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The Big Interview: Estate Agent Today editor tells us her fave estate agent joke

20090604Rosalindrenshaw Estate Agent Today... it may sound like the start of Have I Got News For You missing word round, but everybody who reads it - including the entire Rat and Mouse staff, religiously - knows that it's one of the most incisive and interesting property publications anywhere. Which is due, largely, to its experienced and talented editorial director Rosalind Renshaw. We were delighted when she agreed to talk with us.

So, you’re at a party, and somebody asks you what you do for a living. Does your answer tend to result in an anti-agent tirade? How do you deal with this?

Yes, I do often get anti-agent tirades, and not necessarily at parties. A few years ago, a journalist on the Daily Mail, who was at that time covering property, literally turned on his heels when I mounted a defence for agents. It is very difficult to persuade people that there are honest, nice and professional agents out there – and that they’re in the majority.

Could you tell me a bit about the background to EAT? Were you its launch editor?

Yes, I was the launch editor and never has there been such a rapid launch. I attended just one planning meeting where we all agreed we’d go for it – which we duly did about three weeks later – and threw around some ideas. It was partly driven by the fact that two weeks or even a month was too long to deliver news, and partly by the feeling that suppliers o the industry, struggling in the recession, might perhaps be interested in a fresh and much more cost-effective environment.Other than Rat and Mouse, which is largely London-oriented, there was not at that time a purely online national news service for estate agents. Yet the print magazines were clearly having a hard time, with advertising revenues plunging and production costs remaining high. Having experienced the recession of the early nineties, when I was working as a property editor and saw four of my five titles fold within the same week, I knew that traditional trade print mag
azines, which are wholly reliant on advertising revenue, were in for a prolonged and very savage ride. The launch was very exciting, as it rapidly became clear we had a winner. We made all the mistakes we would have made in a soft launch in public. We also played around with frequency, trying it daily, once a week and twice a week, before settling into a three-day week format (although the website can be accessed daily, and there is usually something new on it).

And this was after a long period at The Negotiator? What encouraged you to make the move?

The credit crunch and the desire to break new ground.

Who owns EAT? How does it make money?

EAT is owned by a tiny publishing group called Angels who are young and entrepreneurial, and busy bringing out other ‘Today’ titles. The idea is that they make (or at least, will make) money by offering a range of online marketing and advertising solutions. We don’t ever plan to charge subscriptions and we will always keep the editorial side of the site totally independent from advertising.

How many people write for the website?

I have as many staff as I did when I was at The Negotiator – me!

The rest of the interview, including Rosalind's favourite estate agency joke, here.

Technorati Tags: property, real estate

What do you know about its readership? Can you give out any information about traffic?

Here are last month’s (May’s) stats: Page loads: 289,297. Unique visitors: 104, 697. A visitor went to 2.32 pages every time they came to EAT. Each visitor spent on average 2m 21 seconds on the site.

Writing for and about estate agents must give you a unique perspective into the dark art… Have you developed more or less sympathy for an industry with – let’s face it – a poor public image?

I’ve always liked estate agents. I couldn’t do their job and for the most part I think they do it brilliantly – dealing with some of the most stressed people on the planet, nursing chains through, negotiating, and, over the last year, having to stay motivated in an awful market when they could have given in to boredom and misery. They also work extremely long hours. The industry also has some real characters in it. I have never thought they deserved their bad image. However, that doesn’t mean I am uncritical – I am certainly concerned by the activities of some letting agents, and am very uneasy about referral fees.

How do you retain a good relationship with agents (presumably your primary source of material?) while still covering the scandals, regulatory issues etc?

Well, you certainly can’t expect to be popular with everyone and I am sure I have hacked off a number of agents. But yes, they remain easily my best contacts for the inside track on news. Sadly, the industry has become so respectable that we haven’t had a really juicy scandal for ages – at least, not a reportable one.

What’s the secret to encouraging agents to take part in the conversation? We’re positive agents read the Rat and Mouse, but getting them to contribute anything other than anonymous tips – largely criticizing the competition – is very difficult. How can I change to the Rat and Mouse from guilty pleasure to forum for opinions?

When we first started, we didn’t accept posts until a reader kindly suggested it. We feel they are now a major reason for people reading the site, although I have to say the posts are a two-edged sword: to put it politely, some do not always show our readers in the best light. Experience shows that agents will almost always respond to stories with ‘HIPs’ or ‘Rightmove’ in the headline, but you can never quite tell what will draw most response. Obviously ‘sex’ in the headline also helps, whereas ‘survey’ sends people to sleep. The posts are very lightly moderated and we only take down the minimum – obvious libel is the main reason. I leave plain insults up there (unless the recipient complains to me). Quite a few of the insults are about me and they also stay: readers question my editorial judgement, not always politely, and they aren’t afraid to let me know if a particular story has bored them rigid. We recently had a string of posts from agents all saying that a story was so boring that none of them had bothered to read it!

Where, now, for the profession? Will the online model – like Brightsale, for instance – eventually replace bricks-and-mortar storefronts? Or will the more radical sale-by-owner model – now that it’s so cheap and easy to reach people online – be the future?