Welcome to The Academy Blog

When I've told people about the launch of the new Academy site, and how it's free for everyone to access, the two questions I'm asked are "How and Why?"  Let's deal with the "Why?" first.  

The property industry has been hit harder than any other and whilst governments around the world are bailing out banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers and other large scale employers they've done nothing for estate agents. Thousands have lost their jobs, owners have stopped drawing salaries, investment for the future has been cut to zero.  So we asked ourselves the questions "what can we do to help the industry? And the answer - provide the best training in the industry free of charge.

But how can we do this?

I recently read "What would Google do?" by Jeff Jarvis where he poses this question for several business sectors (including real estate by the way) and concluded that the ways of funding a business and making a profit have changed since the times BG (Before Google). Suitably inspired, we decided to build an inclusive training platform and invited all the very best trainers to participate - Adam Walker, Richard Rawlings, Clare Fletcher, Julian O'Dell, Mark Hayward, Peter Chapman all agreed to share their wisdom, experience. I hope you will visit each of their web sites and see how they can help your business develop further as whilst online training is very cost effective it doesn't completely replace the live workshops.

Developing the Academy has required a substantial investment and the ongoing cost of maintaining the site itself is considerable.  In what some have described as "a leap of faith", we're confident that the site will attract a large and motivated audience who in turn will wish to learn more about appropriate products and services which will improve their business performance.

In addition to the video lessons we will be frequently posting articles of interest together with surveys, analysis and comment on topical issues.  You can access all this for free and stay up to date by registering your email on the site and by following and linking to this blog.

Please give us your feedback, suggestions and ideas - all will be carefully considered - and if you would like to make a contribution, as other leading agents such as Peter Rollings, John McGrath, Julie Twist, Jon Handford, Alan Robinson and many others have then please get in touch.

My hope is that The Academy helps you and your team to get through this difficult time and then to really prosper in the future.  Thank you for your support.
 
Peter Knight