Exclusive Interview: Charlie Wright, Founder of CIELA
We were pleased to be invited for an exclusive interview with Charlie Wright, founder of the forthcoming proposed organisation CIELA, The Charter for Independent Estate and Letting Agents.
So, let us get our teeth stuck in to this new idea that could enable traditional estate agents to capture back control of their industry from the giant corporations.
I can certainly grasp the idea and need behind a concept like CIELA, such as focusing on the unique value of independent agencies and giving them the opportunity to control their own destiny via the data they hold, which inevitably otherwise gets pumped in to the major property portals they pay to use. If enough independents join, then this collective voice value increases, thus enabling them to dictate their own future going forward and to stand alongside giants such as Zoopla and Rightmove (that would not survive without them). Only if there was real unity between the majority of independent agents to collectively build consumer awareness of the importance of quality local representation when selling or letting a home, then a meaningful entry into the property portal market could ultimately be achieved.
Thanks for the invite Charlie. Now the question all readers will want to know is: what is in it for them?
1: A better public profile for Independent Agents. CIELA would conduct a constant consumer-facing PR campaign promoting the values of owner-managed, law-abiding independent agents, and highlighting the risks of choosing uncaring corporate and online agents. The public are bored of and ignore most advertising, choosing instead to be entertained by documentaries. There is scope for engaging, fly-on-the-wall documentary TV production of the home-selling equivalent of “One born every minute”, showcasing the pitfalls of poor agent choice, and the happy ending when rescued by a quality local professional. This can be done at a lower cost than simply buying expensive advertising. It’s a human story and TV channels are desperate for more original programming.
2: Control. CIELA would give agents the chance to control their own business future, by providing a vehicle to collectively control their valuable business data and decide how it is used. Imagine the “CIELA House Price Index” comprised of actual agent data, rather than manipulated portal data. Imagine how much more valuable the information would be than, say, the Nationwide price index, given that we would have a much larger, fresher big data set. TV and Media companies as well as financial institutions would come to rely on CIELA as the voice of authority in the industry, being the organisation which holds the most collective data.
3: Additional income with no additional work. CIELA already has a growing number of partnerships and associations in place which would provide each member with a way to monetise their data, at higher values per lead than existing offerings who take a larger cut.
4: Dividend income and share ownership. Once enough support is achieved, ownership of CIELA will be gifted to its members. Even agents who joined at the free entry-level will be direct recipients of the success of CIELA and receive annual shares of profits. In it’s 2015 report, Rightmove returned £112m in cash to shareholders. ZPG reported £16m dividends paid to shareholders. This money came from agent businesses, predominantly. This would amount to more than £8,500 average dividend per independent agent per year if the industry owned and controlled it’s own data, in addition to any income earned from individual lead sales.
OK, so what exactly is CIELA and importantly, why are you launching it?
Well it isn’t launched yet, and it may never do so! Whether or not it launches will depend entirely on the outcome of the preliminary founders meeting on 18th January, when the founding members, all active independent agents themselves, will decide whether they wish to proceed after they hear the detailed plans for launch. Any such organisation can only succeed with support from the majority of the industry, from the outset. If CIELA doesn’t unite enough agents behind it before the proposed full launch date of September 1st, it will be abandoned. I have no interest in a prolonged, slow effort to gradually persuade agents to join in small numbers.
But if agents do unite, swiftly and in majority numbers, then CIELA will quickly become the go-to organisation that represents a larger portion of the entire property industry than any other organisation to date. Membership will be restricted to owner-managed independents, but as these make up more than 80% of the industry, it will be possible to achieve total dominance quickly. It will exist not only to serve its members, but also the consumer, by ensuring that there is a constant campaign of information and education about the best way to sell or let your home.
Why? I really hate corporate bullying, especially in the property industry. Corporates exist solely to increase money paid to shareholders, not customers and not staff. For that reason a Corporate is not the best organisation to be selling personal service to an individual vendor or Landlord. Unfair corporate behaviour, for example arbitrary portal price increases without any associated increase in value to customers, is costing a lot of good people in traditional agencies so much of their hard earned money and affecting their lives. I believe that independent agents want a voice to represent their collective commercial well being, and this is what I am looking to achieve with CIELA.
At its heart, estate agency is a local business. For that reason, CIELA would have a local officer in every county and London borough, who must themselves be an active agency owner-manager, who will represent their local members.
There would also be 12 Regional Officers who would sit on the National Committee with the founder members, which would meet 3 times a year to discuss and decide upon matters affecting members, providing direction to the executive management.
On the biggest and most important questions, such as whether or not to launch a portal, all members would get a vote (using an online voting system).
