Welcome to the first OnTheMarket property product and technology newsletter.
As some of you will have seen, we are delighted to have exercised the option to purchase the remaining stake in Glanty, a software house dedicated to estate agents and letting agent products. We took an initial 20 per cent stake in Glanty in December 2019, which is best known for its lettings platform teclet, the cloud-based lettings software platform portal that automates the residential lettings process from end-to-end, from the creation of a tenancy through to its management to renewal.
Since that initial investment, revenue from sales of teclet has increased as Glanty’s customer base has continued to grow, together with the release of further new products offering similar efficiency savings for agents, including a range of partnerships which are expected to accelerate OnTheMarket’s digital commerce strategies. These partnerships will offer agents the opportunity to earn income by directly presenting buyers, sellers, tenants and landlords with products and services that they can purchase at appropriate points in their property journey.
Subject to the usual due diligence, we hope to complete on this acquisition in the coming months. This is hugely exciting for our business – imagine the opportunities to combine a majority agent owned portal with a majority agent owned software house whose sole purpose is to develop a suite of products and services designed to benefit estate and lettings agents? This is a powerful proposition and one that further galvanises our commitment to supporting agents.
Since I joined the business in December 2020, the team and I have built an ambitious roadmap of product and service innovations for the next 12 months. This sits perfectly within that roadmap.
I am also pleased to announce our commercial partnership with Reach PLC. Reach owns nine national news brands including The Mirror, The Express and the Daily Star. Its 110 regional titles include the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and Bristol Post, along with over 70 online brands including the Live network of sites and hyperlocal platform InYourArea. Through its scale it reaches over 80% of the UK population every day.
The aim of the partnership with Reach is to enhance our digital presence and footprint with the aim of increasing leads for our member agents.
The partnership is already in its initial roll-out stages and will also soon see Reach providing OTM member agents with a bespoke social media service, which will include a dedicated account manager and planner to create and execute social media campaigns on their behalf.
This service will be available only to OTM customers and will also enable them to purchase their social media advertising via Reach, providing agents with a highly convenient and cost effective ‘turnkey’ social media solution.
Our new relationship will significantly boost our consumer engagement as well as providing a valuable platform to support our estate agents’ brands via social media campaigns on a hyperlocal basis. This represents ‘best in class’ local coverage to support our brand, which is what our agents have been telling me they both want and need.
In subsequent newsletters I will be bringing you more information on the updates to our product and service offering, insights into our future roadmap, plus additional news about our strategy and my vision for the business.
Thank you for choosing the agents portal, I appreciate your support.
Jason Tebb
