The Best Estate Agent Guide Awards – FAQs
What are the Best Estate Agent Guide Awards?
The Best Estate Agent Guide Awards are the result of an assessment of virtually the whole of the market of estate agency and lettings agency branches.
The best performing agencies in the assessment are listed in the Best Estate Agent Guide as Award Winners, and the very best in various categories are awarded at the EA Masters event.
What is Rightmove’s role in the Best Estate Agent Guide and EA Masters?
The Best Estate Agent Guide and EA Masters are owned and managed by the Property Academy.
Rightmove is principal partner of the EA Masters.
Rightmove also undertakes data analysis on sales and lettings branches to contribute towards the Best Estate Agent Guide Awards assessment. This is combined with mystery shopping and website analysis by the Property Academy, who then determine the Award Winners.
Rightmove makes no money from the EA Masters or Best Estate Agent Guide.
Why does Rightmove support the Best Estate Agent Guide?
Rightmove supports the Property Academy’s objective of improving standards in the industry. With more inventory and more agents than any other property website, Rightmove has unrivalled insight into the performance of agents.
Data analytics and training are at the heart of the support Rightmove provides agents day to day through its Account Managers, tools and reports. This assessment will help agents understand what being a great agent looks like, and identify any areas for improvement. Agents can request a Health Check report for each of its branches via their Account Manager to understand how it has performed in this assessment.
What data is shared between Rightmove and the Property Academy?
Rightmove has not shared any detailed data on an agent’s performance with the Property Academy or any other third party. Only the overall score that an agent receives – based on numerous different criteria – is shared with the Property Academy to allow them to decide who is a Best Estate Agent Guide award winner.
No property data has been shared or sold to the Property Academy as a result of this analysis.
Why is Rightmove’s data more accurate than other ways of measuring?
Unlike other awards that rely on agent self-submissions and paying an entry fee, using Rightmove data means that virtually the whole of the market can be assessed independently, without charge to the agent. Rightmove’s data combined with the Property Academy’s biggest ever mystery shopping exercise means this is the biggest, most robust independent assessment of the industry that there has ever been.
Does Rightmove make any money from these awards?
Rightmove does not make any money from the EA Masters or the Best Estate Agent Guide. Our involvement is purely in support of the shared objective to help raise standards in the industry.
How are agents assessed?
The awards focus on the most important things a potential vendor or landlord looks for when searching for an agent; how well they market their properties, how well they handle enquiries and whether they ultimately get the property sold or let, and how quickly.
Various metrics underpin each of these things and agents who do well will do all of the above to a high standard. More than twenty pieces of data are used to assess each branch. On most measures agents are compared and scored relative to other agents who operate in their same area, in order to iron out any regional differences in the property market. So, agents who do well relative to their local peers will score highly, regardless of their location.
Rightmove then passes an overall score to the Property Academy for each branch. Property Academy then combines this data with mystery shopping and website analysis to decide which agents are the winners of a Best Estate Agent Guide awards.
What, specifically, is measured?
The assessment focuses on the most important things that vendors or landlords look for when choosing an agent and more than a dozen metrics are taken into account. While we won’t reveal the exact methodology used in the scoring to ensure fairness, it broadly covers the essential parts of estate agency, as outlined below.
Well-presented properties attract more interest, which should result in a quicker sale or let. We measure the amount of leads generated and property detail views an agent gets on average compared to other agents in an area. We also take into account whether the property has a minimum of five photos and a floorplan – elements of an online property listing that buyers and tenants say are essential. New for 2021, we’ve considered whether a property offers an online viewing in its advert. 90% of buyers and tenants say they find these useful, and it’s quickly become a core expectation of an agent’s service since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ultimately, a vendor or landlord instructs an agent to sell or let their property and to do it quickly. So, we look at the amount of properties an agent takes on that they manage to sell, the average time it takes them to sell or let a property and the amount of deals that fall through – all compared to other agents in their area.
Finally, vendors and landlords put value in whether the agent is a trusted brand and has proven credibility at dealing with properties similar to theirs. So, an agent’s market share is also considered.
The data used for the 2021 assessment is from the period 1st October 2020 to 31st March 2021. This aligns with the time of year we’ve done the assessment in previous years.
How do you measure market share?
The vast majority of Rightmove agents have created their “patch” in Rightmove’s reports and this is used as the basis for calculating market share and for most measures that compare an agent’s performance to their local competitors.
Where an agent hasn’t created a patch, or if the patch they used is not representative of their stock, for the purposes of the assessment Rightmove will use a patch for an agents that is representative of where their stock was located over the assessment period.
An agent’s market share and competitive ranking for new listings, sales agreed and available stock is freely available to all Rightmove members within their Rightmove reports.
How can an agent see their results?
Agents who have performed the best across all of their branches will be listed on the Best Estate Agent Guide website by the Property Academy as award winners on 24th June 2021.
The overall winners in each size band will be revealed at the EA Masters event on 3rd November 2021.
Rightmove is not responsible for deciding who is an award winner, or for the mystery shop or website analysis results – this information is provided by the Property Academy.
Agents can request a Rightmove Health Check report for each of their branches here or via their Account Manager, which outlines the Rightmove data used as part of this assessment.
