Despite the dormant state of property e-commerce, OpenEra is offering what it considers the best US systems for UK individual clients and the big agencies. Adam Tinworth reports
Anyone who has been following the often woeful tale of property e-commerce in the UK will be aware of two things. Firstly, many of the e-commerce teams within agents that were set up in the late 1990s are now no more. Second, many of the US e-commerce companies that were planning an expansion into the UK rapidly abandoned their plans when the dot.com bubble burst.
Still, out of the remains of this sad story, new ventures are being formed. One of these is OpenEra, a new company devoted to bringing the best of US property e-commerce ideas to the UK. It has big ambitions for a small firm: it’s just two men, one of whom isn’t even full time with the company. Yet it intends to push forward the kind of web development that most agents abandoned last year.
Mark Sorsa-Leslie, one of OpenEra’s co-founders, was once head of e-commerce for the commercial division of Chesterton. He had an interest in IT since the very beginning of his career working as a trainee surveyor at Grampian regional council.
“There were these two boxes which turned out to contain a PC, which no-one knew how to use,” he says. “I ended up giving it a go.”
Playing with Lotus 123 in an old DOS and Windows 3.11 environment is hardly the cutting-edge of technology by today’s standards, but Sorsa-Leslie could see the possibilities. He ended up writing the GRC Asset Management Register on it and then used Psion hand-helds and digital cameras to build up a record of the council’s 7,500 properties.
In 1996, he left to join Chesterton in Aberdeen. By 1998, at the age of 25, he was an associate director. However, his interest in technology never diminished, and his reputation spread through the company. When the e-commerce team was formed in 1999, he was a natural choice.
Sorsa-Leslie developed an idea for using the internet to manage and control property assets centrally while doing his MBA thesis. With that out of the way, he became part of Chesterton’s new e-commerce team and developed the idea further.
Contact with the nuclear industry
This brought him into contact with Dr Wole Wey, who is, by training, a nuclear engineer. Indeed, before being sucked into the City to do consulting for firms ranging from NatWest to the London Stock Exchange, he did some significant work on controlling nuclear reactions in particular types of power stations. At the time he was advising a bank that was partnering with Chesterton on the project. The two hit it off, sharing similar views on the internet and its potential to change business.
Then the dot.com bubble imploded and after a number of months, both Chesterton and the bank decided to put the project on hold. Chesterton quietly disbanded its e-commerce division and its members started moving to other jobs.
Sorsa-Leslie was determined that the project shouldn’t die. He handed in his notice at Chesterton and, along with Wey, started planning the launch of a new company to bring similar products to the UK.
The first of these was VirtualPremise, a portfolio and project administration system, with which they signed a deal in November last year. “I’d met the Virtual Premise people at Pikenet in San Francisco,” says Sorsa-Leslie. “We talked to them about bringing their product to the UK. We couldn’t afford to develop our own product, but the technology was already available and we could bring it to the UK.”
That first deal was the kick-start they needed to get the company going on 1 January this year. Their first six months have been spent acquiring the rights to sell the technology they think will work in the UK market. Their second deal was with tapX, a subsidiary of CASHFAC, to develop and deploy its internet payment and payables discounting system for the property industry.
The most recent deal was with Real Decisions. The two companies formed a joint venture to cross-sell technology to the corporate real estate market.
“US companies have their hands full already: their market is so huge,” says Sorsa-Leslie. “We give them an easy way into the UK and Europe market. They’ve been really good at working with us to customise the product for the UK.”
Sorsa-Leslie is open about the fact that the past year has not been easy. After all, starting an internet company in the midst of the internet crash was hardly a recipe for quick money: the co-founders had to fund the business themselves.
“We had to tighten our belts,” he says. “I’m very, very calm about it, though. I know there’s a business there, it’ll just take time.”
In the early months of the company’s existence, revenue was low to non-existent and he was living off his wife’s income. “I supported her through her PhD and now she’s supporting me through the start-up of the company,” he explains.
Part-time consultant
Wey works on the firm part-time, spending the rest of his working days consulting in the City. OpenEra isn’t providing either of them with a living wage just yet.
“That’s why we’ve kept quiet up to now,” says Sorsa-Leslie. “Unlike so many internet companies, we didn’t want to start issuing press releases until we had something to say.”
And they now have that holy grail of paying customers: both GVAGrimley and Fuller Peiser are using products provided by OpenEra, including a trial of VirtualPremise with Body Shop through Fuller Peiser. The firm has found that demand is no longer driven by the boards of major agents – Sorsa-Leslie has had enough meetings with them to determine that – but by the clients themselves.
“Agents on the ground want to be able to say ‘We can deal with you through this system’. Their clients appreciate it and it gives them an edge.”
Mark practices what he preaches: while he spends several days a week in OpenEra’s Docklands offices in London, the rest of the time he works from the Aberdeenshire house he shares with his Finnish wife, whom he met on a brief layover in Helsinki. “With my mobile phone and internet connection, it really doesn’t matter where I work,” he says.
As he carries his message of modernisation and improvement to the country’s cynical and wary property industry, that faith in technology may well be what sustains him.
http://www.openera.co.uk
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The first imports: VirtualPremise and tapX |
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Two products in search of UK users |
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www.virtualpremise.com VirtualPremise allows users to manage projects, transactions, documents and information on any property through a web browser. It has six modules: ● Lease manager ● Premise manager ● Task manager ● Contact manager ● Note manager ● Report manager With a user name and password, users can view, edit and analyse data associated with their portfolio. |
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www.tapx.net The tapX system automates all the banking and reconciliation of payments for property managers. It automatically creates a new account for each client and channels all fund movements for that client through that account. The funds are held at the bank in either a pool client funds account, individual trust accounts or, if direct access is required for the end client, personal client accounts. |
