At EA Masters 2023 which took place earlier this week in Battersea, proptech expert and property journalist Louisa Fletcher announced the winners of the 2023 Innovation Awards, sponsored by Sprift.
15 companies from across the UK proptech sector were shortlisted from the dozens of submissions, including conveyancing and marketing solutions, compliance and AML, property management solutions, tenancy deposit schemes, CRMs and upfront property information solutions.
The winners, who were presented with their awards by TV host and mathematician Rachel Riley and journalist and broadcaster Dermot Murnaghan, were:
Best EA Innovation Gold Award Winner
Preston Baker: This agency, based in Yorkshire, are leading the way in terms of adopting technology to support and improve their sales and lettings processes. Using Salesforce CRM, Preston Baker have customised the platform using AI tools to identify homeowners in their database who are most predisposed to move and then ‘match’ this contact with an appropriate email as part of an ongoing nurture campaign as well as ‘training’ their automated chat-bot responses based on their own best practices. Combined, this has saved Preston Baker over one hundred thousand pounds over the last 12 months in reduced staffing costs and has increased their sales to instructions ratio by over 96%
Best EA Innovation Silver Award Winner
Coadjute: Dan Salmons and his team have developed a network, built on enterprise-grade blockchain, that facilitates the real-time sharing of property information, identity and data to speed up transactions. The Coadjute platform means that information can now be shared from both Agents and Conveyancers existing CRM solutions without the need to login to another system so that agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers, buyers and sellers have a shared, unified view of the transaction. Agents using Coadjute have seen a 10 percent reduction in fall-through rates and a 15 percent reduction in completion times
Best EA Innovation Bronze Award Winners
Kerfuffle: Long-time champions of proptech innovation, Kerfuffle is the property industry’s very own ‘Trip Advisor’ which helps agents of all sizes to identify, compare and review proptech suppliers and products to find the right fit for their business. Their review platform is particularly helpful, as with over seven thousand agent reviews, you can find ‘real world’ feedback to help guide your decision making process. You can also find net promoter scores and recommendations for which products and suppliers integrate seamlessly with others.
The Depositary: Kristjan and his team have continued to innovate their digital platform which automates and streamlines the tenancy conclusion process. Proven to reduce letting agent admin around tenancy conclusions from 3 or 4 hours to just 10 to 15 minutes, in the last few months The Depositary has released further updates to the platform, including their integration with MyDeposits Insured and Custodial schemes meaning that in addition to their existing integration with TDS, The Depositary is now fully integrated with two thirds of deposit scheme solutions in England and Wales.
Shortlisted businesses for the EA Masters 2023 Innovation Awards:
Acaboom: For years, Acaboom has provided agents with the tools to make a great first impression during market appraisals but over the last year they’ve taken things one step further with their AI-supported nurturing programme, powered by sophisticated and in-depth property data. Of particular note is the frankly gorgeous UX which puts the user at the centre of intuitive navigation, as well as providing cutting-edge analytics.
Inventory Base: Another sales and conveyancing solution that’s easing the administrative burden on agents but supports compliance requirements as well as reducing transaction times. The latest release from Inventory Base takes vital documentation, such as the BASPI, TA6, TA7 and PIQ forms and turns them into digital assets. Inventory Base also have a Data Entry Wizard which populates BASPI and PIQ forms directly into TA6 forms. All of this awesome technology means that Inventory Base have reduced admin costs on average from £373 to £74 per transaction, saving agents an average of £299 per sale
Landmark: With automated AML checks, including PEP and sanctions as standard or the option of a fully outsourced AML service plus biometric facial recognition checks, a bespoke risk assessment service and a dedicated manager who acts as an extension of your team to help you navigate complex cases together with a training academy and the ability to order searches upfront, Landmark have wrapped it all up in one platform with open API integration that plays nicely with the rest of your tech stack.
Legalito: Currently the only solution available to specifically address the challenge of enquiries, Legalito is a cloud-based enquiry management platform that enables property lawyers and agents to track the progress of their pre-contract enquiries and reduces the process of enquiry management from weeks down to an average of eight hours, as both sets of lawyers are able to identify exactly where they are in the process and what enquries are outstanding. And most importantly, lawyers can share this information instantly with their agents to keep them up to date.
The Open Property Data Association: A not for profit initiative launched just this summer, the Open Property Data Association is the UK’s first open data standard for upfront property information. And that’s important, because it means that all data solutions providers can work together on an industry-wide standard to support all the fields in their software that are mandatory under Trading Standards information, via a common data format.
Propcall: A fully-outsourced out of hours property-maintenance service, which means that instead of taking it in turns with the out of hours mobile letting agents can hand over at the end of a day or week to a team of trained property managers who work as an extension of the agents own team to manage inbound calls from tenants, triage them and then arrange for trades to attend to provide a seamless service.
Redbrik: An agency based in Sheffield and Chesterfield, who have innovated their resi sales processes to create their Secure Move solution for home movers that adds more certainty to the transaction process and reduces completion times. In fact, their approach has been so successful that they have reduced their average completion time from 150 days to an average of 69 days and reduced their fall through rates by an average of 75%. They’ve achieved this by adopting a multifaceted approach including use of reservation agreements, upfront searches and a bespoke platform that provides buyers with immediate access to seller documentation, as well as strategic partnerships with reputable solicitors to onboard sellers at listing stage.
Safe2: The Safe2 team are helping to ease the compliance headache for property managers with their cutting-edge platform that simplifies the entire compliance experience around property safety certificates. The Safe2 solution simplifies the complex task of ensuring compliance with safety regulations, and eliminates the need for time-consuming paperwork and manual tracking. This year, Safe2 upgraded their platform to enable seamless integration with any CRM so that agents can easily include this important compliance element into their existing workflow.
Street.co.uk: Street’s CRM is designed around the simple concept of enabling agents to enter or access the information they need with the minimum of clicks. Their latest version, released in August, includes 28 new features, including StreetAI which allows users to create compelling and comprehensive property descriptions and client-facing emails in just a few clicks that most importantly, aren’t obviously generated by ChatGPT!
Trade Innovations Group: With their Help Me Fix video triage solution, the Trade Innovations Group have developed a platform that connects tenants to experienced contractors via video. This means that simple issues can be rectified remotely, while more complicated issues can be diagnosed before an engineer attends, meaning that they can ensure that they have the correct parts with them at the appointment. The Help Me Fix solution has so far led to an average 20% reduction in admin for agents, an average 30% reduction for landlords in maintenance fees and has reduced out of hours physical dispatches by a staggering 93%.
Vouch: Redefining the tenancy referencing space, over the last year Vouch have improved their offering by launching Identity Document Verification Technology which enables agents to establish the authenticity of identity documents such as passports, biometric residence permits, driving licences and identity cards, to protect against fraud.
Congratulations to all the shortlisted and winning companies in the 2023 EA Innovation Awards sponsored by Sprift.