Why most PropTech never gets past the front desk

In eighteen years running an agency I must have sat through several hundred PropTech demos. I bought maybe a dozen. I kept perhaps six. If you sell software to estate agents, the odds are not in your favour, and it is rarely because the product is bad.

You are selling to the wrong person

Founders want to talk to the owner. Fair enough, the owner signs. But the owner is not the one who will use it. The office manager or the head of lettings is, and if they do not want it, it will quietly die within six months no matter what I signed. The demos that worked were the ones where the salesperson asked to meet my team first.

You are solving a problem I do not feel

I never once lay awake worrying about my data architecture. I lay awake worrying about a landlord who was about to leave, a tenant who had not paid, a negotiator who was about to resign. If your product cannot be explained in terms of one of those, it does not matter how clever it is.

Your demo was run by someone who has never valued a house

Agents can tell in thirty seconds whether the person in front of them has done the job. If they have not, every claim gets discounted by half. The companies that got through either hired ex-agents or brought one in to help them pitch.

You priced it for a corporate

Most independents are one to three branches with an owner who does the banking on a Friday. Pricing that works for a 200-branch group is a joke to them. The products that stuck had a price that was obviously less than the cost of the problem.

You asked me to change how I work

The products I kept slotted into what we already did. The products I binned asked everyone to learn something new in a business that is already running flat out. If your onboarding takes more than a morning, that is the reason you are losing renewals.

What to do about it

Before you spend another pound on marketing, get in front of real owners and let them tell you the truth. That is what the Owners’ Panel is for, and it is why I now spend part of my time advising PropTech companies. Eighteen years as the customer is a different kind of knowledge, and it is the kind most of them are missing.