But I can say now that no portal would be launched unless it offered major differences to both its home-searching users and its member agents, and of course had at least as much property as the major players. The portal graveyard is littered with ever-increasing numbers of ill-conceived, poorly-executed attempts at portals with new arrivals to the graveyard every year, even though some of them had significant funding and support. CIELA will never be one of those. It will either have a compelling offering to all stakeholders with meaningful differences from day one, or it wont launch.
There is much more detail about what the Club will do for its members and how, much of which will be put to the vote before full launch, but this wont be revealed until after CIELA has formally inaugurated. We will start as we mean to go on, by listening to and serving our members best collective interests.
You want agents to share their data with CIELA. Just how secure will that be?
I’m pleased you asked me that, because data privacy and security is of the utmost importance. Your data is your business, so it must be totally secure. Nothing less than world-class security is acceptable when you are talking about the type and quantities of data that we would be handling. I have gone to great lengths with experts from all over the world, including Silicon Valley, Australia, the UK and Russia to determine how to address this most important of questions. Almost monthly we hear stories in the news of major household name businesses having “user data stolen”. The world-class experts I have been working with, including some who have come from the UK security services and FTSE 100 companies, have disclosed to me the shockingly simple levels of incompetence at some of the largest firms which has allowed their data to be breached. Make no mistake, CIELA members’ data would be extremely valuable, potentially worth billions, and therefore it would be secured in the technical equivalent of Fort Knox in cyberspace.
There are also new European Data Protection Laws coming into force this year, unaffected by Brexit, which will have implications for all agents. CIELA’s new technology will have this factored in from the start.
OK, I got more than I bargained for there! So, are you saying that small independent agencies offer a superior service over corporates?
Yes I am. An owner-manager of an independent estate agency will always work much harder to sell / rent your property than a corporate or online agent, because he has more to lose, both financially and in terms of personal reputation. Small independents cannot afford the money or time wasted to be listing property they can’t sell or let, and unlike the manager of a Corporate office, the full value of the fee comes to the owner. In addition, I have witnessed astounding passion by the owners of some agencies, which goes far beyond the fee they receive, because they are so proud of what they do. That’s why I have invited some of them to be Founder Members.
Uninitiated first-time sellers today are also being seduced by deeply misleading TV adverts from online agents, tempting the seller in to running with their service, yet not achieving the best price for their properties. Worse, the savings they claim presuppose that each property would be sold for the same price, regardless of which agent sells it, which we all know isn’t true. Consumers need to be educated on the risks involved when selling their property and in most cases traditional estate agents are best placed to provide this service, yet they are hindered by the way the industry has evolved in recent years.
So why you, Charlie? Why should the industry choose to suddenly adopt what you say?
I have never been an estate agent myself but I have had independent agents as clients for nearly 20 years. I believe I know what the majority of them really want, which is a sense of control over their future and livelihood. Despite wanting this for a long time, to date nothing effective has materialised to meet this need, and I have been pondering why this is the case. You can be an outstanding Estate Agent, but to run an organisation like this, it takes more than that. You can be a fantastic techie, but if you don’t really understand what its like to be an agent, fighting for every instruction and bending to the whim of every unreasonable, emotional customer, you won’t have what it takes. You can be a great Estate Agent, and have a great understanding of technology, but if you don’t understand the collective feelings and psychology of a large, emotional customer base, you can launch and still fail. I have been studying this fascinating marketplace and the behaviour of all the different parties in it for nearly 20 years, and I understand what’s needed and how to deliver it. I know how to get the best value from technology, I understand what agents want, and I know how to combine those two things to help the consumer too.
But, I like a quiet life, spent with my family, my dog and flying seaplanes, so unless I have the overwhelming support of the industry, then I will walk away from this project. It’s a fight I don’t need, if I don’t have the support!
I also represent the public’s view of wanting to know how to choose which is the best agent to sell or rent their property for the best possible price and in the required time frame. We can achieve this with a collective community of independent agencies working together with shared data.
The preliminary CIELA Founders meeting is on the 18th of January, with a group of 12 founder members. We already now have a waiting list of agents looking to step in should any choose not to proceed. If that meeting is successful, we will formally inaugurate CIELA on the 1st of March. After that date we will publish the full details and rules of membership, share ownership and participation, and reveal the secret plans which would make this organisation different. which will be the date where we will be pushing that launch button on the project, though of course it is all down to how the industry reacts to us and the support they give. Without their support then there can be no CIELA.
Entry-level membership will be free, with no tie in or contract, to join if you are happy to share your data with the club. – To find out more, agents can email club.secretary@ciela.co.uk , follow CIELA on Twitter at @clubciela or register here http://www.ciela.co.uk
Thanks Charlie. Any last thoughts before we go?
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