A bright start to the new year

Today we welcomed our new National Sales Director Jason Cheeseman (16 years estate agency experience) to our team and opened our Southern UK HQ in Chertsey in Surrey. We are more and more confident that 2008 is going to be a breakthrough year for online estate agencies, and we are investing accordingly (we will shortly be making an announcement about additional venture capital funding for BrightSale).

The house price recession is going to hit traditional agencies hard. Through the good years, much like Gordon Brown, they did not husband their resources and now they find themselves with bloated cost structures and inefficient business models. Your Move has announced a significant number of branch closures and Humberts appears to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy (although the stock has ‘rallied’ to almost 13p today!). We are going to read a lot more stories like these over the course of 2008.

The future in estate agency belongs to those who can provide a great service to customers at a price which represents good value. It is very difficult for many traditional agencies to do that given their reliance on high street branches that no one uses, logoed cars which alienate customers, and commission hungry sales people who often lack experience and training. BrightSale is an alternative, and having worked and invested quietly and diligently over the past 12 months we are now going to push hard to claim a much greater share of a market that has not served the British public well for far too many years.

2008 is going to be a bright year.