Agent launches bid to corner rural property market at a gallop
Experienced agent Simon Tomlinson says new lifestyle app for equestrian home, business and lifestyle fans is now open to agent listings.
A property portal and app that enables equestrian home and business owners to interact online has launched after several years of ‘bootstrap’ development.
The innovative platform has been established by Simon Tomlinson who has been working within the estate agency for nearly ten years including stints at several traditional agents in Lincolnshire as well as Purplebricks.
In May 2021 he founded specialist rural agency RELD Property with his wife Melissa and the pair also began developing a community-based platform called Tracks4Hacks.
Tomlinson says they realised there was a significant opportunity for a rural and particularly equestrian property business that utilised digital and social media and set about establishing his platform.
“We know that horse owners looking to buy a property are looking for a minimum of five acres, stables, manège , proximity to local competition venues and access to local bridleways, for example, and there very few opportunities online for them to filter their searches, particularly so on the big portals,” he says.
Equestrian pursuit
“It became clear to us very quickly that even in the equestrian world this kind of ‘pack’ of information wasn’t available, so we have created an app that provides that within a ‘lifestyle’ format that includes a property portal, business directory, a marketplace, chatrooms, mapping technology and a Strava-like functionality that enables riders to see each other locally.
“We also list properties by more traditional metrics such as number of bedrooms and price, of course!”
Tomlinson says the opportunity for his business is significant including that there are some 374,000 horse-owning households in the UK, many of whom struggle to find the properties they’re after using traditional portal or agent website filters.
He is now inviting agents who have equestrian properties to list on his app/portal which is charged on a per-listing basis as many agents don’t have such properties to market on a regular basis, he says.