BREAKING NEWS – top 5 stories 20/07/2021
Daily bite-sized proptech and real estate news in partnership with Proptech-X. Today, Stanton looks at Boomin, HomeHere & Auction House and more.
- Boomin gearing up to launch its valuation tool
- Pandemic changed buyer behaviour at auction
- Sadiq Khan to put former council homes back into the rental space
- Number of tenants not paying rent in PRS increases by 300%
- HomeHere focuses on better lead generation for agents
Boomin gearing up to launch its valuation tool
Boomin’s new valuation tool, SmartVal, will be free from next month for all of Boomin’s agency members.
Michael Bruce, the founder and CEO of Boomin, said: “Once again we are leading the way, providing our agent partners with new innovations that seek to draw more people into the property market, create new business opportunities for agents and provide them with a competitive advantage.”
Bruce states that SmartVal will combine data, speed and expert insight from local agents to provide consumers with “the quickest, most accurate online sales and lettings valuation on the market.”
Pandemic changed buyer behaviour at auction
Jeremy Prior, the co-chairman at Auction House, a national auction brand used by a large network of agents, reports revenue is at an all-time high with an uptick in the region of £60million.
The takeaway though is that some auction events were live in the room and some were completely virtual. Prior states that Covid has actually made buyers more open to tech and the use of video conferencing.
Prior says that buyers “have already started to learn to live with Covid and… that includes the buying and selling of property. What’s more, they have faith in bricks and mortar as a reliable investment, and faith in the auction process to deliver.”
Sadiq Khan to put former council homes back into the rental space
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has come up with an idea to solve the housing shortage by buying back ex-council houses that were sold off as part of the post-1980 changes, where council homes were sold at reduced prices to existing tenants.
It will be interesting to see this strategy at work. Given a lot of this stock has been sold on to a network of landlords in the PRS, will that not put a squeeze on the landlords of London and their right to earn a living?
Number of tenants not paying rent in PRS increases by 300%
Today there will be an event debating what should happen with the significant increase in rents not being paid either in full or in part.
The National Residential Landlords Association is poised to petition the Government, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak, on behalf of landlords across the land, with the hopes of getting something done.
HomeHere focuses on better lead generation for agents
Proptech company HomeHere has developed a top-quality digital screening service for estate and letting agents, a type of digital applicant box that co-exists with agents CRMs, analysing applicants in a way that empowers agents and the end-user.
By automating processes normally conducted by the agent, viewers can be booked into the agent’s diary after being digitally verified, so a lot of the legwork is removed at a cracking pace.
Lou Quinn, the co-founder of HomeHere, says that serious buyers or renters will engage with a software response first before a human if they are motivated, also they can do this at any point 24/7.
Quinn said: “If you are giving the buyer or renter the opportunity to take the next step themselves, if they are not willing to do that, perhaps the question is how interested they really are in that property.”
HomeHere’s tech removes the stress from rammed email boxes. All agents have to do is log into a website and they’ll have a comprehensive view of everything that is going on.
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