Through our neighbourhood coaching work Bromford are already changing the nature of the tenant/landlord relationship. How can technology help us support community innovation?
We’re always really excited to hear about the latest proptech developments. It's an area of fast growth, big ideas and ultimately has the potential to transform the way we offer our services, so we can provide the best possible user experience to our range of customers.
On Monday we hosted @tom_heylandlord from HeyLandlord, a platform that is looking to revolutionise property management and make it much simpler for tenants, landlords and contractors to engage. We first made the connection through Hyper Island and the idea was borne out of identifying various stress points Tom had highlighted talking to his father (who is a private landlord himself) and drawing upon his own experiences as a student renting accommodation. Communication between all relevant parties (or the lack/difficulty of it) stood out as the common thread, so Tom came up with the idea of a single, simple platform that embedded tools similar to those found in social media to make this process quick, easy and fully traceable.
Tom and his co-founder, Chris Collard (@_collard) started HeyLandlord in January 2017 and in a small space of time, they have built something that we think could have a huge impact and has the potential to grow and adapt more swiftly than the existing traditional housing proptech and software suppliers would ever dare to. Their development roadmap included looking at items such as integrating A.I for reporting repairs and video diagnostics, and their ideas don’t stop there.
We were really impressed by how something that was so simple could provide an effective yet enjoyable user experience so it got us thinking:
In our experience, we have found that one of the main reasons customers avoid contact online is that the interface is clunky, hard to use or does not integrate with existing technologies customers use on a regular basis. We have also noted in other tests that whilst customers often enjoy new technologies, without insight into how these should be used effectively, quite often customers will make the technology fit into their existing patterns and habits, as opposed to refreshing their thinking and ultimately adopting new behaviours.
Here at Bromford Lab, we feel there is significant insight to be gained from some tests around using products such as HeyLandlord to see whether keeping it simple would encourage more customers to break the habit of using traditional contact methods and switching online. We’re looking further into this and will keep you posted via the Trello Card!