At Home Estates: one town, and what the focus buys them

What we found

At Home Estates are a single office independent agency in Horsham. One branch on the Carfax, a sales team and a lettings team, and a patch that barely leaves the town.

The stock is ordinary family housing, and that is the point. The middle home is £425,000 and about 958 square feet. 55 of the 67 are within five miles of the office.

That is the headline, and it holds up in every price band we could test. The question this report answers is what it is costing them.

Where they list

Every dark dot is a home At Home are selling right now. Every pale dot is a rival listing in the same ten miles. The rings are five and ten miles from their office.

This is the opposite of a spread out agency. 61 of their 67 homes have another At Home home within a mile. The whole book fits in 5 postcode districts and 17 miles end to end. One home in Capel, at 11.5 miles, is the only real outlier.

Look at the pale dots and you can see what they are leaving alone. Crawley, eight miles north, has over 700 homes for sale between its two postcodes. At Home have one of them.

Only some rival listings carry an exact position, so the pale dots are a large sample of the 2,562 rivals, not all of them. At Home's 67 are all placed by postcode.

They own a slice of one town and nothing else

This is their share of every home listed within ten miles of the office, split by postcode district.

Crawley alone has 392 homes for sale and they have none of them. Cranleigh has 267, Dorking and Capel 169, Haywards Heath 122. That is nearly a thousand homes on the market inside half an hour of their door, with no At Home board on any of them.

Their homes sell faster than the market

We pulled every live listing within ten miles of their office. That is 2,610 homes from 208 agents. 48 of them are At Home's.

It is not that their homes are cheaper. Their middle asking price is within a few thousand pounds of the market's. The gap holds in three of the four price bands, and it is widest at the top end, where they are quickest of all.

The one band where they only match the market is £300k to £500k, at 63 days each. That is the most crowded part of the Horsham market and it is where every agent in town is competing.

How long the current book has been out there

Counted from the first day each home appeared on Rightmove.

The middle home has been on the market 55 days. Only 2% have been out there over a year, against 7% for everyone else. There is almost no dead stock here.

Longest sitting

These are the only homes on the book worth a conversation about price or presentation. On a book of 67, that is a short list.

Eight years on their home patch

We pulled every advert that has come off the market within five miles of their office, back to 2018. That is 20,637 old listings from 330 agents. It shows how much of Horsham each agent has actually handled.

At Home have handled 886 of them. That puts them 8th of 330 agents in their own town, ahead of Hamptons, Connells, Purplebricks and Savills, even counting all of their branches together.

They went from one advert in 2019 to a settled share of the town by 2022, and they have held it since. That is a business that grew fast and then stopped growing.

One caveat. Homes listed in the last few months are still live, so they are not in the come-off-the-market count. That flatters the older firms slightly and understates this year.

Two thirds of the book is already sold

43 of the 67 homes on their website are sold or under offer. Only 24 are still looking for a buyer.

The homes still available have a middle price of £537,500. The ones already agreed have a middle price of £400,000. So the same mild pattern shows up here as everywhere: the dearer homes take longer. But at £537,500 against £400,000 this is a small gap, not a problem.

What the money looks like

If every home on the book completed at a 1.5% fee, that is about £447,000 of fee income. The 43 already agreed are worth £17.9m in sale price, so roughly £269,000 of that fee is already won and waiting on solicitors.

Their middle home works out at about £420 a square foot. Homes actually sold near the office run at about £546 a foot for a detached, £452 for a terrace and £344 for a flat. They are asking sensible money, which is the other half of why the homes move.

Only 33% of their live listings have had a price cut, against 38% for the rest of the market. Where they do cut, the average cut is 5.0% against the market's 7.3%. On a £425,000 home that is about £21,250 off the seller instead of £31,025.

So is the tight patch smart

Yes, and the numbers say so plainly. A one office agency that concentrates gets a real buyer list, real board presence and real word of mouth. That is why they sell in 55 days when the market takes 82.

But focus this tight has three costs, and all three are visible in the data.

• The ceiling is close. They are 42 of 867 live listings in RH12 and RH13. Even doubling their share of their own town only doubles the business, and it means taking listings off five well established local rivals.
• They are one market's weather. Everything they own depends on Horsham. If Horsham slows, the whole book slows. There is no second patch to lean on.
• The growth stopped. Their share of Horsham has been flat for four years. They built something good and then held it steady.

What we would change

• Lead with the speed number, not the awards. 55 days against 82 is provable, it is about the seller and not about them, and no rival in Horsham is saying it. The awards page says a panel liked them. This says sellers get moved.
• Pick one next town, not five. Billingshurst already works at 2.01%. Southwater is theirs historically. The obvious next step is one adjoining market taken seriously, not a scatter of one-off listings.
• Crawley is the elephant. 392 homes for sale, eight miles away, zero At Home boards. It is a different market and cheaper stock, so it may be a deliberate no. But it should be a decision, not an accident.
• The book is thin, not slow. 24 homes actually available is a small shop window. The work is winning more instructions, not shifting old ones.
• Use the speed to win the instruction. Every valuation should end with the same line, backed by the same data: the market takes 82 days, we take 55.