Dwelly is not like the clutch property industry giants who regularly hoover up lettings agencies, even though unusually for a tech firm, it’s competing with them.

For starters its boss is a former Uber senior and his company, which has created a software for the lettings sector, is taking a unique approach to growth.

Rather than spending considerable sums persuading letting agencies to use its software – a path that not all proptechs have followed successfully – Dwelly has been busy buying up letting agencides instead and, after a handful of purchases, now has a lettings book of some 3,500 properties across the UK.

It has plans to reach 10,000 soon and be a ‘top 25’ industry player to boot.

The Neg sat down with CEO and founder Ilia Drozdov (main image) to find out why he decided to take this unusual route and ask why letting agency bosses should sell their firms to Dwelly rather than one of the industry blue-chips like Lomond, LRG, TPFG or Winkworth.

“We are different from the big traditional agencies because we merge the worlds of technology and property. What is similar between us and say Lomond is that like them we are growing by acquiring traditional high street firms using external funding.

“But we’re not the first company to take a ‘tech first’ approach – Howsy for example was an early pioneer – although ‘tech enabled’ is now changing to ‘AI enabled’.

“The way we are building our business means we can control how the service is delivered at each of the agencies that we acquire, but we still leave the teams alone to run them on a daily basis.”

Drozdov says the more traditional approach of software suppliers means their product can become ‘a little clunky’ as each customers asks for features to be added or turned on or off.

Dwelly is hoping to eliminate this by improving each agency’s operations rather than the software and that is – by definition – only possibly if you own the letting agency involved.

“That’s why we believe our strategy is the best approach,” he says.

But who runs the businesses after acquisition? So far only one owner of the five letting agencies Dwelly has bought to date has remained with the company, the rest having retired.

Running the show

“We’re looking for firms that have strong management but also strong succession plans – we’re not like many corporate estate agencies who, when they buy a firm, want to run them centrally,” he adds.

“Other than improving the processes and introducing our technology, we pretty much leave them alone – they know their business and local landlords best, our tech just gives them back the time to do it better.”

They know their business and local landlords best, our tech just gives them back the time to do it better.”

One of the more unusual claims by Dwelly is that its AI tech can reduce ‘time to let’ by a third and maintenance resolution time by 40%. But how does Dwelly achieve this – given most property firms would dearly love to trim their timelines in this manner?

“It’s all about freeing up staff to do their jobs better and focus on more other, non-admin activities,” he says.
“Our AI-driven tech eliminates and streamlines the multiple steps that property management and lettings work requires.

Maintenance speed

“For example, when it comes to maintenance, a lot of traditional agencies will hand over a request to fix something from a tenant to their local repairs firm but from that point onwards they are often in the dark about what’s going on but, if the repair company is slow to contact the tenant, it’s they who then have to try and pick up the pieces – the average repair time in the UK is 52 days, let’s remember,” says Drozdov.

“It’s not the agent who is the problem, it’s that they don’t have access to a technical solution that speeds processes up – so for example with Dwelly, we track all communications and chase up the maintenance provider if they are too slow.”

Such promises appear to be attracting interest from agents. As well as the five already acquired, Drozdov says he has another four to five being negotiated, the outcomes of which should be announced soon.

Read more articles about Dwelly.