Industry
Software engineering for Real Estate & PropTech
Property is under-digitised for real reasons, not because nobody tried. Most proptech fails by ignoring how agents actually work and by underestimating how entrenched the portals and legacy agency software are. The value is in removing genuine manual friction from slow, paper-heavy processes, and portal and CRM integration is the practical hard part. We build for that reality, not for the pitch deck.
Why the domain matters
Real estate is one of the least digitised large industries in the UK, and that is the opportunity and the trap in one sentence. A property transaction still crawls through weeks of manual back-and-forth: enquiries chased by phone, valuations done from memory and comparables, referencing and searches handled in email, conveyancing conducted largely on paper and PDFs passed between solicitors. Every one of those steps is a candidate for software that removes real friction. But the sector is under-digitised because the incentives are awkward, the data is fragmented, and the systems that already exist (the big portals and the incumbent agency software), are deeply entrenched. Software that ignores any of that dies quietly, however good the demo looked.
The market has a shape worth naming, because software lands differently at each point. Estate agents live and die by leads and listings, and their listings only matter if they reach Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket, so the portal feed is not a feature, it is oxygen. Letting agents and property managers run a different business entirely (tenancies, referencing, rent collection, deposits, maintenance, compliance certificates), that is far more operational and recurring than transactional. Landlords sit behind the letting agents, or increasingly want to self-serve. And the whole transaction chain, from offer to completion, drags because it involves several parties, several ageing systems and a conveyancing process that has resisted digitisation for decades. Proptech that works picks a genuine friction point in that chain and removes it without asking anyone to change how they fundamentally work.
We are a senior-led team and we operate what we build, so we start from how the business actually runs rather than from the product we would like to sell. The recurring failure mode in proptech is beautiful software that agents will not use because it does not fit their workflow, or that cannot get a clean feed into the portals, or that assumes a landlord will do administration they will always push back onto an agent. We would rather build the unglamorous integration and the workflow that survives contact with a busy negotiator than the slick front end that wins an award and then sits idle. The hard part here is almost never the interface. It is the portal feeds, the CRM data, and the manual friction you are actually trying to remove.
The challenges in real estate & proptech
Portal integration is the constraint, not a checkbox
For any agent-facing product, listings have to reach Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket cleanly, or the product is useless. Those portals are where buyers and tenants actually look. Feeds mean adhering to the portals’ data formats and rules, handling media, keeping status in sync, and living with the fact that these are dominant platforms that set the terms. Underestimating portal integration is the most common way a listing product ships late and half-working.
Legacy agency software that everything already runs on
Most agencies already run an incumbent CRM or property-management system, often dated, often the system of record for their entire pipeline or portfolio. New software has to integrate with it, migrate off it carefully, or sit alongside it, because ripping it out mid-flight breaks the business. Any plan that assumes a clean greenfield ignores the software the agent already depends on every hour of the day.
Software that does not fit how agents actually work
This is the graveyard of proptech. Negotiators are busy, mobile, and moving between viewings and calls; letting managers are firefighting maintenance and compliance. A tool that adds clicks, demands data entry they will not do, or assumes a tidy process they do not follow gets abandoned, no matter how good it looks. The value is in removing steps from their real day, not in adding a system for its own sake.
A transaction chain that is slow by design
Getting from offer to completion involves buyer, seller, two agents, two solicitors, lenders, searches and referencing, several parties and several disconnected systems, much of it still on paper and email. The slowness is structural, not one broken step, so digitising a single link helps only if it plays nicely with the rest of a chain that remains stubbornly manual around it.
Fragmented, inconsistent property and people data
Property data lives in many places (portals, Land Registry, EPC registers, agency records, mapping and address data), in formats that rarely agree. Tenant and applicant data arrives through referencing, right-to-rent and credit checks. Keeping all of it accurate, deduplicated and consistent as it crosses systems is a large part of the real work, and where most of the defects hide.
Regulatory obligations that reach into the software
Letting and agency work carries right-to-rent checks, tenant referencing, deposit protection in an approved scheme, AML checks on property transactions and estate-agent redress obligations. These are not compliance paperwork bolted on at the end. They shape what the software must capture, evidence and retain, and getting them wrong is a legal exposure for your client, not just a bug.
What we build for real estate & proptech
The systems this sector most often needs, built by engineers who understand the domain, not just the code.
Listing and portal platforms
Listing management that treats the portal feed as a first-class problem, clean, reliable outbound feeds to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket with media, status and updates kept in sync, and a listing workflow negotiators will actually maintain. We build for the reality that a listing which does not reach the portals correctly, and stay current there, has failed regardless of how good the internal tool is.
