Rightmove's 'Best in Country' on your doorstep

KEY STATS

• Over 25,000 branches
• 1 million properties at any time
• 3 million transactions
• 50 million leads
• 3 billion property views

Rightmove are one of the biggest names in property, like Dyson for vacuum cleaners, the two are synonymous for many people. Rightmove has around 127.5 million
visits per month to their website and because of this, they can access a vast amount of data. The Property Academy provides information, insights, ideas and inspiration for individuals and
companies in the property industry and has been running the Estate Agents Masters Awards for the last 15 years. These two giants joined together to create the Best Estate Agent Guide.

Orchards Estates were shocked and delighted to receive the award for Number Two Lettings Agent in the country AND the trophy for Best Sales Agent in the country.

Rightmove have access to an unrivalled breadth and depth of data based on the interactions of both agents and consumers, as well as the performance of over 1 million individual property listings at any time. With Rightmove’s data and the Property Academy’s contacts, they have assessed over 25,000 estate and lettings agency branches to create the Guide, designed to help you to choose an estate agent for the sale or let of your most valuable asset. The study focuses on the consumer experience and involves analysis of hundreds of thousands of data points, as well as a large-scale mystery shopping exercise and took almost a year.

Rightmove explained some of the features of an exceptional agent.

1. Special Greeting – every caller is made to feel if they are the most important person who’s made contact that day. Email enquiries are individually and personally replied to within the hour, often within 5 minutes by having a proper response system in place.

2. The customers’ questions are answered or answers are found. Additionally, the caller is asked more questions, the exceptional agents diagnose before they prescribe.

3. Every property has a minimum of 5 images, sometime 10+, all professionally taken and showing off a property in its best light.

4. Every property, for sale or to let, has a floor plan which is scalable, clear and easy to view on a mobile and tablet as well as a desktop.

5. The exceptional agents generate more viewings per property than their competitors. We assessed this with online viewings as these typically will translate into physical ones.

6. Likewise they generate more enquiries/leads. Ultimately, the more interst in a property, the more likely it will sell/let and for the best price.

7. Talking of price, the best estate agents price correctly whereas some others will position properties at any level to either please their clients or to win instructions. This practice leads to reductions and worse a failure to sell.

8. Another area where the exceptional agents were clearly able to be identified was fall through rates – the best are much lower.

9. The ultimate test and measurement – did the property sell or let? The exceptional achieve a higher completion rate.

An exceptional agent does the ordinary things extraordinarily well.