The new British challenger property portal Boomin has received the backing of The Guild of Property Professionals, an influential agent organization with some 800 members across the country. The backing comes after Boomin founder Michael Bruce entered into an agreement with the guild “that guarantees the integrity of data and its ownership rights, as well as the primacy of the agent/customer relationship”.
Bruce is well known among agents in The UK for being the co-founder of online brokerage and agent-scourge Purplebricks, and the guild admitted in a statement that because of Bruce’s past, “opinion on Boomin has been divided” with many fearing that Boomin might eventually seek to bypass agents from the equation and go directly to vendors or use agent data in ways that cut them out.
These fears have been allayed however with an agreement between the two parties which will see all agent data pass-through a specially developed Guild-controlled platform before being fed to Boomin. With the agreement in place, The Guild is now officially recommending that its agents sign up to Boomin which is offering agents free use of the site for 2021 and a flat fee structure until 2024 if they become ‘Founder Agents’.
The important backing of a reputable industry association comes at a good time for Boomin as its delayed December launch was chalked up in some quarters to an inability to sign up enough agents before its mooted launch date. Although no concrete launch date has yet been divulged by the portal, the backing of The Guild will no doubt see more agents commit to list and may precipitate a launch which in December was delayed until “early next year”.
Since its inception in early 2020, Boomin has played the portal PR game very well generating a number of positive headlines and winning over sceptics. The portal is believed by many industry insiders to be the only challenger portal with the financial muscle to take on Rightmove and Zoopla and has already promised to flex these muscles in a marketing campaign and promote agents’ brands alongside its own.
To read more about Boomin’s business model and its short history, head over to our analysis of the company’s marketing video for agents.
