Fixing estate agents with technology | Richard White – Co-founder of GoodLord Podcast

We all know renting or buying a house can be a pain for everyone involved, in this episode of Cohoste we spoke to Richard White, a co-founder of GoodLord. GoodLord is an award-winning tech-based lettings company that integrates market-leading products and services at the optimal time. In this clip Richard and Lloyd discuss successful investment rounds as well as what allows Richard to stay sane in the manic world of startups:

[00:00:13] Lloyd: Welcome to host. In this series, we’ll be focusing on the tech innovation in finance, fintech. This is the series where we meet the people shaping the future of finance. I’m Lloyd Whitehead and I’m a head hunter. I’m privileged to spend my days with some of the most innovative and in-demand minds in tech and finance. From unicorn companies that ride in to fix our everyday problems to financial disruptors. In this show, you’ll hear from the founders themselves and hopefully pick up some awesome ideas for where you can invest and win big in the future. The future of tech belongs to the consumer. So listen up. Hit subscribe and get your weekly dose of host.

[00:01:01] Lloyd: Today, I’m joined by Richard White, co-founder and CEO of Good Lord, a company Improving Property and Letting Transactions by Slimming Down the admin it’s a revolution in tenancy. He’s a dog lover and sharp suit wearer, and sometimes he stands in the fridge to relax. I’ll explain. We’re talking time, habits, productivity and how he quit working for other people to found a business that turned an everyday situation into an opportunity.

[00:01:27] Sneha: Thanks for joining us, Richard. Good Lord is obviously solving a huge admin problem in the lettings industry. How far has your success come and what’s in store for the future?

[00:01:39] Richard: Yeah. I mean, like, is renting still crap? Yes. So I don’t think we’ve come that far. Relatively. I think we have done a good job so far. But there’s still a lot more to do. You know, we started off trying to make the transaction better and trying to make it quicker and simpler. But actually, you know, the bigger problem is everything around rentals. I mean, right away from search when you’re on your property and things just don’t get fixed and things are not transparent and people are taken advantage of. And it’s not just tenants. Landlords get taken advantage of. Agents get taken advantage of. And everyone does because, you know, it’s nontransparent and there are places for people to hide. So I think, you know, when there’s a time where, you know, people can move a lot more freely into places and get the service and the flat that they expected at the start, then, you know, we’ll have done our job.

[00:02:37] Sneha: Yeah. That’s really interesting. What inspired the idea behind Good Lord.

[00:02:41] Richard: Erm so I was an agent zipping about in one of these minis. And I just I really enjoyed meeting people. And as corny as it sounded, I actually really enjoyed people finding people a home. But that wasn’t the majority of what I found myself doing. It was just doing all the kind of paperwork and crap and sending the same e-mails over and over again. And that rapport that you built up with that tenant or that landlord to really help them when it came to doing the process, that deteriorated. And you went from being a good relationship to it breaking down. Because I was frustrated. They were frustrated. And I just thought, well, we’re all complicit in this ecosystem, in this process.

[00:03:29] Sneha: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, the rental market is kind of a minefield as someone who regularly looks for a flat and throughout the whole of university, lived away from home, was flat hunting a lot. It is a dreadful experience. Especially, I was doing my master’s in Sheffield. I ended up going away from a private landlord and going through an agent. And the agent just kind of completely took advantage of any little bit that they possibly could. And as the tenant, you have no power. So it is quite an imbalanced industry, isn’t it?

[00:04:01] Richard: No one’s winning out of the current status quo. Letting agents are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. Tenants are finding it harder and harder to get good quality flats and landlords. You know, you speak to a lot of them and you know, they’re getting a bad quality tenant. So it’s really, really expensive to kind of keep a flat in good repair. And so it’s broken. The whole thing is broken.

[00:04:26] Lloyd: Richard, can you give us some type of idea about the scale of the operation at good lord currently? So, how many staff there are? And then really, what are you spending your time on if we reflect on what’s been crap in the letting industry.

[00:04:42] Richard: Yes. So we’re about one hundred and twenty-five people today. And I think this time last year we were around thirty-nine, thirty-eight. So we’ve grown quite rapidly and we’ve been spending a lot of our time on tech and getting the tech right. I think the typical mistake to do is to probably not put as much money into your technology as you probably should do. For us, it was about, let’s make sure we can build a world-class team, so let’s attract those world-class developers and those product people and just general world-class talent within the UK and everything else will spin out of that. But also increasing the number of users and the number of tenancies we’re doing, there’s ninety-seven billion which flows between private renters to landlords each year and there’s a certain amount of transactions. And you know, for us it’s about getting those transactions on the platform. As a founder, your job is to stay ahead of the curve of the rate your business is growing. If you don’t, you’ve got a big problem. There’s a lot of founders out there which find themselves in a position where, you know, the business runs away from itself. And they can’t keep up. So from day one, it’s always been about what can I learn and how can I develop myself personally to do my job justice, you know, we expect people to do their best work in the company.

