Jet Agent For Sale On Trade Me

Thursday, 10 July 2008, 9:50 am

Jet Agent the virtual licensed real estate agent has put its website up for sale on Trade Me. Jet Agent was launched by its founders John and Andrea Bradley around Christmas last year and its goal has been to virtualise the role of a real estate agent and provide an online platform for home sellers to sell their home at much lower fees. It is claimed by Jet Agent that the business model is consistent with other developments overseas and the overall trend toward the Internet in general.

However, the company is now struggling financially due to a lack of working capital and as a final resort to keep the concept alive the website itself has been offered for sale.

During the past months the owners have not been idle in their attempts to attract additional equity and Mr Bradley said that they had put their energies into preparing a public offer but now this appears to have been the wrong option.

For example, if you were planning a one month trip around South America you would probably use a travel agent. However, to book an intercity airline trip & a rental car you are more likely to use the net.

I can see that similar principles are likely to be used with online real estate. Already we recognise that many of our listings are property investors and builders who don’t need an agent’s negotiating skills and prefer to do the deal themselves. They just need a wider market and a bit of backup.

In other words, our initial market is those people who were unlikely to use an agent anyway. You could say that we’re just bringing them back into the fold.

We have a long way to go but some of the early adopters are telling us its a cool idea.

You raise a good question in your last paragraph. And the fact that you have 200 listings gives some real credibility to what you are doing.

Some people believe it’s either/or. That is, either you’ll have services like your that cut services and cots, or services like traditional agents–but not both in the same market.

I believe there will be room for both in the market. The success of a model like yours wouldn’t mean the end of traditional agents. It would just mean their are more options on table.

It will be interesting to see how things play out. Would you update us over time on how your business is doing? It will be interesting to watch.

I reviewed your comments with interest.

The points you have made can be summarised in two groups. The first is to do with value for money and the second is to do with traffic.

In regard to traffic, sure we have low volumes. That is inevitable with start ups. However, we do expect traffic to increase as our marketing kicks in and I invite you to have another look at the site. I note your comments were published on 2 May. At that time we held around 30 listings. Today, less than a month later we have topped 200. So things have started to move for us.

I would like to point out also that these are listings. Not advertising placements. We can sell these properties just like a real estate agent and collect a success fee (out of the deposit). After all that