Agency CRM and lead management
CRM and lead capture built around how an agency really pursues business, enquiries from portals and the website landing in one pipeline, applicants matched to properties, viewings and offers tracked, and follow-up that a busy negotiator can keep up with on a phone between appointments. The point is to stop leads leaking through the cracks, not to impose a process nobody follows.
Property-management systems
Systems for letting agents and landlords covering the operational reality of a portfolio: tenancies and renewals, rent collection and arrears, maintenance requests and contractor coordination, deposit handling, and the compliance certificates and checks that come due. This is recurring, operational software where reliability and clear workflow matter far more than novelty.
Virtual tours and AR
Digital viewings, virtual tours and AR-assisted experiences that let buyers and tenants shortlist before travelling, and let agents qualify interest earlier. We are honest that these support the process rather than replace the in-person viewing for most purchases, so we build them to save wasted journeys and widen reach (a genuine efficiency), not as a gimmick that promises to remove the human from a life-changing decision.
Valuation and AVM tools
Valuation support and automated valuation models that pull comparables, sold prices and property attributes to give agents and landlords a defensible starting point. We treat an AVM as an assistant to expert judgement, calibrated and transparent about its uncertainty, not an oracle, because a confidently wrong valuation on an under-priced or over-priced instruction does real damage.
Tenant and landlord portals
Self-service portals that take load off the phones, tenants raising and tracking maintenance, viewing tenancy documents and paying rent; landlords seeing portfolio performance, statements and compliance status. Built with a clear-eyed view of what each party will genuinely self-serve versus what they will always push back to the agent, so the portal reduces work rather than creating a channel nobody uses.
Where we help
A listing tool whose feeds to the portals actually stay in sync
An agency wants one place to manage listings and have them appear correctly on Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket. The real work is the outbound feed engineering: matching each portal’s format and rules, handling photos and floorplans, and keeping price, status and withdrawal in sync so a sold property does not linger live. Get that right and negotiators trust the tool; get it wrong and they quietly go back to the portal back offices.
Lead capture that stops enquiries falling through the cracks
Portal enquiries, website forms and phone leads all landing in one CRM pipeline, matched to properties and applicants, with follow-up prompts a negotiator can action from a phone. The measurable win is fewer lost enquiries and faster response, in a business where the agent who replies first often wins the instruction or the viewing, without asking anyone to log data they were never going to log.
A property-management system for a growing lettings book
A letting agent outgrowing spreadsheets needs tenancies, rent collection, arrears chasing, maintenance and compliance certificates in one operational system. We build the recurring workflow, rent reconciled against bank feeds, maintenance routed to contractors and tracked, deposit protection evidenced, certificates flagged before they expire, because in lettings the value is steady operational reliability, not a one-off transaction.
A tenant portal that genuinely reduces phone traffic
A managing agent buried in maintenance calls and document requests wants tenants to self-serve. The portal lets tenants log and track repairs with photos, pay rent, and pull their tenancy documents: deliberately scoped to what tenants will actually use, integrated with the property-management system behind it so nothing is entered twice. Done honestly, it cuts inbound calls; done as a box-tick, it becomes another channel the agent has to monitor on top of the phone.
How we build for real estate
We start from the workflow and the integrations, not the screens. Before designing anything we want to see how the negotiators or letting managers actually spend their day, where the portal feeds and the incumbent CRM sit, and which manual step is genuinely costing time. In proptech the constraint is almost always adoption and integration, so we design for the busy person who will use this between viewings, not for the demo that impresses a founder.
We are blunt about where digitisation adds value and where it does not. Removing a real manual friction: a leaking lead pipeline, rent reconciliation done by hand, certificates that expire unnoticed, is worth building. Digitising a step that then has to hand back to a paper-based chain, or automating a judgement that agents and buyers do not want automated, usually is not. We would rather tell you that early than build something that quietly goes unused.
We treat portal and legacy-system integration as the core of the work, resourced accordingly. Feeds to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket, and integration with or migration from an incumbent agency system, are where these projects are won or lost. We plan for the awkward formats, the sync edge cases and the migration risk from day one, rather than discovering them late when the front end is done and the data will not flow.
Because we operate what we build, the people designing a rent-collection flow or a portal feed are the ones who get called when a payment does not reconcile or a sold property stays live on a portal. That concentrates the mind on the failure modes that actually matter to an agency, and it keeps us honest about trade-offs up front rather than discovering them in production on your behalf.
