TECHNOLOGY BLUEPRINT LIMITED
In our latest interview we catch up with one of the founding fathers of the PropTech revolution, Vik Tara, Managing Director & CTO of Technology Blueprint Limited. Vik discusses how he took an innovation he developed to better manage stock across five West Midlands shoe shops to firstly increase the value of his family’s property business 10 times over and then transform the way property letting is managed across the UK. Having recently overseen the sale of Technology Blueprint Limited to Volaris Group, one of the world’s largest software investment firms, Vik goes on to discuss:
The key challenges faced by ProfTech entrepreneurs today and how they can be overcome
Investment culture in North America and the UK
Operating a business in India and the UK
Latest advancements in technology and the ways it is transforming the property sector
Exclusive details on the next advances in PropTech and what he is working on now
When did you first start developing and applying technology solutions?
I was developing technology from when I was at school. In 1988 I had a part time job at a shoe shop and I scoped out a stock control system on a BBC Microcomputer that would link the five stores together via a telephone modem. For me it made perfect sense, why would I do a manual, paper-based stock control when I could write this on a computer and save a lot of time and effort? Unsurprisingly, given my age at the time and the era, the business owners couldn’t see the benefit or why they would want to do things differently.
When did you first start applying tech solutions to the property market?
Really it all started when I left the university of Portsmouth in 1994, having studied land management. My parents had a successful property business here in Warwick. It was very manual, and all paper based. I joined the business immediately after university and the first thing I did was introduce computers. When I joined in 1994 it was turning over £50,000 from one location. By the year 2000 we had five branches, turning over £500,000.
Why PropTech?
The family business was property, they were pushing me in property, but my real interest was computers. That’s essentially how I became a PropTech entrepreneur. I helped run the family business, and made a lot of money doing it, but what I was doing all the time was using computers to scale and create efficiencies. I built up the business, opened more branches and, using a similar system to the one I scoped for the shoe shops, built a web portal that connected all of the branches so that they could push all of the properties online.
So, you developed a Rightmove or Purplebricks type platform before either of these organisations existed?
Essentially yes. We had the benefit that our main market was students who had access to computers and the internet via their universities. So, unlike a lot of the property market at the time I could run a web portal in 1998 and everyone was using it.
When did you transition from property business owner to PropTech solutions provider and what were the main challenges you faced?
By around the year 2000 I felt like I had done everything I could with the family business, and it was at this point that I started applying what I had been doing in Warwick and the West Midlands to the wider UK market. I kept the main core office and sold off the four remaining branches. I then switched full time into PropTech. I went to India, setup a company, built my development team there and started building the next generation of software for lettings and property management.
What were the main benefits of working both in India and the UK at the time?
This was a time of mass adoption, use and education in internet technologies globally, and particularly in Britain and India. The problem we had as a start-up tech business in the UK was that larger firms like IBM were soaking up all of the available developers. There was a huge amount of untapped talent over in India, which is why we decided to locate the production part of the business there, while maintaining our head office in Warwick.
What was your ambition for the new PropTech entity?
My vision was to build a system that was highly scalable, on banking grade technology. As a result, I could come into the market with something that would suit the smallest user right the way up to the largest operators.
The solution we developed is called PropCo and it’s still in use today. Essentially it runs end to end everything that’s needed for a property letting business. We finished writing the system in 2004 / 2005, we had a couple of early customers and then our first major win was in 2007 when we secured Countrywide, the UK’s largest property company. We won the tender to run out their entire business, 500 branches. Essentially, I was achieving what I wanted to do at the shoe shop just under 10 years earlier at 100 times the scale. Having won the tender, we completely smashed it, solved the problem of the biggest company in the market, which allowed them to scale and go on a huge acquisition process.
Where is the business now?
Technology Blueprint Limited currently has 120 employees, 20 in the UK 100 in India. We’ve recently sold the business to Canada’s largest software giant Volaris Group Inc. for an undisclosed sum. The primary reason for the sale and the main difference between Volaris and conventional investors is that they commit to backing tech entrepreneurs in future ventures.
What are the main challenges tech entrepreneurs like you tend to face and how have you overcome them?
There are two main ones really. The first is getting clients and customers to understand and buy into the vision. Often when you’re entering a vertical market in the way PropTech does you’re often introducing a technology to an industry that has had a certain way of doing things for a number of decades. We’re always operating ahead of the game, which by its nature requires us to convert businesses to a new way of working or operating, the value of which they might not initially understand. You have to educate the market but also you have to realise that sometimes when your vision is 10 years ahead of the market you have to slow yourself down. I’d imagine it’s the same across all of the ProfTech sectors whether that be LegalTech, RegTech, InsurTech or even FinTech.
Secondly, funding was and is extremely difficult to come by. It has always been very difficult to get money into TBL, despite the huge successes we have had. As a result, up until the recent purchase we self-funded everything. When we approached public grant funding, they often didn’t understand the relationship with India. We faced what could be called institutional bias due to having part of the company based in India. We had funding repeatedly turned down for what could arguably be called prejudicial reasons. There was a real lack of understanding as to how businesses in foreign countries transact and that proved to be a major issue.
