There are few facets of the real estate world considered less sexy, less exciting or less engaging than property maintenance. Which is funny, given how much time is dedicated to passionately talking about it.
If an office is too hot, tenants complain. Too cold? They complain. If the loos are not up to scratch, it will not take long before they lose their patience. On the residential side, building snags can fuel even more emotional reactions. From water leaks to boiler breakages, these sorts of issues create a barrage of problems and, as a result, an army of disgruntled occupiers and landlords desperate for a quick solution.
The wider predicament, says Rajeev Nayyar, founder of repair reporting software system Fixflo, is that these issues often go much further than simply resolving the problem. “Repairs are not just about the solution,” he says. “They are about communication and expectation management. In the same way that Amazon has revised its expectation management system to give customers updates on where their parcel is and when it will arrive, building maintenance is about keeping everyone informed – and by default much calmer and happier – throughout the process.”
Launched in 2013, initially to service the residential sector, Fixflo allows tenants to alert landlords to snags as they arise, but takes care of contractor procurement and creates a fully auditable log of the entire process – one that is unalterable by either party.
Now, with more than 400,000 homes in the UK signed up to the system, Nayyar is expanding into the commercial sector with the addition of a cyclical maintenance functionality. This, he says, could automate the management of buildings, portfolios or entire estates.
Here the former commercial real estate solicitor outlines what Fixflo could bring to the wider property community, reveals plans for an overseas expansion and explains why he thinks the term proptech is “only good as a collective marketing term”.
Commercial opportunities
While 90% of Fixflo’s business still operates in the residential sphere, the group’s current focus is on making itself a name in the commercial sector, where Nayyar identifies the biggest opportunities.
“Residential has been ready for this sort of technology for a while, but the real wins are in commercial, where operational efficiencies are absolutely critical,” he says. “There can be no messing around in terms of health and safety and legislation. Brand and reputation are everything.
“When we started Fixflo, our aim wasn’t to just stay in residential. It was our starting point. The plan has always been to move into commercial, and while it’s early days, the reaction has been positive.”
He adds that the time to make the move is now. Over the past four years the company has doubled in size year on year. It now posts a seven-figure revenue sum and has built up a 25-strong London-based team. And while the majority of the firm’s clients are in the UK, Fixflo has customers registered all over the world, from Sydney to Florida and from South Africa to mainland Europe.
As for the success and value proposition of the tool itself, Nayyar says an average of 16-18% of issues are self-resolved, using Fixflo’s online guide, before the problem even reaches the property manager. And a 2015 survey of the group’s customer base revealed that using the platform saved them 28%, in terms of time, on each repair.
But success in the residential sector is one thing. A move to encompass commercial was always going to be more challenging. But earlier this year, Fixflo began to work with large build-to-rent clients such as Get Living London – the property management company behind the Olympic Park residential scheme in Stratford, east London – as a way to bridge the gap. It is already working with a number of hotel and office clients across the UK, though Nayyar is unable to reveal any names at this early stage.
How it works
The platform itself is straightforward. Customers sign up to pay a monthly service charge with packages starting from £75. The system will work in almost same way across commercial as it does in residential lettings.
It contains three “modules”: an online repair reporting system, a contractor procurement section, and cyclical maintenance function. “The first module is where you log the issue,” says Nayyar. “The online repair reporting system is available in 40 languages, so occupiers can log their problem in any of those and it will come through to the property manager in English.
There is a picture-guided repair interface to help the occupier triage the problem to minimise damage or risk to human life. After that, the user can move on to phase two by clicking through to instruct a contractor to fix the problem. Here they can select multiple quotes and then follow the process in real time.
“Whether you are the occupier or the landlord, you can see where your contractors have interacted with the system and everything is time and date stamped. It is all logged, auditable and unalterable by either party. We are not pro-property manager or pro-occupier, we are pro-getting the problem solved.”
The third module is the one that is most likely to get the commercial sector’s attention: cyclical maintenance: “Whether you need to keep track of inspections, diagnoses of issues, or ongoing works, you can use our tool to programme what needs to happen in a building, an estate, or an entire portfolio, and then let us use the software to automatically instruct the right people,” says Nayyar.
“These will be people with whom you already have service agreements, but the platform will track what has been done, what needs doing, and what is due. And this will push back into an overall compliance score, so you can benchmark building against building, estate against estate, property manager against property manager.”
He adds that his team is now working closely with the retirement and assisted living sectors to test a chatbot function for customers who might prefer not to have to log on to a platform and navigate the tool. “We have been in the process of building the verbal function for those who might prefer that, particularly for retirement homes,” Nayyar says. “We have been discussing a transaction with a very large provider around that space for a few years and while they really like our workflow and cyclical functionality, they were very concerned that their residents would not log in online. With the spread of the Alexa ecosystem, it is now pretty easy to build a voice-activated chatbot.
“It felt like the right fit and the right time.”
American ambitions
Future plans all centre on more geographical expansion. Nayyar plans to have rolled Fixflo out officially in the US, with an office in New York or Boston, by the end of this year or Q1 2018. “It is partly timing and partly shoe leather wearing out, but we continue to manage to double the size of the business year on year and we are on track to do the same again this year. So we will open a US office and we will send someone who understands the ethos and values of the company.
“We made a conscious decision not to send anyone to the West Coast. It’s too far away. We want to make it easy for whoever goes to travel back and vice versa. If someone needs to work remotely, you need to overcompensate with communication and ease of travel.”
A proptech authority
Not just known for founding and expanding his own start-up, Nayyar has a reputation within the proptech community for his straight-down-the-line take on how the sector fits in with the wider property market.
And he is quick to make known his thoughts on the terminology. “I have said this before, but proptech is only good as a collective marketing term,” he says. “It is useful to get interest and catch the attention of the more traditional side of the property industry. I think it helps them to focus on the benefits that tech can drive into a business. But, in reality, segmenting property technology and defining it as anything other than property isn’t actually that useful.
“Every property business is, at its heart, a tech business. And tech needs to be one of the core strategy drivers of any successful property business over the next two, five and ten years. Having proptech in a box as something that can be looked at and prodded isn’t helpful.”
Spoken like a true fixer…
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