Buying Better Technology Won't Fix a Business That Refuses to Change

There's a peculiar contradiction at the heart of the property industry. We spend an enormous amount of time complaining about inefficiency, the administrative burden on our teams, the difficulties of recruitment and the increasingly complicated nature of managing residential property. Yet when somebody presents us with a different way of doing things, our first instinct is often to explain why it won't work, or why our particular business is somehow different from everybody else's.

After more than twenty years working in agency, I can understand that reaction. There are processes I've used for years, systems I've become comfortable with and ways of working that have served me perfectly well. When you've spent a considerable amount of time developing a particular approach, it becomes easy to confuse familiarity with effectiveness. The fact that something has always worked doesn't necessarily mean it's the best way of doing it, but acknowledging that can be surprisingly difficult, particularly when you're already busy trying to keep a business running.

I was reminded of this during a recent conversation with SJ Taylor from Greenhouse OS on The Viking Chats. SJ has spent much of her career on the frontline of estate agency and lettings, including eight years running a lettings operation at Preston Baker, before moving into the technology side of the industry. We both understand the frustrations of running an agency, and we've both experienced the gap between what technology promises and what actually happens when you introduce it into a working business.

What struck me most about our conversation was how little of the challenge is really about the technology itself. The software might be excellent, the potential savings considerable and the commercial argument perfectly sound, but none of those things guarantees a successful outcome. What matters is whether the people running the business are prepared to examine how they operate, question some long-established assumptions and make the changes necessary to get the best from the tools they've bought.

Signing the contract is when the real work starts

Estate agents have a tendency to celebrate winning an instruction as though they've achieved the result they were employed to deliver. The listing is secured, the property goes on the website and everybody congratulates themselves on a fantastic bit of business. Of course, winning the instruction is important, but it's also the point at which the real work begins. The property still needs to be marketed properly, enquiries handled, viewings arranged, offers negotiated and a transaction successfully progressed. Until those things happen, you've secured an opportunity rather than delivered an outcome.

I think some technology suppliers fall into exactly the same trap. They celebrate signing a new client, getting the contract agreed and adding another logo to their website, when the really difficult part of the relationship is only just beginning. The customer is handed over to an onboarding team, given some training materials and perhaps offered a couple of introductory sessions before everybody moves on to the next project.

That might be sufficient for a relatively straightforward product, but when you're introducing technology that changes how an agency operates, it's rarely enough. The best suppliers understand that their success is tied to what happens after the sale. They need to get under the bonnet of the agency, understand the people working there, identify the processes already in place and work collaboratively to establish what needs to change.

Sometimes those conversations are uncomfortable. The agency may have to acknowledge that some of its existing methods are inefficient or unnecessarily complicated, while the supplier may discover that its product doesn't quite accommodate something important to the customer's operation. Neither party benefits from pretending those issues don't exist, and the most successful implementations I've seen tend to involve both sides being willing to challenge one another constructively.

There's a considerable difference between supplying somebody with a tool and helping them use it effectively. In our industry, where systems often interact with multiple departments, longstanding processes and significant compliance responsibilities, that difference can determine whether an investment becomes transformational or simply another monthly subscription.

Our journey to refunds in under ten days

I can give you a particularly candid example from our own agency, Base Property Specialists, because this is something we've been working on for quite some time.

One of the ambitions behind The Depositary has always been to help tenants receive their deposit money back faster. We've been working towards an average refund time of ten days or less, and this month Base achieved that ambition for the first time. Naturally, I'm delighted with the result, particularly because it's something we've been striving towards for a while, but I think the journey to getting there is far more instructive than the number itself.

We didn't simply switch on The Depositary and watch our refund times tumble. We've had to return to the process repeatedly, examining the individual stages involved in concluding a tenancy and identifying where things were slowing down. The reporting within The Depositary has been central to that work, allowing us to move beyond the general feeling that something is taking too long and establish precisely where the delays are occurring.

Sometimes we've discovered that a particular task could happen earlier, or that information was being requested at a point in the process that unnecessarily delayed everything that followed. In other cases, we've found that responsibilities weren't as clearly defined as they could be, or that a particular step had survived simply because it was familiar rather than because it was still necessary. None of those individual discoveries necessarily looked revolutionary, but addressing them systematically has made a significant difference to the overall outcome.

It's also taken persistence. We've revisited the same process more than once, looked at the data again, made further adjustments and worked through the practical consequences with the people responsible for delivering it. The result is that we've now developed something that feels robust, predictable and genuinely efficient, rather than a collection of individual tasks being managed through experience and good intentions.

