Poor sales progression is costing agents an estimated £938,697 per brand or £97,274 per branch annually, research suggests.
Analysis by ViewMyChain and TwentyEA examined performance data from the UK’s top 500 estate agents between September 2023 and August 2024 – focusing on the time taken to progress a sale to exchange.
The study evaluated the performance of the 100 agents with the slowest sales progression out of the 500.
On average, the slowest agents took 5.2 months to complete a sale, compared with the market average of 4.0 months. The top 100 agents averaged just 2.7 months.
The analysis suggests that these poor progressing agents turn their stock only 2.3 times per year versus the market, which turn their stock over three times per year. The best 100 agents are turning their stock over 4.5 times per year.
Given the average sale price of properties handled by the top 500 agents £451,000 – and assuming a 1% commission – this results in lost commissions of £938,697 per agent brand or £97,274 per agent branch, according to the research.
That translates to approximately 21 exchanges lost per branch.
When comparing the performance of the lowest-ranking 100 brands with the top 100, the difference is striking. The cost in lost commissions amounts to £2.8m per agent brand, or £294,026 per agent branch.
These numbers should be concerning to most agents, ViewMyChain warns, as even as far as back as pre-pandemic 2019, poor sales progression affected all agents at the time, with an estimated loss of £96k per branch per annum.
Paul Halliwell, executive director at ViewMyChain, said: “The numbers clearly show that something has to give.
“Agents need full visibility of the entire chain, as well as timely progress updates on each property within it—without depending on another party’s availability or the quality of their feedback. This is precisely the gap that ViewMyChain fills, addressing the industry’s biggest chain visibility challenges in real time. The material hurdle is in fact not data availability, as we have already solved that.
“Instead, I believe it’s a software adoption issue, but when compared to the costs of poor sales progression, it seems like an infinitely small price to pay.”