The recent Relocation Agent Network (RAN) Park Plaza Riverbank in London marked the 30th anniversary since the organisation was set-up.
Someone who could never have been accused of being a shrinking violet, Simon Whale opened the event by announcing that given that the last time RAN had had a full conference Huw Edwards was the host that it was probably lucky that Greg Wallace had been unavailable to attend this years due to an ‘unspecified clash in the diary’.
To reaffirm the need to be different Suzanna Mavity of Acaboom with her “Are you just another estate agent, or do you stand out?” gave a whistle stop tour of the things that some of the best agents were doing around presentations and valuations that were having such a dramatic effect in improving MA conversion rates.
Peter Rollings, Katie Darlow, Lizzie Benton and Vince Courtney took on the opening question time panel from those topics concerning everything from recruitment and retention through to the biggest risks and opportunities that 2025 has to offer.
A tech overview of some of the best suppliers making waves for the leading agents, many highlighting the Ai tools that have been promised but until now failed to deliver.
And in an industry first RAN unveiled that it was teaming up with Gluedog to be its Network Integration Partner that is trying to solve one of most agents bane of their lives, the inability of the tech suppliers to integrate together. Mark McCorrie, their CEO, gave a summary of their new solution and it was highlighted that around 2000 offices including some high profile brands had indicated that they would be basing their buying decisions moving forwards with a key element being whether a supplier was Gluedog enabled or not.
A lettings panel, hosted by Matt Goddard, with Megan Eighteen, Rhiannon Llewellyn, Peter Fuller, Ricky Purdy gave their expert advice on how to make the most out of this side of the business and the challenges of the Renters reform bill, acquiring rent rolls, developing client services departments amongst others.
In a couple of industry exclusives, centred around the review and reputation space, Ben Marley of Geocale spoke for the first time about his new business & flagged that almost half of all enquiries were going to the top 3 businesses in the Google search mapping frame, and crucially given the 149 different criteria that define what puts you there his Top 10 Tips to make a difference.
‘Making Word of Mouth work for you’ was a session with Simon Leadbetter where he educated the crowd as to how some of the biggest names around the world use Net Promoter Score to benchmark their businesses around customer satisfaction and how it has the tightest correlation to long term profitability of any metric.
Given the 30th Year angle it was only fitting that a panel of some of the key people that had maze the network such a success with Richard Tucker returning to co host the panel with the likes of Russell Manning, Richard Palfreeman, Kelly Gardner, Roy Hawkins, Mike Poole. No punches were pulled there as they called it as they saw it!.
Mal McCallion of ModelProp offered his state of the union address about where AI was up to at the moment with his talk ‘AI Vs The Portals’.
Then keynote speaker Roger Martin Fagg the behavioural economist gave his expert analysis on what the budget means for us, and probably more importantly what effect Trumps likely to have. He was ‘cautiously optimistic’ which was the theme of the day and indeed his six-year strategic outlook of a positive property market barring black swan events was well received by all.
In the evening, Kerry Godliman, co star of Ricky Gervais’***** show ‘After Life’, wowed the crowd and awarded some of the best agents across the country with their trophies after their efforts this year. This culminated in Richard James being crowned the overall ‘RAN Agent of the Year’ to amazing support from their fellow peers in the network.
Whale commented: “Contrary to popular belief I’m not one to drink my own Kool Aid and so even though so many people said lovely things on the day and social media was buzzing for days after the event, I wanted to take stock and so we left it a while before sending out a pretty comprehensive survey to both the agents & the suppliers who attended. On a Net Promoter Score basis, where as Simon Leadbetter had enlightened us all earlier in the day that a positive NPS score is doing well, then to see us get an score of 94 from the agents and 89 from the suppliers was mind blowing, even more so considering that was from over 70% of those who attended.
“Over the last three decades this network has delivered millions of pounds of referral fees to its members and so it only felt fitting we did it justice with a proper event like this. If you’re not taking advantage of out of area referrals then very simply you’re leaving money on the table for your corporate competitors to take advantage of. With over 98% of our leads placed this year we’re very proud that we’re putting RAN very firmly back on the map & I couldn’t be more excited about our plans for 2025. ”
