More than half of buyers and sellers still prefer to communicate face to face with their agents.

A survey was commissioned of over 1,000 people who have either bought or sold a property.  The survey suggests that there is still real value in estate agents having a high street presence.

The survey found that 56% prefer face to face communication.

Other methods were much less popular, with 16% wanting to communicate by phone, 15% by email, 5% by online chat, 2% via personal apps or dashboards, and 2% by text.

Broken down by age group, the results reflect generational differences, with the highest proportion of votes for using a personal app/dashboard coming from 16 to 24-year-olds (10%); 35-44s gave the highest proportion of responses to using online chat (9.4%); and 35-44s and 45-54s had the highest proportion of votes for text communication, albeit at just 3.1% and 3.2%.

Even so, among all age groups, face to face communication was easily the most popular.

In the youngest age group, the 16 to 24-year-olds, talking face to face was preferred by 52.5%.

The survey was carried out in June by Censuswide.