Regulation and compliance
Lettings and estate agency carry a specific set of obligations that reach into the software. Right-to-rent checks must be captured and evidenced, tenant referencing and credit checks feed into decisions, tenancy deposits must be protected in a government-approved scheme within the statutory timescale, and agents must belong to a redress scheme. Where our software touches these steps, it has to record and retain the right evidence at the right time: the compliance is in the data trail, not just the policy.
Anti-money-laundering rules apply to property transactions, and estate agents are within scope for customer due diligence and reporting. Software that supports sales work needs to accommodate identity verification and the record-keeping AML requires, rather than treating it as an inconvenience bolted on beside the deal. Getting this wrong is a legal exposure for your client, so we build the checks and the audit trail in deliberately.
Data protection under UK GDPR sits across all of it, because property software holds a great deal of personal and financial information about buyers, sellers, tenants and applicants, including referencing and credit data that people are sensitive about. We engineer for lawful basis, minimisation, retention limits and access control from the start, not as a privacy notice stapled to a finished product.
We build systems that meet these obligations, but we are engineers, not your legal or compliance advisers. The obligations around right-to-rent, deposit protection, AML and redress carry real legal weight, and sign-off on them rests with your own compliance and legal functions. Our job is to build software that captures, evidences and retains what those obligations require, and to work alongside the people accountable for them.
Integration
The property portals are the gravitational centre for anything agent-facing. Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket are where demand actually is, so listing software has to feed them reliably: matching each portal’s data format and rules, handling images and floorplans, and keeping price, status and withdrawals in sync. These are dominant platforms on their own terms, and we build resilient feeds that cope with their quirks rather than pretending the integration is a simple export.
Agency CRM and the incumbent property-management systems are the other side of the integration problem. Most agencies already run one, and it is frequently the system of record for the whole pipeline or portfolio, so new software has to read from it, write to it, or migrate off it without breaking the day-to-day. We treat migration and coexistence as first-class engineering, because the legacy system is not going anywhere on the timescale of a single project.
Referencing, right-to-rent and credit-check providers, payment and rent-collection rails, and open-banking feeds for reconciliation all have to plug into the operational flows. In lettings especially, rent has to be collected, reconciled against arrears, and reflected accurately to landlords, so we integrate the payment and banking side carefully, because money that does not reconcile is the fastest way to lose an agency’s trust.
Property and land data (Land Registry, EPC registers, sold-price data, mapping and address lookup), enriches listings, valuations and management, but arrives in formats that rarely agree. The recurring engineering problem across all of this is the same: keeping data consistent and deduplicated as it crosses portals, CRMs, providers and registries that were never designed to agree with one another. We treat that reconciliation as core work, not an afterthought.
Security and data protection
Property software holds a rich store of personal and financial data: buyers and sellers, tenants and applicants, their identity documents, referencing and credit-check results, bank details for rent collection, and the AML evidence gathered on transactions. That is an attractive target and a serious liability, so we build with access controls scoped to genuine need, encryption in transit and at rest, and retention limited to what a lawful basis actually supports.
Referencing, right-to-rent and AML data deserve stricter handling again: narrower access, clear purpose limitation, and deliberate thought about who and what ever needs to see an applicant’s credit result or identity documents. This is exactly the sort of sensitive data flow that turns into an incident when it is added without care, so we design it deliberately rather than letting it accumulate loosely across the system.
Rent collection and any payment flows are a direct financial-fraud surface. We build these paths with strong authentication, careful handling of bank details, and reconciliation that makes discrepancies visible rather than silent, because in property management a payment that quietly goes astray or a portal account that is taken over does real financial harm to a landlord or tenant.
Because we operate what we build, security here is not a report handed over at the end. We instrument for the access patterns and anomalies that indicate a problem, keep the audit trail an investigation or a data-subject request would need, and treat the ability to reconstruct exactly what happened to someone’s personal and financial data as part of the deliverable, not something you find missing after an incident.
What changes
Listings that reach the portals cleanly and stay current
Because we treat the feed to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket as core engineering rather than an export, listings appear correctly and stay in sync (no sold properties lingering live, no half-broken feeds), so negotiators trust the tool and demand actually reaches your instructions.
Manual friction genuinely removed, not relocated
By building around how agents and letting managers really work, the software takes real steps out of their day (leaking enquiries captured, rent reconciled automatically, certificates flagged before they lapse), rather than adding a system that quietly gets abandoned and pushes the work back onto the phone.
Operational reliability your team can run a business on
In lettings and management the value is steady, dependable operation, so we build for reliability and clear workflow (rent, maintenance, deposits and compliance handled consistently), which is what actually lets a growing agency scale beyond spreadsheets and heroics.
