Goodlord is a RentTech platform working with over 1,000 letting agencies across the UK. Before Goodlord, renting a property was a complicated, time-consuming process for everyone involved — agents, tenants, and landlords.
There were paper-based application forms, referencing forms, and contracts that took precious time to manually complete, sign, and file. Not to mention hunting down all the references required from old landlords and ex-employers.
With a 100% focus on lettings, Goodlord sets out to make the rental experience better for everyone. We’ve built a platform that combines and digitises these processes, simplifying the entire journey from start to finish, for everyone involved. On average, our platform saves 3.8 hours of admin per letting for estate agents. For landlords and tenants, it also provides a seamless experience that removes many of the headaches traditionally associated with renting.
Starting life as a team of just three employees, Goodlord now has a headcount in the hundreds working with over 300,000 tenancies across the UK. We’re the leader in our field and have out to champion the importance of technology in a largely outdated sector.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Creating Goodlord didn’t feel like a “eureka” moment, it came about because myself and the other two founders spotted a gap in the market. At the time we were all renters (with one of us actually working as a letting agent), so we’d all experienced the pain of renting from both sides of the fence.
When we started the company, renting was a clunky, heavily paper-based process — we’re talking 30+ sheets of paper to sign for one tenancy. Being part of the younger more digitally minded generation, we could see an open opportunity to digitise the process and make life easier for everyone involved.
We invested £6k into building our first platform, which was capable of managing document signing, payments, and data collection. At the time we felt like landlords would be the ones to benefit from the technology, but soon realised that landlords don’t have a software budget – it was then that we turned our attention to letting agents.
Our first attempt at the platform garnered a lot of interest from agents who, like my co-founder, were keen to remove the manual processes in place and increase efficiencies both in time and cost.
Given the positive response from lettings agents and the sheer size of the private rental market in the UK (4.4 million households), we knew we were on to winner.
Ultimately, we took a technology mindset into a cottage industry, and I believe this is why Goodlord is so successful and remains so unique in the industry today.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
The biggest change over the last couple of years has been that Goodlord has transitioned from a start-up to a fully-fledged organisation, and with it the organisation has evolved in terms of what it prioritises.
Any start-up begins with the ideation stage where it’s all about getting people invested in the idea to get you off the ground. Next you go into the heavy growth stage, where the aim is to grow year on year. That’s the stage we’re just starting to come out of. We’ve now reached the point where, of course we still want to grow, but our focus has shifted to creating an organisation that is sustainable for the next 10 years.
This means we now focus on consistency, establishing core processes, and ultimately being reliable to our staff and customers. In summary, we are moving further away from the ‘just get stuff done’ crazy start-up days and more into the structured day to day workings of a large-scale company.
What can we hope to see from Goodlord in the future?
Goodlord has its sights set on becoming a household name.
When people think of renting, I want them to think of Goodlord, much like people think of Rightmove or Zoopla when they want to purchase a home.
With an estimated 10 million residential properties to rent in the UK and 30 million people living in them, the rental sector is a huge market, but it’s somehow overlooked.
It’s one of the reasons we’ve been talking about ‘RentTech’ so much in the last year. Everyone knows the UK PropTech industry is huge, but it tends to focus on tools that only help homeowners and buyers. We need technology that helps those millions of people who are not in a position to buy. That’s what Goodlord is all about.
Going forward, I want Goodlord to be championing a voice for tenants, landlords and agents alike, building a consumer brand that handles the whole lifecycle of the renting process – from referencing and setting up tenancies to paying rents and household bills. I want us to be able to manage it all.