[00:06:14] Lloyd: In terms of what you want to achieve in the market obviously, letting has fundamental issues. And that’s because of buyers and let changing and so on and so forth. Can your product keep on expanding by taking further market share or is there something else that you are thinking through? That can keep on encouraging this growth?

[00:06:35] Richard: I don’t know anywhere around the world where people are really happy with the long term rental experience. It’s crazy. It’s because it’s one of the oldest industries in the world and one of the most complex. I come back to their kind of point. There’s a lot more here to do. For us, it’s about growing by not only our market share and doing more transactions, but also by really changing that trade and experiential shift around renting. So not just making the transaction better. And you can do it on your mobile phone but by making people feel safer, making it cheaper and lowering the barriers to entry with the amounts you need to put down or when you come into the UK and people ask you for 6 months rent or a year’s worth of rent. So there’s a lot more that we need to do to kind of do that before we start getting overexcited and jumping in the pond.

[00:07:33] Lloyd: Sounds sensible and in proptech at large, are there any businesses that you would champion for people to look into that you think are doing an equally great job, but in a slightly different space within proptech.

[00:07:45] Richard: I think that it’s a tough one. Look, I think that we’ve had the first, second and we’re now on to kind of the third wave and it’s a market that’s maturing. I think my problem with that at the moment generally is it’s a really fragmented market. When you go into pop tech or go into property anyway like there are thousands of suppliers, there are loads of estate agents, there are loads of online estate agents. And the first few waves of that was just adding more fuel to that fire. So we need to get away from just solving small problems, which are kind of niggardly when you come to renting and think about the whole way people rent because that’s where the change needs to happen.

[00:08:37] Lloyd: Why don’t you have one of the really large players like, let’s say, a Foxtons where you see many people driving the minis around town who’ve got a huge market share? I’m sure they do. just investing or acquiring into their… Let’s take it to Good Lord, and what you do well. You’re making a more seamless process in the application and then taking it through to the tenant being in the house with deposit.

[00:09:02] Richard: It’s a really good question, one that a lot of investors, when we first started out were asking is why isn’t Foxman’s doing it? Why isn’t Countrywide doing it? The quick answer is they are or they tried. You know, Foxtons was one of the most advanced companies out there in terms of technology. Ironically, what gave them the advantage back then has kind of been a lead weight around their neck. You’ve got to be extremely, like an extremely amazing company to be able to grow a marketplace, so get loads of landlords, loads of Tenant, loads of home buyers and sellers. Run all that ecosystem to do all of that and then build a world-class technology team that attracts all that talent and can maintain it. I’m guessing here, but probably Foxtons is sat on an iteration of their software that they’ve made over several years and it’s costing them more money than they probably ever thought it would do to kind of keep up and keep it relevant. And actually realizing that having this big cost base, it’s just not like with the way the market is going and having to cut the costs everywhere. It’s just not viable.

[00:10:19] Lloyd: Just for a layman. And I have friends in the industry in sales or lettings or corporate. It’s crazy, isn’t it, because the amount of retail from shops that they have which are costing the premium and then you see that there’s like two agents in that shop and then you speak to them like hows your year going? And the numbers they’re talking about are not large at all. And it’s a huge infrastructure, much comparable to let’s say what’s going on with consumer banking And you know, the branches shutting down. So you can see the advantages of having a lean tech operation.

[00:10:55] Richard: We’ve seen it all before in many industries. You can draw parallels between many different industries that went through a similar kind of thing.

[00:11:03] Sneha: So where do you see the kind of lettings industry go after Brexit? What do you think the demand is going to be for lettings once the kind of influx of migration is really slowed down? I mean, we’ve already seen a slump.

[00:11:15] Richard: Whenever you have a tough time, letting is always coming out strong. If people are finding it harder to make ends meet, people are going to be renting for longer. And the figures out are already seeing the rental market growing and growing and growing. And it still won’t stop people coming to study at our top-class universities in the world.

[00:11:38] Lloyd: With Brexit in mind. Is it the right time to invest?

[00:11:44] Richard: I wouldn’t know whether to invest myself, in London. I think you have to wait a bit longer to see what happens. But, I think if we can see that the trend in the tech community continues, then that should bring more jobs.

[00:12:05] Lloyd: One of the things I’m really interested in, Richard, is you’ve taken good lord through a few successful investment rounds. Have you run that? you have another co-founder, what’s the split there? Are you spending most of your day on econ, finance and strategy?