The private sector was easier, but we found that the investment community in the UK was too conservative in the way that it approached funding. The Canadian approach is completely different and was heavily targeted towards tech businesses and tech entrepreneurs. Volaris buy, hold and invest in the companies they purchase. It’s part of their model to back founders and help them go on to create new innovative solutions. That’s why they’ve been so successful; they buy a business which they know has great tech entrepreneurs, back the entrepreneur and finance and support them in their next venture or ventures.
On a similar note, one of the things we’ve been very conscious of as a business is being principled in where we accept investment from and how we operate. That’s meant it has taken us longer to grow than if we had, for example, tapped into large middle eastern funds from questionable regimes but ultimately, it’s meant that we’ve been able to offer a very robust business for investment. If you’re principled it will take longer for you to grow, however, it would have been a lot harder to secure investment from a Canadian company without the level of financial transparency and good governance that we were able to evidence.
As a CTO and ProfTech entrepreneur what do you see as the main technology solutions and approaches that businesses should be embracing today?
One of the things I’ve done recently is flipped a significant amount of our own build at Technology Blueprint Limited to low-code. We’ve made that transition in our business and we’re already seeing eight times more production. I know that no-code is an area that SuperTech has invested in heavily both through the SuperTech Seeds programme and in educating the next generation and this is something that should be applauded.
You were working in PropTech before the phrase was even coined. Could you give us your thoughts on the sector as a whole as well as the importance of bodies like SuperTech and the UK PropTech Association?
It was interesting when everyone started talking about PropTech in 2012. It was like hang on; we’ve been working in this for ages. When Eddie Holmes and James Dearsley created the UK PropTech Association (UKPA) in 2017 to support the sector, it seemed like a great idea, so I was happy to invest and join as a founding member. PropTech was what we were already doing but there wasn’t a badge or a name for it, so it made sense to create that scene and the association is doing a fantastic job of attracting more people and businesses into the industry. We’re a growing sector in the UK and bringing together UKPA with SuperTech is allowing us to create a real buzz around PropTech in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. PropTech is shaping up to be the next big growth area in the West Midlands. With the combination of SuperTech and UKPA we know there is a lot to do, but the work we’re doing now should mean that if, like me in 1988, you have a talent for tech - whether you’re 16 or 63 - there are going to be a host of new businesses and organisations within the region that can help you harness that. There is already a whole range of innovative business and organisations in the West Midlands that will recognise and reward talent. One of the roles of SuperTech is to help champion those firms and individuals and that is why I fully support it.
What comes next for you and the broader property industry?
That’s giving the ideas away! The property industry workforce needs to be fully mobile and should have been ten years ago. It was in 2006 that I developed the first mobile app for letting agents, so they could take on their instructions via a HP iPAQ – the precursor to BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads. Essentially, the app allowed agents to go out, meet an owner, assess their property, show them the number of potential renters and sign them up there and then.
We took the solution to agents at the time and they were saying ‘but we’ve got a clipboard why would we need to buy these devices?’ Two years later the iPhone was launched and became widely adopted and we saw a surge in market demand. PropCo mobile, the Android and IOS version of the app we developed is still in use today, with a lot more functionality. This remains the biggest growth area now. Tech has to be mobile in the property industry. The more accessible and mobile the technology is, the better the experience will be for residents, landlords and property owners.
Moving house is consistently rated as one of the most stressful experiences in all of our lives. It’s awful in part because the background technology is not sufficiently supercharging those companies. It’s not glossy and it’s not end to end. What we’re doing now is building that glossy end to end experience. Our current mission is to make every property transaction joyful. Because right now it isn’t. It’s absolutely horrible and for what for many people will be the biggest investment of their lives, this really shouldn’t be the case. I’m absolutely looking to solve that problem now. Ensure that customers are being treated as well as possible by the company they engage with.
All too often the industry views technology as a way to drop heads and reduce staff numbers. It’s not. Technology is there to help superpower your people, ensure quicker, more effective transactions and increase the satisfaction of everyone involved. The industry needs great people, and it always will. The question is how do you make all of your people look like superheroes to your customers? Imagine dealing with an agent who in his hand has all of the power, all of the answers to your questions about a given property or area that is by definition going to be a much better experience.
We’ve always been exclusively in lettings and have helped to transform that sub-sector. We’re now expanding into sales as well. Similarly, to the lettings market when I entered it just under 30 years ago there are a lot of businesses making a lot of profit, but not really considering the customer experience and how it can be improved. For someone like me, developing sector altering technology that’s a fantastic place to be. Essentially, we can operate under the radar and develop a really robust tech-enabled experience that will benefit everyone and offer a real commercial advantage.
Making use of low-code and no-code, something that is a real strength within the West Midlands, we also have the advantage of being able to develop and launch to market at a much quicker pace than ever before.
Vik Tara is a global award winning technology entrepreneur and PropTech investor based in Warwick in the West Midlands. He’s a founding member of the UK PropTech Association and SuperTech – the world’s first professional technology supercluster.
For more about Technology Blueprint Limited.
To find out more about working with SuperTech and how it can support your business contact executive lead Hilary Smyth-Allen at hilary@supertechwm.com.