Emoov founder Russell Quirk has admitted that his predictions about the online agency sector were wrong. He had previously predicted in 2013 that online agents would have a 35% share of the estate agency market within five years - by 2018.

However, he now says that online agents won’t get beyond a 10% market share. A  decade on from launching Emoov – which has since entered administration and been relaunched with a different owner – Quirk, now concentrating on public relations, has warned on his Twitter account that online agents suffer from being seen as “too cheap” or “too good to be true”.

Purplebricks, which is now the largest online estate agent in the UK, has seen its share price crash by 73% since July 2017, with mounting losses in the US and Australia revealing the limitations of its business model.