The largest online property portal in the UK launched twenty years ago and has set the standard for portals since. The model is straightforward. Properties are categorised according to price, location and type and when a prospective homeowner or tenant finds something they like, they jump from the platform and into the arms of an estate agent or lettings company.
There is, however, a large community of property investors in the UK, not well-served by this approach. These buyers, from corporate investment firms to buy-to-let landlords, transact on and think about property in a very different way to a more-standard homeowner and they are hungry for data.
As such, they hang around in clusters on the internet, in Facebook groups and on forums, exchanging facts about local markets and trading tips on how to get good information on such things as rental demand, yield and capital growth.
These communities have a fundamental problem. Investors don’t tend to prefer one location over another.
A property that has a solid rental demand, a high yield and stable historic growth is a good investment but the challenge of finding that property on a location-based search engine, focusing on the question, ‘where would you like to live?’, leaves many investors, frustrated.
And it was through such frustration that Robert Jones decided to create property xyz, a property portal for investors, that was launched this summer.
An experienced investor himself, through his company Property Investments UK, Robert is also an educator and mentor, who, for ten years, has been teaching other investors how to read property markets through an often gruelling process of extracting piecemeal information from many different data sources, to slice and dice in a spreadsheet.
Alongside co-founder and technologist Dr Simone de Cola, Robert’s mission is to “build the world’s most intelligent property platform”, which captures market data from across the industry and presents it as deep insights into the properties that are for sale on the platform and as part of a research toolkit for property investors and buy-to-let landlords.
Yet investors are only one side of the equation.
While landlords can often struggle to find investment properties that fit their exact criteria, so too can agents and housing developers sometimes struggle to reach investors to buy their stock.
With property xyz, the idea is to bring all these parties together in one collaborative space, for the mutual benefit of all.
Looking to the future, property xyz has big plans. As Robert puts it, “The data revolution has really only just started and companies with a vision of how to transform the information at our disposal into something useful, find themselves empowered to make a meaningful difference in their respective industries, like never before.
But any information that doesn’t also provide insight is, by definition, not very helpful so, while we will continue to expand our data partnerships to bring richer content to the platform, our focus is very much on keeping the dialogue going with our stakeholders, property investors and agents so that we can work to supply them with everything they need.”
