Delivering a Platform for Property Sector Professionalism

Countrywide is the UK's largest and most successful estate agency and property services group. With almost 1,000 outlets across the country, operating some of the best-known agency and lettings brands, it handles more movers than any other property business in the UK.

But managing a large geographic spread of businesses and agents in a highly complex, fast-moving regulatory environment poses significant communication, training and administrative challenges. Countrywide had the foresight to commission a technology platform to address these issues scalably, but they needed a trusted, long-term IT partner to support and constantly develop the solution.

The challenges

• The property industry faces credibility and reputational issues around a lack of training and qualifications. In a business the size of Countrywide, these shortcomings can result in operational failings and a significant volume of costly, time-consuming complaints.
• Internal communications between Countrywide's 38 subsidiary companies and its specialists (such as its legal team) were highly manual and often paper-based, causing miscommunication, information loss and delays — which, under the Consumers, Estate Agents and Redress Act 2006, could result in hefty regulatory fines.
• AgencyPro was initially developed internally. Technonerds needed to assume total ownership of complex third-party code, then develop and support it to keep step with business changes that can happen overnight — and, in due course, transform AgencyPro into an external service marketable to others.

Technonerds' long-term relationship with Countrywide goes back to 2007, and this led to us being chosen to take on all support and development for AgencyPro in 2011.

Accessible from all devices, AgencyPro is an online service for estate agents that combines City & Guilds-accredited online training and certification with streamlined complaints handling, portal-style collaboration, and extensive management information (MI). It gives insight into practitioners' training, experience and qualifications, and delivers the Continual Professional Development (CPD) needed to satisfy industry requirements.

It also helps retain existing staff and attract new talent, and enables best-practice learning to be fed back into the business, shared and collaborated on. AgencyPro is entirely cloud-based — incurring no on-premise server costs or software licensing overheads.

The application has rapidly proven its mettle — not only to the more than 15,000 individuals who have used it, but in the endorsement it has received from the industry's own Redress and Trade Body heavyweights, including the Property Ombudsman and the National Association of Estate Agents.

The online training and certification that AgencyPro automates and enforces enables agents to deliver a far more professional and efficient service than ever before — not least in complaints handling, where it has brought down the average cost of each claim substantially. Some 86% of respondents now strongly believe the training and qualifications add value to their job.

"Technonerds has helped us boost the credibility of the estate agency business by developing the system to deliver formal qualification as an integral part of practice. It has also enabled us to create a platform powerful and robust enough to market to other regulated industries — surveying, parking, and so on."

"As one example, we recently needed an urgent, unforeseen audit of 900 branch managers to comply with an issue raised by the Competition and Markets Authority. Technonerds worked through the night; the entire project was delivered in less than 48 hours, helping us build a stronger defence and avoid higher penalties. They are very much part of my team." — Mark Summers, Head of Operations, AgencyPro