What we build for real estate & proptech
From a first platform to modernising what you already run. The disciplines this sector draws on most.
How we deliver
- 01
Discover
We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves, including the parts nobody documented.
Architecture brief
- 02
Architect
Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.
Decision records
- 03
Build
Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.
Shipping increments
- 04
Operate
Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.
Runbooks & SLOs
Building something for real estate & proptech?
Tell us the problem and the constraints you are working under. A senior engineer will give you a straight view on what it would take, and say so plainly if we are not the right team for it.
Technologies we work in
Chosen per problem, not per fashion. A selection of the stack we most often reach for.
Why teams in real estate & proptech choose us
We build for how agents work, not how proptech wishes they did
The reason most proptech fails is that it ignores the busy, mobile reality of a negotiator or a letting manager. We start from that reality and design software people will actually use between viewings and calls, because a tool that is abandoned, however elegant, has delivered nothing.
We treat portal and legacy integration as the hard part it is
Feeds to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket, and integration with or migration from the incumbent agency system, are where these projects are won or lost. We resource that from day one instead of discovering it late, which is what separates a listing product that works from one that ships half-connected.
We are honest about where digitisation adds value
Real estate is under-digitised, but not every step is worth automating, and some automations agents and buyers actively do not want. We will tell you plainly which manual friction is worth removing and which digitisation just relocates the work, rather than selling you software for its own sake.
We operate what we build
The people who design a rent-collection flow or a portal feed are the ones paged when a payment does not reconcile or a listing goes stale. That keeps us focused on the failure modes that matter to an agency and honest about trade-offs up front, not discovering them in production on your behalf.
Common questions
Can you feed our listings to Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket?
Yes, and we treat that feed as core engineering rather than a simple export, because it is where agent-facing products most often fail. Each portal has its own data format, rules and media handling, and the real work is keeping price, status, updates and withdrawals in sync so a sold or let property does not linger live. We build resilient feeds that cope with the portals’ quirks and downtime, because a listing that does not reach them correctly, and stay current there, has failed however good the internal tool looks.
We already run an agency CRM or property-management system, can you work with it?
Almost always, and we plan for it from the start. Most agencies already depend on an incumbent system that is the record for their whole pipeline or portfolio, so new software has to integrate with it, sit alongside it, or migrate off it carefully, never rip it out mid-flight. We treat that coexistence and migration as first-class engineering, because the legacy system is not going anywhere on the timescale of a single project, and pretending otherwise is how proptech breaks a working business.
Why does so much proptech fail, and how do you avoid it?
Most proptech fails for two reasons: it ignores how agents actually work, so the tool gets abandoned no matter how good it looks; and it underestimates portal and legacy-system integration, so it ships half-connected. We start from the busy, mobile reality of a negotiator or letting manager and design software they will genuinely use, and we resource the portal feeds and legacy integration as the hard part they are. We would also rather tell you early that a particular idea just relocates manual work than build something that quietly goes unused.
How do you handle right-to-rent, deposit protection, AML and referencing?
As design inputs that shape what the software captures, evidences and retains, not as paperwork bolted on at the end. Right-to-rent checks have to be recorded and evidenced, deposits protected in an approved scheme within the statutory timescale, AML due diligence captured on transactions, and referencing and credit data handled carefully. We build those steps and their audit trail into the workflow deliberately. To be clear about the boundary: we are engineers, not your legal or compliance advisers, so sign-off on these obligations rests with your own compliance and legal functions, and we build to work alongside them.
Are automated valuations and virtual tours worth building, or are they gimmicks?
Both are worth building when they remove real friction and are honest about their limits. An AVM is a useful, defensible starting point for a valuation when it is calibrated and transparent about its uncertainty and treated as an assistant to expert judgement: a confidently wrong valuation on an instruction does real damage, so we do not sell it as an oracle. Virtual tours and AR genuinely save wasted viewings and widen reach, letting buyers and tenants shortlist before travelling; we build them to support the process, not to pretend the in-person viewing disappears for most purchases. Where an idea is a gimmick, we will say so.
Building for real estate & proptech?
Tell us what the system has to do and what it cannot get wrong. A senior engineer reads it, and if real estate & proptech is not a domain we know well enough to be useful in, we will say so rather than learn it on your budget.
- 01A senior engineer reads it. Not a form queue, and not an account manager.
- 02We reply either with questions or with a straight answer that we are not the right fit.
- 03If it looks like a fit, a technical call with the person who would actually run the delivery.
- 04Then scope, effort and risk in writing, before anyone signs anything.