Vebra creates software for estate agents, who then use it to upload sales details onto Vebra’s listings website. Adam Tinworth reports on an IT player that has found a niche in property
An industrial estate on the outskirts of Pocklington, 10 minutes’ drive west of York, is not where you’d expect to find one of the country’s most popular property websites.
Even the taxi driver had problems in identifying the seemingly deserted building.
The reason for the apparent desolation is a clue to the success that Vebra is having. Its offices are undergoing a dramatic refurbishment, leaving some of the staff working out of a Portacabin at the back of the site.
Colin Quickmire, joint chief executive of Vebra, proudly shows EG around the facility. There are training rooms for the clients, and a kitchen and dining area make up for the lack of local amenities.
The need for these facilities stems from the company’s unusual approach to the residential listings website business.
Vebra is not an internet business. It’s a software business whose property portal is an offshoot from the rest of the firm’s activities.
The product of a merger
Vebra was formed two years ago by the merger of Solex and Craft Computer Systems, two long-established players in the property software field. The two had competed against one another, but eventually came to the conclusion that they’d be better served as one company, with offices in Pocklington and St Albans.
Despite being a consummate salesman and head of a hi-tech company, Quickmire started his career as a mechanical engineer. He and his partner in Solex, Blyth Nicholson, decided to move into IT eight years ago with their own business and identified the property market as a niche that could be successfully attacked.
The pair now share directorships in Vebra with the two founders of Craft. Its key business is selling software to the independent estate agent market. The product is designed to run everything from contact management to producing on demand the property particulars for a house.
Once a set of details has been entered they can be reused in a variety of ways, from producing window boards to placing newspaper ads or doing automated mailshots. “Agents don’t like duplicating effort,” Quickmire says.
When the internet boom hit, it became apparent that the ability to upload property details to the web was becoming vital to agents, and so the software was developed in that direction.
Quickmire says he hasn’t recently checked the number of users their software has, but estimates that it is in 2,500 individual offices around the country. The bias is towards smaller, local agents rather than the big national chains.
Agents pay a licence fee for the software and an on-going support fee. The firm now has its own portal – vebra.com – to which agents can freely upload properties as part of the licence price they pay for the software.
Vebra also hosts agents’ own websites and has a design team in place to assist with that side of the business, charging agents extra for the service.
“What people want is up to date information about properties,” says Quickmire. “What agents want is local and national publicity for the sites they are selling. That’s where our philosophy comes from.”
He claims that Vebra.com is up-to-date because the moment a property is marked as sold on the agent’s own database, it is pulled from the website because the two systems are linked.
Sold properties leave the pitch
“At the moment, with so few houses available, some agents have asked us if they can keep up some sold properties,” he says. “While I can understand that they want it to look like they have some properties to sell, I don’t think it does anyone any good.”
Once details such as particulars, floorplans and photos – an unlimited number – are in the system, agents can quickly and easily upload them to vebra.com. The software also offers the option to add them to the other portals as well.
Vebra is proudly promoting itself as the most visited property search portal in the UK, based on Hitwise’s figures (see EG, 6 April, p110). A quick look at the front page of the website makes that amply clear.
The figures are, in some circles, deeply controversial. Some have suggested that, because Hitwise takes data direct from ISPs, the vital traffic from corporate networks during the week is ignored.
Others point to the disparities between Hitwise’s figures and the regular table run in Estate Agents’ News, with data supplied by the sites themselves.
Quickmire is dismissive of that attitude. “At the end of the day, Hitwise is an independent company,” he says. “Any arguments from the other sites about why some of their visits are being missed would apply equally to us.
“Equally, we’re not interested in page impressions,” says Quickmire. “We don’t have advertising on the site.”
Instead, he is more interested in unique visits from actual house buyers – after all, that is what his clients, the estate agents, want.
For this reason, Vebra doesn’t link up with financial services firms or the like, as some sites do to raise money. That would put it into competition with the agents’ own arrangements in that area, he suggests.
“That’s what the agent does. That’s his business,” he states, emphatically.
He attributes the website’s low profile to date as a side-effect of deciding not to advertise it initially. He says a television advert might reach millions of people, but how many of them are actually looking for a house when they see it?
“People spent lots and lots of money to get to the public,” he says. “As a result, quite a lot failed. Ultimately, only two or three will survive.” Quickmire clearly believes that Vebra should be one of them.
He feels that the best publicity to date has been the agents’ own shops, particulars and websites. That’s about to change, however.
He indicates that Vebra will be stepping up its marketing in the coming months and is looking at moving into the commercial field as well.
For now, the focus remains on the residential business, and the internet is at the heart of it. “More and more people are looking at the internet at the start of the buying cycle,” he says.
Offer to agents
The firm pushes forward its offer to agents to take in new technologies as they arise. It’s in the process of promoting a text-messaging service that allows agents to alert buyers automatically via their mobile phones when a property that matches their needs comes in.
“If you look at agents’ phone bills, 70% of it is to mobile phones,” says Quickmire. “This allows them to inform their customers faster and more cheaply.”
Throughout the conversation, Quickmire returns repeatedly to the theme of serving agents in their own offices. He describes with some passion the move from sticky photos on photocopied particulars to the smooth, PC-based particulars of today. Being part of that transition has clearly been good for the business.
Asking a property listings firm if it is profitable normally elicits a response along the lines of “we hope to be cash flow neutral in 18 months”.
In this case, the response is quite different. “Yes,” laughs Quickmire, “and we have been for years.” The business turns over around £3m pa, he claims. It’s still privately held, although the directors did look at going public during the height of the tech stock craze, and it’s within the realms of possibility that they might do so again.
However, Quickmire is aware of the dangers of complacency in a sector which many see as an easy target. He says the firm’s record for innovation and its established nature give it an advantage.
“Estate agents want to know that a site is here to stay,” he says. “We’re here to stay.”
