London based agency London Executive provide a niche market offering dealing solely with prime central London properties.  They purchase and then manage the residential property profiles of international investors and the technology they use to support this client base is critical.

London Executive made the change to Aspasia in 2005, converting from server based Rentman. "We had many issues such as irregularity and reliability of the software itself, no automatic letter publishing and problems with publishing properties to portals especially as we could only show one picture per property," said Managing Director Georges Verdis. "With many of our investors being overseas, they need to see the property in detail before making their purchasing decision and the technology we used was not supporting this. With Rentman, there was lots of duplication using FAP editor and many mistakes were made. All of the tracking of leads was done by e-mail and we struggled to keep up with changes to property prices. The final straw was when FAP reduced the size of pictures that we could use and the technology finally left us at a disadvantage," Georges added. Having made the decision to change technology they reviewed Dezrez and GMW, "and although Aspasia was more expensive, it has been worth every penny," Georges stated.

Once a purchase is made, London Executive typically offer the property onto the lettings market. With the complexity of client accounting, a further criterion for selection of their IT was the accuracy of the software in managing this side of the business. "Because Aspasia was web based we could give our auditors access to the data and they were delighted with how Aspasia handled the reconciliation of client accounts, it was very accurate."

Having made the decision to move to Aspasia, their priority was to ensure that the staff were confident in using the basics of the system before exploiting some of the more sophisticated elements. "Aspasia is a complex system and staff had a lot to learn and we also needed to handle the transition of data into the new system which took time," said Georges.

However, once this was achieved, Georges and his team then looked to how they could use Aspasia to improve the web site. "Our mission was to ensure that customers can access any property within 3 clicks. We have a simple and fun branding and we wanted that translated into our web site to convey the same impression to the end user." "Aspasia offers our customers 3 options when it comes to sending data to their web site and the choice is influenced by the level of flexibility they need," offered MD for Aspasia, Stewart Anderson. London Executive opted for the most sophisticated option which takes the data from their system in XML format. "Whilst this offers the highest level of flexibility, it does require specialist knowledge and typically third party involvement from web designers," added Aspasia programmer Robert King.

London Executive already had a company they used and were amazed at how easy the integration was. "Everything went very smoothly and on schedule. We could play with the feed and look at how it worked with different designs and test it . The 'wow' factor when we understood what we could do was just incredible," enthused Georges. One of the things they decided to do early on was to move away from the commonly accepted practice of customers accessing pictures of properties first. "With Aspasia, customers could do a virtual tour of the property straight away which gave us a competitive advantage."

But even this was not enough for Georges who constantly strives to exploit the best that technology can provide. London Executive are, they believe, the first estate agent to exploit Microsoft based technology Virtual Earth which provides a virtual aerial view of properties. "As many of our clients are overseas investors, they want to see where a property is located in relation to other properties in the street and our prospective tenants want to understand things such as parking availability and heights of surrounding properties. Property bird is an incredibly impressive piece of technology. Our customers could not believe their eyes when they saw what we could offer. It has definitely led to us getting instructions and I even had a client ask me to keep a property on the site even though it had rented so that he could show it to all his friends," said Georges with a smile.

The technology also had a big impact on other stake holders in the business. "Staff now go straight onto the web site to show properties and our landlords and tenants are logging in and find it a more enjoyable experience. They can track down data in what is a very transparent system so we are no longer tarred by the industry brush of "sneaky estate agents" as everything is there for them to see."

Whilst London Executive operate in a niche market, Aspasia and its ability to link with other applications has had an impact on their market image. "Aspasia has allowed us to compete with bigger offices with much less cost." But Georges and his team will never allow themselves to stand still with their technological development. "We have plans to integrate flash presentations and digitally enhanced audio and we know that Aspasia will integrate easily. Aspasia has given us the possibility of carrying out every dream we have had. We have lots of ideas and have never heard the team at Aspasia say no. They always support our ideas and seek to find out how we can work together to integrate them into the system."

March 2008