[00:12:20] Richard: Fundraising is awful. Yeah. It’s. Yeah. It’s a pretty awful process. And it takes you away from obviously running the business. And that’s a classic answer. But if you don’t have any money in the business, then it’s kind of like you need to do it. You know, early days we were all involved in fundraising and as we’ve done more and more successful rounds It’s less and less. Everyone’s kind of involved. We like our potential investors and investors to meet as much of the team as possible because that’s what we’re really proud of. We do tend to split it me and Tom, but it’s whoever is kind of really free and we’ve got more of a finance function. So we don’t have to be building Excel models ourselves. All I can think back to is a business lesson back in A levels having to write a business plan for some finance or a bank. And that’s the closest kind of thing that I could think of, what it was gonna be like, so I was thinking I’m going to have to do all these things and do like this old school business plan, write several pages of like 20 page like A4 document, which is just text-heavy. And it was a bit kind of unbelievable that it was put together as a general Excel model with a pitch deck selling the vision back in the day with some big numbers on it. So it was kind of a lot simpler than I thought, really. I mean, these investors see pretty much the same idea come through the door all the time. And what they’re really looking at is, do I believe that this guy is the guy that’s going to like figure it out. I had been working in the sector for about five years, so, I knew a lot about what was wrong with it. And it was just the knowledge of the industry really inside out. And then coupled with the team that we had around us then, Tom, before, he ran a fudge business, we’d all been quite just done random, random things. I mean, I used to run bands and artists and be a promoter. So I think in our backgrounds, there was dare I say, all that scrappiness about starting a business and just making stuff work. We had another chap on tech who was actually Tom’s brother and that kind of helped.

[00:14:47] Lloyd: What or who do you read? Have as mentors? Maybe study?

[00:14:54] Richard: I’m really boring. I just don’t I don’t look at people like that. I found it really weird when people have idols and I think it’s about, you know, find your own way, you know, talking to people. I think you can learn lessons from everyone and whether it’s having a conversation with a person in a taxi or whatever. You know, there are always things you can learn and not necessarily directly from them, but just open your eyes up to a different perspective.

[00:15:25] Lloyd: I think it’s really constructive to have a balance of people learning from what you’re reading.

[00:15:32] Richard: It’s really important. There’s a lot of lessons you can derive out of things that have gone on throughout your day. And unless you have that time to really decompress and to work through them. It’s really hard to kind of pull those lessons out and they’re the most powerful ones, rather than reading it, you know, you’ve got a lot more context around that. They were a lot more visceral. I think the other thing is it’s highly stressful. It depends on what kind of person you are. I internalize a lot of stress. A lot of people say you don’t look stressed, but I think that’s kind of what’s the worst kind. So you got to find a way to manage it. And I’ve tried cryotherapy for several weeks. Three minutes of minus one hundred and forty-five degrees.

[00:16:16] Sneha: Where do you go for it?

[00:16:18] Richard: There’s one in Harvey Nichols, which is like a fridge, and there’s one in Liverpool Street, which is called CryoLondon. And that is a different one. It’s more of a pod that sprays liquid nitrogen on you and cools you down that way. It’s a lot cooler.

[00:16:37] Lloyd: I just turn my shower on freezing cold for about five minutes in the morning. I feel really great. Yeah, just the blood flow. I’m sure it’s not the same, but it’s free.

[00:16:46] Richard Yeah. And you know, that’s what I would suggest as well. Start off with that. It’s really good.

[00:16:52] Sneha: So if there is one cause that you want tech to take to solve, whether it’s, you know, philanthropic or altruistic or anything like that, which would it be and how would you solve it?

[00:17:02] Richard: So obviously, the first one is renting, make it better for everyone. Everyone needs a house. Yeah. I mean, over and above that, I would say it’s probably the rising mental health issues everyone’s facing. Through, the rise of technology we’re only starting to see the iceberg that’s coming through with the young people in our society, which are really suffering from anxiety. And I think it’s it’s highly stressful that you can’t sit there. Not many people can sit there and just do nothing for 10 minutes. Now you’ve got to be flicking through your phone. So that’s something that I think we really need to tackle.

[00:17:39] Lloyd I couldn’t agree more. Any ideas? how can we do this?

[00:17:42] Richard: I mean, there’s some really great waves of kind of product design initiatives which are based around kind of giving people time away from screens, so I think, you know, little things being done everywhere, but it just starts it starts at home. I think we will have to take responsibility for ourselves and the children that we’re bringing up and just to make sure there are clear boundaries.

[00:18:07] Lloyd: I don’t know what the name of the tools are, but for instance, there’s one where you can decide and proportion how many Internet hours you might have throughout the course of the day. Which is brilliant. Most people I know who are in a corporate role. They wake up and they’re so stressed they won’t even relax and have their breakfast. And then when they’re on the tube, that stress and they get to work and they hit work at a million miles per hour and then suddenly calm down about 11.

[00:18:34] Richard: Everyone’s the same. But I mean, we try to really tackle this issue at work. So we work the company called Sanctus to give people time and space to talk about all these issues. And we do talk about it. We don’t want people to live their lives like that who work for us as well, It’s just not effective or efficient. You get a lot more done with less time.

[00:18:56] Lloyd: Absolutely.

[00:18:57] Sneha: Thank you so much for coming on

[00:18:58] Richard: No, thank you! bye-bye.

[00:19:04] Lloyd: Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that wide-ranging conversation and have had your next big idea, please share this show with like-minded disrupters, investors and trend hunters like yourself. It’d be great if you could take a moment to rate or review the show on iTunes and you can find me Lloyd Whitehead or host on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or hostjob.co.uk.