Moira Webley, Associate at Bell Ingram, explains how Reapit gives them full visibility of all of their records across all of their branches, and how it helps them to remain compliant. We also discuss how they use Reapit’s advanced reporting tools to identify market trends and adapt accordingly, the essential range of support services they can access, and how the market is going to change over the coming months.
Tell us about your agency
I work for a company called Bell Ingram. Primarily, we are actually rural Chartered Surveyors, however, we have a number of our offices – which are spread geographically from the north of Scotland right down to the middle of England – a number of those offices also offer estate agency services and lettings for rural and property management.
What are some of the benefits of using Reapit?
Well, one of its main benefits is the fact that all of our offices can be interlinked. So, all of the records for each office are available to us all, which means that we’re able to offer each other support, and we’re able to see different records to see whether or not properties are under offer. We can also support members who are on holiday, and it also helps us to bounce off each other if we have any difficulties or troubleshoot without having to take it to the next level, to actually approach Reapit for support.
How does Reapit help you to stay compliant?
Well there are a number of steps that we have to do both professionally and legally, and we’ve been able to bespoke our particular version of Reapit so that there are fail safes within that. So there are various stages with checklists that we have to comply with before it will allow us to actually move on to the next stage, to put it live or to note it as under offer, and that really helps us to make sure that we are compliant.
It also means that when it comes to auditing both internally and externally, all of that really important information is kept within the records, and we’re able to check and give the evidence that we’ve actually done things right in the first place. So, it’s really important from a compliance point of view.
“...there are various stages with checklists that we have to comply with before it will allow us to move on to the next stage...”
What’s your favourite thing about Reapit?
Well, there are quite a number of good things about Reapit. I particularly like the fact that all of the records are interlinked with each other. So, whether it’s a contact record, a property, or an applicant, they all work together, which makes it very easy to navigate your way through to find the information that you need and to link all the information together.
It means that we’re able to keep a record of whether properties are under offer or whether there’s a note of interest on it. So, if an offer comes in, we know that we have to, perhaps maybe even put that to a closing date, but it helps to keep everybody aware of what’s happening on all of those things.
We also have the internet registrations coming directly into Reapit, which makes it easy to then add these people as an applicant. It also keeps track of the things that we need to keep track of. For example, on the lettings side, if there are gas certificates that are about to expire or works orders that are still waiting on a contractor to come back, so it just keeps a whole professional tie on everything that we’re doing from an agency point of view.
How does Reapit bring value to your agency?
Well, there’s a number of different ways that we get value. One of the tools that we use regularly is the reporting tool, which helps us internally to see what areas we can improve on as a team. It also helps us to see how the market trends are working in our area. We can run a report to see what price properties came on for, what price they sold for and that gives us an idea of what’s actually happening in the market so that we can adjust to work with that.
Also, from an external point of view for our clients, each month we produce a very nice professional vendor report which helps them to see the progress of what’s happening with their sale, including the web stats, along with a bit of market commentary as well. It helps clients to see that we’re on the ball and that we’re looking after their sale and it’s just a nice, professional way to report it to them each month.
“We can run a report to see what price properties came on for, what price they sold for and that gives us an idea of what's actually happening in the market...”
How does Reapit help support your agency?
The support is excellent. So, our first line of support is our Customer Success Manager who’s always on the end of the phone and very quickly responds to anything that we ask him to do. He comes to see us every 12 weeks and we have a meeting to catch up on anything new or discuss any issues we’ve got that he can help us resolve.
On a day-to-day basis, we’ve also got access to the support that’s on Reapit itself, so whether it’s being in contact with the support team or using IQ where there’s webinars where we can learn new skills, or even use the Knowledge Base where we can brush up on those skills that we thought we had, but we’d forgotten. So very essential and very helpful.
“The support is excellent. Our first line of support is our Customer Success Manager who's always on the end of the phone...”
Are you concerned about the current market conditions?
I think we have to say it is a concern. Going through the Covid period and then after Covid the property market took a turn we weren’t expecting, it was extremely buoyant and we were able to achieve quite a number of properties selling well over their asking price and getting good premium sale prices for them. Of course, that was naturally slowing down anyway.
However, the financial chaos that we’re in at the moment has really knocked the confidence of people putting their property to market or their inability to get mortgage funding. So, all of those things are really presenting quite a number of challenges. So yes, it is something that we are concerned about, but we feel that we are a robust business. We’ve been around for 125 years, so we’d like to think that we will work positively with the situation and hope that things will improve in the next few months.
