into perspective, this represents 6,700 New Instructions less in 2020 than in 2019.
But, its not all doom and gloom, as when it came to agreeing sales, the Franchise operators' market share rose by 0.4 percentage points.
Franchise operations collectively sold about 1,800 more properties in 2020 than the previous year, but from 6,700 less instructions. Clearly this would prove costly in the long term as it is not sustainable.
Clearly it is very early days in terms of data that we have seen so far this year, but it is obvious some of the key trends experienced in 2020 are continuing in 2021.
Here are a few to take away with you:
It will be intriguing to see how early on these 2021 trends continue throughout the duration of the year especially with the announced mergers and acquisition activity in the corporate and franchise segments.
You can count us on to be keeping a close eye on how these trends develop as always.
However, what is happening with the branches themselves by segment is a topic we will be unravelling this time next week.
If you would like to know more about what's happening in the property market or about how we can help your brand to obtain greater returns from targeted marketing then please contact Katy Billany, (Our Executive Director for Estate Agency Services) at katy.billany@twentyea.co.uk.