Recently, the Property Ladder Group (PLG) became the first service provider in the UK to create and launch a property valuations app, designed to make valuing property safer whilst maintaining accuracy. Find out how the creators came up with the idea and the thought process behind it.
Over the years, technology has become a huge influence in our day-to-day lives, with more and more of the population owning smart phones and tablets to help manage their diaries, social communication and to stream music, TV series and movies.
There are apps for everything, from banking to language translation, shopping to booking a holiday. So why has there never been one created to make life easier when valuing your property? It could be argued that valuing a property the usual way (having estate agents visit), is simply how we have come to expect the process to be. However, the events of the last year with the Covid-19 pandemic have meant that, as a society, we are needing to rethink how we interact with other people, especially people we do not know. Should we not be looking at new ways of carrying out this process?
The creation & idea
With this in mind, the founders of PLG sat down and discussed how things could be changed to make valuing property safer whilst maintaining accuracy, and the creation of the PLG property valuations app began. Darren Leggett, Managing Director of PLG, said:
“Finding a new service solution in such an established industry is not the easiest thing to do. If it was that easy, someone else would have thought of it. Not only do you need to consider the service itself, but you also need to decide how it looks, works and whether it is in fact a solution at all.
Helen (the co-founder of PLG) and I discussed this for hours on end. We both agreed that a property valuations app was the most sensible and tech friendly option. We also decided that the app needed to offer our customers the flexibility to choose the reason for the valuation, add the details of the property itself and then be able to submit the information to PLG in order to generate our report.”
Helen Graham, Managing Director, said:
“We wanted to create something that gave the user a ‘one stop’ experience, something that was focused on making life easier. If you are selling a property, you may be buying a new one, so why not explore having everything you may require making this happen in one place?
Wealth Management, Will Writing and of course Conveyancing are all services that are relevant to the property industry, so why not offer them during the initial valuation process? If we can make the user consider what else they need, then offer those services, we are able to provide a better customer experience.”
The solution
Ultimately, what PLG have achieved is to create an app that has revolutionised how property is valued and that is able to offer additional services to clients that could require them during a property transaction.
This has been described as “game-changing” and professionals in the legal sector are particularly seeing the benefit of this new concept.
Darren added:
“If you look at Probate, it is one of the most stressful process someone will ever go through. Pair that with the need to sell a property and life can become one huge headache.
Our app allows the bereaved to obtain a HMRC-compliant valuation without the need for estate agents to visit the property, something that we believe will make this important part of the process more bearable and certainly much less intrusive. The same is to be said for Court of Protection and Trust matters.”
The idea was rather straight forward, but it took some time to launch. Helen said:
“Trying to partner with a technical firm that understood what we were trying to create was the hardest part.
In addition, as this is the first of its kind there was nothing to compare with, so there was a lot of back and forth with getting it right. 16 months of consulting, hard work and perseverance was well worth it though!”
To find out more about our app and how to use it, visit our app webpage. You can download the app today for free from the App Store and Google Play.
This article was submitted to be published by the Property Ladder Group as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Wills and Probate. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Wills and Probate.
