Estate Agent Software

Estate Agent Software

Back in 2,000 I became involved with a project to produce a complete package for estate agents. The concept was really quite simply stated – design some estate agent software.

The first step in the design process of any software, including software for real estate agents, is requirements capture

Requirements Capture for Estate Agent Software

The process of requirements capture involved conducting semi-formal interviews with a number of estate agents in our target market and refining the extremely nebulous initial concept and defining a core requirement set plus a requirement set that covered the wants rather than the absolute needs.

What is a Real Estate Agent?

Before we could even begin that process of requirement capture, we needed to define our target market. Estate Agent is a term that covers businesses from one person operations to national and even international corporate entities. Some are specialised in various property areas – commercial property, property rental, domestic property sales and or rentals.

We defined our market target as being an estate agent with possibly more than one office but no more than three offices who may or may not have a local area network but was unlikely to have an inter-office network.

The bulk of our estate agents would have no more than three staff operating from an office.

Having reached these conclusions we could proceed with the requirements capture phase of the project.

By the end of the requirement capture phase of the project, we had a fairly clear idea of what our potential client's capabilities were, the level of their technological abilities and most importantly what they wanted from their software.

The development of the internet to being as it is now the prime marketing weapon in the real estate agent's armoury meant we had to consider integration of the desktop software with a remote web server based system

The Ideal Estate Agent Software

We thought we had defined our requirements of our market quite accurately but before we could consider production we had to check two major points.

• Would our real estate agent software fulfil the needs of and appeal to our target market?
• How much would our target market pay for this software?

Answering the first question would also provide an answer to the second question. We surveyed a number of real estate agents in a number of countries with a description of what our proposed software would do and asked if they would be willing to purchase if the price was right. In other words, what price point would they consider represented clear value for money.

The survey produced results beyond our expectations. Over 90% of the real estate agents interviewed stated they would buy the product if the price was right and it performed as described.

We then suggested a number of buying models and price points. Our survey indicated that the product could be extremely profitable to develop and that our innovative model would result in a high order to enquiry ratio along with a low churn rate.

A Successful Product

We had a winner on our hands, if we could raise the capital investment to develop and market the product. Our conservative business plan indicated a break even on trading within 18 months and a return on capital invested within 30 months. Plugging in the figures we actually expected rather than our pessimistic figures gave even better results with an exit point for investors clearly defined either pre or post IPO

Finance

We failed to attract a serious investor for our product in the post dot com crash climate so the project was shelved leaving us with a number of attractive domain names on our hands.

These domains, including this one aimed at real estate agents requiring software are now being utilised to generate advertising revenue, thereby recouping the costs incurred in the research phase of our estate agent software project.

Realistic offers for the domains will be considered and contact should be made through WebOneUK

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