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A number of attempts have been made to take on the big two providers. With member buy-in, this will be a priority.
Daft.ie and Myhome.ie both make profits of more than €5m p.a. from estate agent’s fees, listings, and associated advertising. As recently reported in the Irish Times (Oct. 2021), Daft.ie paid a €15.37m dividend in 2021.
In short that is a lot of money taken out of Estate Agents pockets. If profit is to be made, lets’ make it ourselves, or alternatively, one can reduce listing fees for agents.
Property Technology
Prop tech opportunities arise with increasing regularity. If they look like being profitable, we should be there, utilising our scale and our shareholder’s expertise to get in on the ground floor and avail of profitable opportunities on behalf of IEAS and its shareholders.
Professional Indemnity Insurance
All estate agents need professional indemnity insurance. If we can provide it at the same price as existing providers, we would hope that shareholders and others would take up the opportunity.
Stationary and other office essentials
An Estate Agency Office Supplies company would be able to use its scale and the power of bulk buying to be competitive and provide office supplies both to agents and outside the estate agency original business targets.
Recruitment services
Here is another market where we can provide a service to members. There are 5,000 plus registered and licensed property service providers. There must be the same number again in administration/support/accounts and financial staff.
IEAS Recruitment could be a market leader in Estate Agent (and associated staffing) recruitment before branching out to other related markets.
Retrofit Ireland
The recently announced government initiative to upgrade existing homes is another great opportunity which might have been overlooked, by estate agents. Grants are available, and an average retrofit will cost in the region of €50,000 to €75,000. Customer acquisition is a cost for all businesses, and the same will be true for companies offering “Retrofitting” services to property owners (landlords and home-owners alike), our customers, whether past or present.
Many companies would be happy to pay for a successful referral, and with customer acquisition costs of circa 10 to 15% of the project value, there is a multi-million opportunity here for estate agents who are the recognised “go to“ person for all types of property advice.
IEAS can become the market leader in these product/services?
All services will be competitively priced, and available for non-shareholding Estate Agents to sell/avail of if they wish. The question is, how best do we monetise these? Do we licence each of the above to an experienced operator for 3-to-5-year terms (renewed at our discretion only), or set up a joint venture?
