Protal
Cartwright Hands are an estate agent and lettings management company in the West Midlands. Pretty much everything in their daily process was manual, which was limiting their ability to grow. Manual work often introduces potential for human error, and the potential for this was something they wanted to get rid of as much as possible. There wasn't a product on the market that offered exactly what they needed. We built Protal, a bespoke piece of software that manages the entire lettings process from start to finish.
The challenge
Manual work is costly, time-consuming, and full of opportunity for human error. Cartwright Hands had estimated they were spending upwards of 30 hours per week on the basics, repetitive parts of the job. The team were handling landlords, tenancies, compliance, and document signing entirely by hand.
A typical Monday morning involved chasing for tenancy agreements to be signed by tenants, ensuring all their properties had valid certificates, and they weren’t expired or expiring (a compliance nightmare). The staff were having to spin a lot of plates and mistakes were becoming increasingly likely to happen. They wanted as much automation as possible, and bringing visibility to all the data that they had.
The current solution they had was just far too limited to the number of staff they had. Whilst wanting to expand the property management side of the business, the existing solution would require hiring more staff members which is expensive.
Our approach
This was a large project, and we appreciated all the existing issues that they were experiencing. As with all our clients and projects, we aim to deliver value as quick as possible, utilising a phased delivery approach, rather than all at once at handover. We agreed with the client to break the project into phases with clear milestones, each shipping a defined set of features. Each phase would have a user acceptance testing before signing off, allowing the client to be as close as possible to the project, and allowing them to flag any issues as soon as possible.
A phased approach isn’t always possible in a project; the project could simply not be large enough for it to work, but Protal was a perfect example of a phased development approach working excellently.
The outcome
By the end of the project, the entire lettings management process ran through a clean, accessible web application we aptly named ‘Protal’. We had managed to automate much of the time-consuming annoying parts of the job; chasing tenants for agreement signing, updating their internal calendars with property certification expiration dates etc. Instead, they had a simple system that handled it all. A dashboard provided staff with instant data points; upcoming certificate expirations were instantly on the dashboard ready to be actioned (a compliance nightmare and constant worry was no more). A list of tenancy agreements and their current state was in plain sight on the dashboard. The typical Monday morning was now a breeze.