What financial advisers can learn from estate agents

The financial services industry should take a leaf from the book of this new breed of estate agency, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

If you drive around Edinburgh, Fife or the Borders these days, you see an awful lot of signs from an estate agency called Mov8. Five years ago, you didn't see any. It's been a very fast expansion. And like all fast expansions, it's been driven by innovation. Mov8 doesn't charge you a percentage of the sale price of your house to flog it. It charges you a flat fee of £600 wherever it is and whatever it is valued at.

You will say that this means Mov8 has no incentive to sell your house at the highest price possible. After all, a traditional agent gets more commission for nudging the price up than he does for just flogging it at the asking price or less. But the truth is that most estate agents don't really have an incentive to sell high. It isn't price that gets them going. It's turnover.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.