Peter Grant Blog

From floppy discs to digital devices - the evolution of property software

VTUK, the Oxford based property software solutions provider, is celebrating its 25th Birthday and Founder and Managing Director, Peter Grant, has been reflecting on the changes to estate agency and software systems over that time.

Our first product for estate agency was revolutionary at the time in 1989, as it enabled branches to be networked together. I would say this very loosely, as it involved a member of staff driving round all of the five offices collecting floppy discs of the day's work which were then all amalgamated on the central office PC before being returned to the local branch. It was a revolution when we managed to transfer these files electronically for merge. How times have changed!

The property management system back then collected rents and did the calculation to perform landlord payments and not much else. However, it did seem that tenancies were just as safe, tenants and landlords were happy, and legislation was less onerous. Perhaps the biggest change has been that the implicit honesty of property professionals has been diluted by the make a quick buck brigade who we simply did not see back then. If an agency wasn't 25 years old, it was considered a newcomer.

From those early days, we have always been client driven and no one knows how to push commercial and operational boundaries better than an estate agent or letting agent. To this end, our client portal technology (that came second only to BT in this year's British Computer Society Innovation Awards), is changing the way that agency does business. From automatic legislation reminders to landlords to an automated valuation message to a vendor - effective use of technology is ensuring agents can communicate with their clients, 24 hours a day.

We share our Birthday with the World Wide Web - which gives us some definitive point of reference of how much change we have embraced and to celebrate this, we are giving all of our clients a free tenant log in worth over £1000.00. We have already started the implementation on our client base - one client advised that this alone had saved them over 20 hours a week on the effectiveness of the management team.

*For further information on VTUK, please call 0800 328 0460 or visit www.vtuk.com