15,000 Estate Agents to lose their jobs

According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research the current economic downturn will result in 15,000 estate agents losing their jobs over the next two years. While this may not be good news for those individuals, I believe this is great news for consumers as estate agents are now both unnecessary and costly as far as I am concerned.

Yes they may have been useful in the pre-web era by aggregating information on which houses were available to buy for potential homebuyers and further adding value by explaining the process to both parties but their position as intermediary was costly for both the buyer and seller.

Since the introduction of the internet potential sellers now have a way of more cheaply advertising their properties with an online aggregator without having to go through an estate agent. However the estate agents fought back by grouping together to form Rightmove, their own online aggregator.

Whilst the online market was still relatively new the estate agents started channeling all the properties on their offline books through their Rightmove website. This effectively strangled any competition as potential buyers would always opt for the website with the most properties, namely Rightmove as that was the only website to find properties that had been advertised with the many offline estate agents. As of 2007 Rightmove had 78% of the online property search market.

So news that a potential 15,000 estate agents will lose their jobs, means there will be 15,000 less troops on the ground collecting property details which has been fuelling their online dominance.  Hopefully this will provide new property aggregators the chance they need to enter the market and compete with Rightmove. This competition is desperately needed to open up the online market and drive down the high transaction costs often associated with buying/selling properties.