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Responding to Arthur and Steve B in particular: My firm was part of QS for a time. We left becuase we founf it didn't work for us. Part of the appeal to us was that we expected some savings through economies of scale, benefits from wider advertising including TV adverts, and better brand recognition, and we thought that it might be useful to have input about dealing with things in a more commercial way, with improved conversion rates etc.
We found that none of that really materialised for us. The 'deals' QS gave us access to were no better than (and in many cases worse) than what we could negotiate for ourselves, and came without the benefits of building relationships with other local businesses.

Advertising was very slow to materialise.

When the QS website was rolled out it was much worse than the one we already had, and there were a lot of issues with it, to the extent that we ended up reviving our own to run along side it, so that was another thing which should have saved times anad costs and didn't (We also had ssues with QS being unable to promptly or accurately correct or change errors in parts of 'our' website which we didn't have access to, and specifc assurances we had been given about content for the webpage were not kept.

I suspect that some of these issues may well have been ironed out for later joiners, or those who chose to stay.

In terms of the commercial attitudes - we found that QS would come up with innovative new ideas and that we would mostly find ourselves saying "Er, yes, we're doing that already" or "Um, we were doing that until we joined QS and you told us to do it your way instead".

In the same way, we didn't find that either the volume of enquiries, or our conversion rates went up.

The only thing we foun that QS offered which we couldn't do alone was TV and National Newsprint coverage and ads.

We made the decision that we could make bettter use of our money. The amount we were paying QS buys a *lot* of local advertising and sponsorship, and the targeted, local publicity works better *for us*.

We are a long established firm with offices in 3 rural towns. I would imagine that the dynamics might be very different for a firm of a simialr size based in a large city or suburb.