The Rise of Proptech: How to buy back your time and prepare for the future
In property, it's easy to be "busy being busy." Between the spreadsheets, deal calculators and the admin of mail merge and direct-to-vendor (DTV) letter campaigns, many investors are left with little time to focus on the important things: having the right conversations with the right motivated sellers.
Thankfully, property technology, or "proptech," is changing the way landlords who are expanding their portfolios work. It has never been easier to find motivated sellers and use systems that save your most valuable asset: time.
Here's how proptech is changing the industry, what the future holds and how to prepare for it.
My original career was as a bridge engineer. Initially involved in building Discovery Channel grade superstructures around the world. In the UK, I was mainly carrying out major repairs and emergency work on key pieces of infrastructure.
My career eventually brought me to England permanently, in 2016. Being very practical, I’d always had a passion for property, having bought my first one in France, in 2013. I became obsessed with the possibilities in the UK market; its uniqueness and unique finance systems.
In the meantime, with a fast-paced corporate career, for the first time and at the senior position I had achieved, I realised that I didn’t want my boss’s job this time, and so I began pursuing this obsession for property, after getting educated in 2018.
From my first viewing, I was shocked at how far behind the property industry seemed to be. Everything seemed to be old-fashioned and dated.
At one point, I was wasting my time scrolling through the portals, randomly booking five to ten viewings a week and spending a small fortune on untargeted DTV letters.
Ultimately, every success in property comes down to finding great deals. I found that the way to secure the best deals was to identify ‘problem properties’ or ‘problem scenarios for vendors’ and create ‘win-win’ solutions for the vendors. Whatever this looks like.
Then you have all the admin of progressing your deals, following up, never mind managing efficient DTV letter campaigns that actually convert deals.
This is why to find good deals you need motivated sellers you can help. Trying to find them by randomly doing as many viewings as possible - or worse - randomly sending letters (to neither motivated vendors nor actual sellers, just some random person with an address!) is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s exhausting and time or resource consuming.
Trying to free up my time and after searching everywhere for a solution that actually worked to get me deals, I created my own software, which would identify motivated sellers, as well as taking care of the admin around due diligence and organising my follow ups.
It did this by tracking properties where the sale had fallen through, the asking price had been reduced, or multiple agents were marketing the property etc.
At the time, this software was just for me and my business partner. It didn’t have a name, other than ‘le software’.
We started to do quite well, going full time in property and within 18 months of using the now named: ‘Property Filter Blueprint’, having also won some industry awards, many people were asking us how to get access to it.
And rather immaturely, our initial response was, “build your own!” It took us a couple of years before we gave it to some of our property friends, who also started to do really well from using it too, which prompted them to start asking for more features….
We became accidental ‘proptech’ entrepreneurs.
Property Filter is currently the highest rated platform for finding property deals, with over 1,400 of the most serious property investors subscribed, doing deals with it every day up and down the country.
They are doing ten times fewer viewings, send ten times fewer letters, but are getting ten times more interesting conversations with the right vendors.
Most serious people subscribing to Property Filter will do at least one deal per year minimum, with some of our members now doing over thirty deals per year, all through the system.
And we’re only just getting started with the product development!
I think one of the biggest things that will change is the conveyancing process. The current system is extremely dated and far too slow.
I predict, that with the right combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology, we could begin to see a sales process that once took three months to complete, take three days.
AI will also become more prominent. We’ve seen increased hype around that with the rise of ChatGPT, although, ChatGPT is a language model and not true AI.
People will need to understand the difference between the two, before they can be used correctly.
More than a year ago now, we integrated ChatGPT into Property Filter, to draft DTV letters.
We can connect this to data, so that the letter is relevant.
For example, if the sale has fallen through twice, ChatGPT will include this in the letter.
And like any software with large language models, use them as tools and adopt an editor mindset.
However, I do think we are a number of years from seeing any huge changes.
Right now, we’re just at the start.
The Rise of Software as a Service (SaaS)
There are hundreds of companies that have spent millions building software solutions you can access and leverage for a few pounds a month.
This is how you’ll be able to build huge capacity on a very lean team and drastically increase your growth rate and margins.
The property sector, however, is weirdly and hugely behind on adoption of these tools, especially for people who lack time.
They still want to do things themselves on spreadsheets, moan about the government and not really progress on their portfolio growth or margins.
We will see people awaken to the use of SaaS in the property management space, making it easier to file documents, collect payments and communicate with tenants through one central hub.
Scale quicker with Property Filter.
Get Excited for the Future
My advice is not to worry about these changes. Embrace them. Landlords once had to move from newspaper adverts to Rightmove.
Get excited for the future and leverage your time, so you can start having the right conversations with the right people. Don't waste your energy on tens of viewings and hundreds of letters, like I did.
Read more investor interviews and strategy pieces at Blue Bricks Magazine.
We wanted to say a special thank you to Blue Bricks Magazine, by giving their readers an 8-day free trial to Property Filter, plus a £100 off voucher they can use on any membership.
