Agents who are hoping that the Coronvirus crisis and clumsy handling of it by Rightmove might be the beginning of the end for the portal might want to look away now.
Research completed for The Negotiator by a member of the Boycott Rightmove Facebook group reveals that the number of agents leaving Rightmove has slowed down dramatically.
Richard Dixon of The Yorkshire Property Guide last week scraped data from the portal’s agent listings to discover that 300 agents left during April, but warned that this leaving rate would have to rise to at least 500 or more a month for it to sit up and pay attention to the different campaigns.
These include Murray Lee’s Agents Union; Rob Sargent’s Say No To Rightmove, Paul Davies from Boycott Rightmove and David Thomas from Revolution Estate Agency 2020.
But Dixon’s latest figures show that the number of agents who left during May was just shy of 100, much less than during April.
Dixon also says his research suggests that one in 12 agents who left during April re-joined the portal during May.
“The only other explanation for this would be that more agents are setting up new agencies and signing on to the portal, but this is unlikely given the current economic situation,” says Dixon. “No wonder the portal is silent.”
These figures will be of interest to industry trainer Iain White, who is due to conduct a webinar tomorrow for agents within Rob Sargent’s group on how to ‘survive and thrive without Rightmove’ but who recently said the number of agents leaving Rightmove “needed to be much greater”.
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