SOFTWARE REVIEW
Innovations in residential software
Sophistication, integration, automation is the name of the game, says Andrea Kirkby.
Software series Part 1
SophiStication There have been a few changes in agents’ priorities, though, since the credit crunch. Interestingly enough, the main change doesn’t seem to be a priority for cost- cutting. As more estate agents have added property management to their portfolios in order to acquire a recurring revenue base, they have been looking for software that can handle both sales agency and lettings/ property management tasks. LetMC has, historically, only supplied
software for letting agents, so while they still focus on lettings and property management, the cloud computing nature of their software allows it to be integrated with leading sales and marketing software, giving customers the best of both worlds. Director, Glynn Trott says, “A good number of our clients now offer both sales and lettings. We’ve found from our own experience that there are on average three times more letting agents now compared to the number in 2007, and a lot of these were born from established estate agents seeing the appeal of the rental market in the current financial climate.” Nick Hubbard at Estates IT has similar
views: “The recent upheavals in the property market have led estate agents to diversify from simple sales or lettings operations and add sustainable revenue streams such as property management. We always viewed Property Management as a good foundation for cash flow and an ideal way of increasing landlord commitment so our property management module was planned from the start.
T
hings are looking up for property software developers, now that the credit crunch is behind us. As recently as last year
agents were still shying away from investment in
software. Agency Expo, formerly the Property Computer Show, gave up the ghost after a very quiet show in 2008 – Philip Evans of PEX Software says, “basically no estate agents came” and didn’t return in 2010 as planned. But in the last three or four months, he says, “these guys have really woken up.”
Mark Goddard, Group MD of GMG
Property Services, tells the same story. “This is our best year since 2008,” he says. “Estate agents are very engaged with software at the moment.” He feels that agents are more sophisticated in their use of software and more dependent on it. “Few clients were using even 40 per cent of our software capability five years ago , now, they’re using 60 to 70 per cent of it. It’s a sea change in terms of how they’re using the vendor/applicant match tool for instance, and the data reporting tools. They’re getting smarter about what data they capture, and how they use it.”
integration GMG Property Services has had to rethink the separation of sales and management tasks, Mark Goddard says. “Five years ago we didn’t have many clients who wanted to talk to us about sales and property management in the same breath. Now we do. They are two very different beasts, but now we want them to work together.” There is now a data bridge between Vebra Live and GMG’s property management system, allowing agents to create a common database while retaining the ‘best of breed’ qualities of separate systems. “We have to be more flexible in how our software deals with revenue streams and with the client base.” And the agents are having to get a bit
more savvy, Glyn Trott says, “Our clients are having to think outside the box when it comes to their USP, as there’s much more competition to contend with.”
PROPERTYdrum JUNE 2011 17
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