Moving home, whether as a buyer, seller, tenant or landlord, can be an arduous process. Two new sites aim to harness the power of tech to ease your property pain.
For lettings
If there’s one thing about renting that tenants, landlords and lettings agents can all agree on, it’s the unnecessary bureaucracy and lack of transparency of the process.
Billed as a ‘rental passport’, property platform Goodlord, which recently secured £2million of funding from Islington-based venture capitalists Local Globe, aims to change all that.
Through the website, which will also be available as an app from late summer, tenants can pay their holding deposits, complete their references and sign their tenancy agreement from their computer, or mobile phone.
Landlords can receive and sign offer letters from anywhere in the world, with references readily available.
Goodlord was founded by ex-Foxtons agent Richard White and is used by more than 200 lettings agencies.
Mr White said: “Tenants don’t have to leave work early to trudge around flats and fill out paperwork and they don’t have printers or scanners to process all that paperwork.
“In addition it provides a guarantee that tenants’ requests will actually happen, they can’t just be agreed verbally and forgotten about. As long as the landlord signs off on it and it’s agreed it’s absolutely binding.”
LocalGlobe’s cofounder Robin Klein said: “Generation Rent is rightly demanding better customer service from letting agents.
“For too long tenants have felt powerless in a market where transactions were anything but transparent. Goodlord puts that right.”
For sales
Brand new website seewhoslooking.com, which is soft launching in north west London, makes even industry disrupting property portals like Rightmove look dated.
What is intriguing about the new site is its emphasis on people rather than properties.
Buyers and sellers each fill in a detailed questionnaire about who they are and what they want or have to offer and the service matches the seller with a buyer’s criteria.
Unusually, at no point during this part of the process does either party actually see a property.
The comparisons with dating apps are obvious, “We’re like Tinder for property,” say the apps founders Sarah Myers – a former Hampstead Garden Suburb estate agent – and amateur property developer Mich Preston.
In fact, it’s more like an old fashioned matchmaking agency, acting as a broker between two parties with specific requirements.
At the moment the site is free to use, but in the next few weeks the pair will be introducing a £29.99 fee for sellers who want to connect with any buyers they’ve matched with.
“Trying to be seen as a hot buyer, constantly chasing estate agents to find out if they’ve got any new properties they haven’t shown you, always being up against cash buyers, or as a seller having to chase up feedback after viewings and not being able to be proactive about selling your house are all frustrations of the process,” say Preston and Myers.
“We’re aiming to get around some of these frustrations with the service.”
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