It is now nine months since the Alto Software Group, the UK’s largest property industry supplier of its kind, announced it was to become a standalone company, cutting the apron strings from its now former parent company, the Houseful Group.

Alto is used by a third of all estate agencies and the software has an approximately 35% market share. But as Ric Iannucci-Dawson, Alto’s CEO, points out while sitting in his London office, which shares the same address as Houseful, Zoopla and Hometrack – his operation is now ‘completely Chinese walled’ from the other businesses.

The split came in February, prompting some to claim that the group was being broken up to be sold, but Iannucci-Dawson says the real reason for the separation was that as standalone businesses, they didn’t mesh together well.

“When we were all together under ZPG and then Houseful, the idea was to make all the separate businesses that drive different parts of the transaction process better than the sum of all their parts,” he says.

“But this proved difficult to do because we all had different pricing strategies, markets and decision makers – and I was coming to the end of my contract obligations and wondering what to do next, and then the investors [Silver Lake Partners] said they wanted me to come in an run Alto having previously been head of the businesses I started, YourKeys.”

Sales progression platform YourKeys was bought by Zoopla in April 2021, four years after Iannucci-Dawson set it up.

“I said, I’ll move to Alto if I can form my own leadership team with proper SAS [‘cloud’] software leadership experience,” he says.

“And I wanted to report into the board directly and run our own P&L and make all our own decisions. And they said, yeah, fine, that’s exactly what we want too.

“And since then, we’ve had three back-to-back record quarters. It shows what a lift a bit more focus, experience and ‘going back to core’ can do. So yeah, it’s been a fascinating year.”

Going it alone

Iannucci-Dawson agrees when The Neg points out many agents make this point too about corporate versus independent agencies – namely that businesses can do better when left alone to focus on their core activities.

“When you’re part of a corporate, you’re making decisions based on sort-of peripheral ideas of either saving costs or taking cross-sell opportunities, and you’ve got the prioritisation of central functions that can slow you down particularly finance and legal – but when you’re smaller and focused, they’re not as much of a burden,” he adds.

“But with us, the challenges of for example trying to bundle software and portal subscriptions together created conflicts in the minds of the individuals in marketing and sales who are there to deploy these kinds of products.

Shoe horn

“And you end up trying to shoe-horn stuff together that the customer ultimately doesn’t want.

“Whereas now, from our perspective as a software business, we exclusively look at our product through a jobs and work lens, which is ‘what are the features and functions that our customers want and pay us to provide?’.

“Our role is to help estate agencies increase their efficiency – because many businesses face higher costs, lower margins and increased regulation particularly in lettings, and we’re super aware of that.”

AI capability

Alto is also building AI capability which Iannucci-Dawson says goes much further than most other platforms have done so far, using the 215 data points within every house sale or let that two decades of providing software has created.

“What we’re building are agentic [or ‘decision making’] AI workflows that also enable agents to benchmark themselves at different phases in the journey against agents on their own doorstep, but also much more broadly than that,” he adds.

“So it’s things around valuations, appraisals, sales performance, sales progression time, cancellation rates and lead qualification for tenancies.”

ChatGPT

Iannucci-Dawson says other attempts to use AI are different to Alto’s because they are just integrating their platforms with AI services like ChatGPT to help agents write property descriptions, for example, which “software engineers can knock up in a week or so”.

“They’ll be outdated before you get them live and working. And by the way, all the agents that are worth their salt and curious about this stuff, are doing it through Gemini or GPT outside of the CRM anyway.”

So what does ‘agentic’ mean for agents at the coalface? While a traditional CMS software system will flag up that a property needs a gas certificate, agentic AI will also do this but then liaise between the landlord, gas engineer and tenants and get a new certificate provided for the property.

“What’s next is we want to roll out AI through two points of contact, if you like – one is the agentic just discussed,  but the other is ‘prompt-based interfaces’.

“We see our software platform evolution going more towards the ChatGPT type interface, whereby to on board a tenant, let’s say where you typically say, right, run this check, press this button, send this DocuSign, and so on, being done by AI – and we’re launching something in Q1 next year.”