What makes me particularly pleased about reaching that milestone is that it demonstrates the relationship between good technology and good operational management. The Depositary has given us the visibility and functionality to make those improvements, but the improvements themselves have required us to question how we work and be prepared to change it. There's still more to do, of course, because achieving a target for the first time is different from maintaining it consistently, but we've now got a process we understand and can continue to improve.

When experience becomes an obstacle to improvement

During the podcast, I told SJ about an experience we had implementing The Depositary at Haslams, which remains one of my favourite examples of how attitudes towards technology can change once people experience the practical benefits.

One of their senior property managers had been doing the job for something like fifteen to twenty years. She was knowledgeable, experienced and perfectly capable of managing tenancy conclusions using the methods she'd developed throughout her career. She was also deeply sceptical about introducing a new system, largely because she already had a process that worked and couldn't see why she should disrupt it.

I think that's an entirely understandable position. We sometimes describe resistance to change as though it's simply an irritating personality trait, but for experienced professionals, established routines often represent years of accumulated knowledge. Those routines give people confidence, help them manage demanding workloads and provide a sense of control in an environment where they're frequently dealing with competing priorities. When you introduce a different way of working, you can inadvertently make somebody feel that the skills they've spent years developing are being questioned or devalued.

In this case, the property manager was professional about her concerns, but she was certainly not convinced. She could see the potential disruption much more clearly than the potential benefits, which is hardly surprising when you've successfully managed hundreds of tenancy conclusions using a familiar approach.

A few weeks after the new process went live, she sent us an email. She hadn't copied in her colleagues or her manager, and there was no particular reason for her to contact us other than to share what she'd discovered. Having used the system properly, she'd realised just how much of her working day had previously been consumed by chasing information, repeating tasks and managing small frustrations that had gradually become normal.

Her message was wonderfully enthusiastic, and the sentiment was essentially that we'd changed her working life.

What I love about that story is that her expertise hadn't suddenly become less important. She hadn't needed to forget everything she knew about property management, and the technology hadn't replaced her judgement or experience. It had simply removed some of the repetitive work that was preventing her from applying those skills as effectively as she could.

It's a distinction that matters enormously, particularly in property management, where experienced people are often carrying a remarkable amount of technical knowledge and responsibility. If we can give those people more time to deal with complicated situations, support landlords and tenants properly and exercise the judgement they've developed over years, surely that's a better use of their abilities than asking them to spend their afternoons chasing the same unanswered email for the fourth time.

We've confused being busy with being valuable

SJ described inheriting a struggling lettings operation at Preston Baker, where complaints were piling up and the systems and processes simply weren't delivering what the business needed. It wasn't that the people involved were deliberately doing a bad job. They were working within an operation that hadn't equipped them with the structure, training and processes necessary to deliver consistently good outcomes.

I think there's a wider lesson in that experience because our industry has traditionally been very comfortable measuring activity. We look at how many calls somebody has made, how many emails they've answered, how many tasks they've completed and how much work appears to be passing across their desk. Those measures can tell us something about workload, but they don't necessarily tell us whether that activity is creating value.

A property manager might spend forty minutes chasing information that could have been collected automatically. They might make several calls, leave voicemails, send follow-up emails and eventually obtain the answer they need. From the outside, they've been busy and they've completed the task, but it's worth asking whether that process genuinely required forty minutes of somebody's working day.

One of the principles I've repeated throughout the development of The Depositary is that where a human adds no value to the outcome of a task, all they add is risk. That isn't an argument for removing people from property management, because I think the human element is fundamental to delivering a genuinely good service. It's an argument for identifying where people make a meaningful difference and ensuring that their time is concentrated on those activities.

I want experienced property managers dealing with difficult conversations, exercising judgement, reassuring tenants, advising landlords and resolving situations that require empathy and expertise. Those are areas where knowledge and interpersonal skills matter enormously, and where the consequences of getting something wrong can be significant. What I don't particularly want is for those same people to spend hours carrying out repetitive administrative tasks that a well-designed system could handle more consistently.

The challenge for agency owners is that we've often built our expectations of staff around the volume of work they complete. If technology suddenly removes a substantial part of that workload, it can feel as though somebody is doing less, even when the business is achieving better results. We need to become much more comfortable assessing people by the quality of their contribution and the outcomes they help deliver, rather than simply how occupied they appear throughout the day.

Experimentation doesn't mean abandoning common sense

At Base, we've developed a fairly straightforward attitude towards trying new technology and working methods. We can always go back to the way we did something before if the alternative genuinely doesn't work, but unless we're prepared to try different approaches, we'll never know whether there's a better option available.

That doesn't mean every experiment succeeds, and we've certainly had our share of frustrations. This year alone, we've tried technology that has worked brilliantly alongside products and approaches that haven't delivered what we'd hoped. What's changed is that we're increasingly inclined to explore another solution or a different model rather than automatically retreating to the old process whenever something disappoints us.

