By Trevor Abrahmsohn, OnTheMarket.com Founder and Glentree International CEO.
Sadly, the agents last vestige of independence and control will be gobbled up by CoStar as the majority of shareholders in OTM have agreed to take the money and run!
Unfortunately, this is ‘short termism on steroids’ and they will rue the day that they took gain today for pain tomorrow.
I must congratulate CoStar, they have bought significant market share at a bargain price and the ‘lemming syndrome’ is alive and well amongst our estate agent brethren.
I conceived OTM as a utility site for agents to try to defend against the abuse that was being meted out gratuitously by the duopolos incumbents Rightmove and Zoopla.
It was a 70% agent owned bastion and all those well-intentioned aspirations are now in the hands of CoStar.
Not only have they given up a chance to multiply their investment but, as they will find out to their cost, tariffs will rise exponentially, and they will be on the menu when the BBQ banquet is being organised by not two, but three portals.
It’s incredible when you think about the fact that agents own and control the data and the money that the portals thrive and depend on, and yet, counter-intuitively, you would have thought that the control of the process would, or should, never be lost.
Having set up OTM in the first place and worked tirelessly for eight years without a scintilla of remuneration and invested half a million pounds in order to encourage other institutional agent shareholders to do the same, I think I have done more than my bit for King and Country!
I bid a fond farewell to the high hopes and ideals that was the bedrock of my rationale but unfortunately; ‘non so blind as those who don’t want to see’.
R.I.P. OTM.