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IN PROFILE
Charlie Wright, co-founder and chief executive of BPM Media Group, and architect of The Bu2iness talks about how his new product will help agents make the leap from old-tech to the newest business productivity technology available, while lowering IT costs. The Bu2iness is a new website which gives agents all web marketing tools such as a property website, portal uploads, applicant matching and emailing, completely free.
BPM Media is five years old now, and you have worked exclusively in this industry for 10 years, why are you only just launching this product now?
As all agents will know, the software market for residential property is very crowded and becoming increasingly so. It was important that we did not bring a new product to market which was going to be just another contender - we had to wait until something new and exciting was possible and that involved patience. But now, thanks to web technologies which have only become available in the last 12-18 months, it is now possible to achieve things which were impossible before. Apart from Google and Facebook, we are among the first people using these innovations in web products.
What new things are now possible as a result?
Well, for starters The Bu2iness is the only product available which provides any residential estate agent with a property search and display function for their own website which rivals that of Foxtons in terms of functionality, uploads to the four main portals plus Globrix and Zoomf, and automatic applicant matching and emailing completely free of charge. The latest web technologies mean that we can do this at extremely low costs, and users can set themselves up online.
Ok, but that can't be the only reason you've waited until now?
There are a few other reasons. Firstly, agents were extremely uncertain about using web-based products to begin with, feeling that they were ‘safer’ if data lived on their own servers. Apart from being a more expensive way of doing things, having data on separate servers in each office has made it extremely difficult for staff to share information on applicants and properties, which really ties one hand behind the backs of agents who are competing against other agents with web-based products. Also, there were security fears about web based systems, including what happened if the internet went down, and speed issues. All of these issues are now old-hat. If you trust your bank to allow you online access to your accounts, and you book flights or holidays online, then surely you are showing that the internet is an acceptable way to conduct business? Broadband internet access is now widely available and extremely cheap. You can get 8Mb per second download speeds for £25 per month now, which means you can put in two lines and have one as a back up. Even then, if your internet does go down you can access your web based system from anywhere else, such as home, or an internet cafe. The new Vodafone Mobile broadband USB stick is amazing. I carry it in my pocket and have 2Mb broadband wherever I go for £15 a month (provided there is a 3G signal, which there is in most towns now). All of this makes web based services safer, more reliable and more convenient than office based systems
So the Internet is now more widely accepted by agents as an important part of their business. But why would an agent even consider going through the pain of re-training their staff onto a new system?
The Bu2iness is not a system, or software, or a solution. It is a simple website. We already have new customers using it who we have never met, who have needed no training, because everyone knows how to use a website. We consulted a number of leading independent agents before embarking on the creation of the site, and they all had a common requirement: ‘We just want one product which does everything (not two or three), which our staff will find easy to use and therefore want to use.’ We have worked extremely hard to put the negotiator first, as there are more man-hours spent on our site by negotiators than any other user type, such as managers or directors. Our first customers were delighted. All they needed was their log in username and password and the rest they figured out for themselves.
It’s great that you are providing agents with valuable web marketing tools free of charge, but where's the catch? How do you make money?
We think that any agent of any size would need to have a very good reason not to use the The Bu2iness for free - ‘The Bu2iness | Free’ - especially in the current climate. How do you justify paying for something when there is a better quality option available at a lower cost? But for agents who are currently paying for a software system of any kind, web-based or not, we offer a comprehensive version of the site, called "’The Bu2iness | Everything’ because it does everything any agent would need, from a marketing and negotiator point of view.
What does ‘The Bu2iness | Everything’ do then, and how much does it cost?
Well, as the name suggests, it does everything that any small to medium sized independent agent would want, and is the first product to do so without limitations, such as website layout or functionality. It has negotiator and office diaries, linked to a score-board system so that they can see how they are doing overall, letter generation, sales or lettings progression and tracking, follow-ups, a Top Five leader board, management reporting, activity reports, pipeline reports, advanced applicant and property search functions. But one of the most valuable features it has is an unlimited file storage capacity allowing users to store an unlimited quantity of files, including a high resolution image vault.
How on earth can you offer an unlimited file storage and image vault facility? Surely this risks your servers going down and the website along with it?
This is one of the beauties of the latest developments in so-called ‘Cloud Computing.’ We have teamed up with Amazon and Google to use their unbelievably large server farms to ensure that the load of serving our website is spread across the most powerful server solutions in the world. Almost every page of our site uses a combination of our own servers (where the actual site and data is held), Amazon's servers and Google's servers. To be able to offer this facility with only our own servers would have been prohibitively expensive and time consuming to implement, we are extremely proud of this feature. Director magazine, which is the monthly publication of London’s Institute Of Directors, ran an article only last month on how cloud computing is the thing of the future - and we're already using it!
If the free version really free? Or is it a limited period introductory offer? And what does the chargeable version cost? And are agents tied in?
The free version will always be free. We will never charge for these features, and in fact we will add to the free version as time goes on, to ensure that our product is always the most compelling. The chargeable version costs £200 per office per month, with discounts of up to 24 per cent available. There are no contracts and no tie-ins whatsoever. In fact, agents will be able to manually download and backup their data on demand as frequently as they want, and take it all to another provider. I am horrified by the number of agents who are using products they are only staying with because they can't get hold of their data to move to another system. Software providers who hold their clients' data hostage like that will not last. It is no longer how business is done in the outside world and they will ultimately die if they don't change.
How can agents find out more?
Our website, www.thebu2iness.com has full information and videos to answer most questions, but we are also hosting a seminar on how agents can get the best out of all the free products available on the web, such as the myriad products available free from Google, including even search engine optimisation, and other free sites like Globrix and Zoomf which are a great boost to agents who want more traffic going to their own website.
The Bu2iness’s Tech Fest seminar will be held on the 18 September at The Radisson Hotel in Heathrow. Details can be found on their website.
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Posted On
27
August
2008
at
06:33
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