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Online Estate Agents Online estate agents are an alternative to traditional estate agents who claim to offer lower fees, nationwide coverage and a better service that traditional agents. The first online estate agents started trading in 2004, with Housenetwork (2004) and Hatched (2006) widely considered to be pioneers of the online estate agency model.

In recent times, online estate agents, or hybrid, as they are sometimes known, have raised large amounts of funding from private investors and crowd funding as they try to disrupt the estate agency industry. They include Purplebricks, EasyProperty , Emoov and Housesimple.

More recently, high street agents have acquired some online estate agents to complement their range of services. In what was described as an 'industry defining moment', the first acquisition of an online estate agent was by one of the largest property services group in the UK, when Connells Group acquired Hatched.co.uk in November 2015. Other acquisitions include Savills who acquired YOPA in June 2016.