The underlying problem hasn't necessarily disappeared simply because the first proposed solution failed to address it. If we've identified that a particular activity is unnecessarily time-consuming, inconsistent or frustrating for our customers, returning to the old way of doing things might restore a sense of familiarity, but it doesn't resolve the issue that prompted us to look for an alternative in the first place.

There's also a question of giving new approaches a reasonable opportunity to succeed. Some businesses introduce a system, encounter a few frustrations during the first fortnight and conclude that the product doesn't work. Yet we'd rarely apply the same expectations to a new employee joining an important department. We'd recognise that they need training, support, clear responsibilities and time to understand the business before we could fairly assess their contribution.

Technology that changes how people work deserves similar consideration, although that doesn't mean persevering indefinitely with something that genuinely isn't fit for purpose. Suppliers have responsibilities to deliver what they've promised, and there comes a point where continuing to invest time in a poor product becomes its own form of waste. The important thing is distinguishing between a system that cannot deliver the required outcome and a business that hasn't yet worked out how to use it effectively.

That distinction isn't always obvious, particularly when staff are frustrated and management is under pressure to demonstrate a return on its investment. It's one of the reasons I believe suppliers need to remain actively involved after implementation, helping customers understand what's working, what isn't and whether adjustments to the technology or the surrounding processes could improve the results.

Technology needs a proper introduction to the business

During my conversation with SJ, I made a comparison that I think captures the problem rather neatly. Imagine creating a new department within your agency and recruiting somebody to lead it. You wouldn't expect them to arrive on Monday morning, quietly sit in a corner, introduce themselves to nobody and somehow transform the business without anybody changing what they do.

You'd explain why the department exists, what it's responsible for and how it interacts with the rest of the operation. You'd introduce the person leading it, establish responsibilities, agree expectations and make sure everybody understood how their work might be affected. You'd also expect to provide support while the department became established, because even an exceptionally capable person can't operate effectively without understanding the organisation around them.

Yet agencies routinely introduce technology without giving the implementation anything approaching that level of attention. A platform gets connected to the CRM, somebody announces that the team should start using it and everybody carries on with their existing routines. A few months later, management wonders why the promised improvements haven't materialised.

The missing ingredient is usually a proper examination of how the business needs to operate differently. Somebody has to decide which tasks are moving, which processes are disappearing, how responsibilities are changing and what success will look like. Those decisions need to be communicated, people need to be trained and the business needs to monitor whether the changes are actually delivering the intended outcomes.

I don't believe every operational decision should be made by committee. Sometimes leaders can see an opportunity that their teams don't yet recognise, and there will be occasions when a decision needs to be made despite understandable reservations. But that doesn't make consultation unimportant. People deserve to understand why something is changing, what it means for their work and how they'll be supported through the transition.

Their feedback can also be invaluable, particularly when they understand the practical details of a process far better than the people making the purchasing decision. The objective isn't necessarily to secure unanimous agreement on every change, but to make sure concerns are heard, genuine problems are addressed and the people responsible for using the technology have a fair opportunity to contribute to its success.

Keep asking why, even when everything seems to be working

One of SJ's observations that stayed with me was how valuable it can be to have somebody inexperienced question an established process. She talked about bringing work-experience students into businesses and how frequently they'd ask simple questions that experienced employees had stopped considering. Why does that person need to send the email? Why is the information entered twice? Why does something have to happen in that particular order?

Sometimes there's an excellent reason. There might be a compliance requirement, an important control or a genuine customer-service benefit behind a particular step. But sometimes the answer is simply that it's how the business has always done things, and that should be an invitation to investigate rather than the end of the conversation.

At Base, we try to revisit the technology we're using at least once a year, looking at what's changed, what new functionality has appeared and whether the processes we've built around a particular platform are still appropriate. The business isn't the same as it was ten years ago, our customers aren't the same and the tools available to us certainly aren't the same, so it would be extraordinary if the best way of operating had remained completely unchanged.

The same thinking applies to The Depositary. Achieving our first month of average refunds below ten days has been enormously satisfying, but the real achievement is developing a process that we understand well enough to keep improving. We'll continue looking at the reports, identifying bottlenecks and questioning whether the way we're working remains the best option.

I don't think the property industry suffers from a shortage of technology. There are some genuinely impressive products available, and the pace of innovation is accelerating. What we sometimes lack is the willingness to examine our own businesses with the same enthusiasm we apply to exploring the latest platform.

Before buying another system, it's worth spending some time understanding the problem you're trying to solve, why it exists and what you're genuinely prepared to change. The technology may provide the opportunity, but the results will depend on the decisions you make and the work you're prepared to put in after the contract is signed.