BestAgent Marketplace suppliers meet to agree launch plans
London – 14th November 2018 – Lloyds Building
On 26th September, BestAgent held it’s inaugural Marketplace Suppliers conference in London. Industry suppliers gathered to hear from a panel of agent speakers about their frustrations with the Proptech supplier industry. The conference was oversubscribed with standing room only. Since then BestAgent has had more than 110 supplier companies register their interest to be part of the Marketplace.
Today, courtesy of BestAgent’s partner Lonsdale Insurance, a meeting is being held in the iconic Lloyds of London building, pictured, where the first suppliers to be integrated into the marketplace will agree the launch plans.
Construction work on the technical foundations of the Marketplace is nearing completion and the next step will be testing the integrations with the 18 Primary Partners that were selected following the conference. All of these companies are in attendance at tomorrow’s meeting, where the single integration method that will allow almost any existing supplier API to connect directly to the Marketplace will be demonstrated, along with several other new features of the BestAgent proposition.
New BestAgent CRM functions being revealed
Partners will have an exclusive preview of the forthcoming CRM functions being released which are set to make the latest tech available to the smallest agents, free of charge, as BestAgent earns its income from charging it’s Marketplace suppliers a commission on their sales.
BestAgent is not planning to compete directly with other CRM’s, but rather is taking a different approach: Offer the basic essential CRM functions only, and leave the agents to connect the integrated supplier products of their choice which work best for their business, to complete the CRM functions they want, such as PayProp, AgencyExpress board ordering, ValPal and ViewMyChain.
Once the Marketplace has successfully launched with its initial 20 or so integrated partners, it will be opened up to all other suppliers to connect their services. To begin with, integrations will only be offered to single branch agents, with a focus on completing the offering of all available services through the Marketplace. Eventually, when the complex layer of multi-branch agency requirements has been added, it will be opened up to all remaining agents.
Invitation-only
Initial access for single branch agents to the Marketplace will be by invitation only from the Primary Partners, as well as being offered to any agents already using BestAgent as their CRM.
Agents will receive a single monthly itemised bill for any services they have chosen to purchase, which will be automatically settled by credit card. This will substantially reduce paperwork and admin for agents, as well as improving the collection of payments for suppliers, all of which will be automatically settled and disbursed.
Commenting on the forthcoming meeting, BestAgent Founder, Charlie Wright, said “The idea of a free, easy CRM tool which has all supplier products integrated seamlessly has proved extremely popular to agents and suppliers alike. It will spare agents the headache of interface-fatigiue and multiple data entry, and make access to new products much easier for them. We are focusing only on delivering this facility to single branch agents to begin with, as they make up the largest proportion of the industry, and represent a long-tail of vast opportunity to suppliers.”
Whilst the CRM tool, which uploads properties in real time to all major portals, has a GDPR compliant property and applicant database, and offers the option of a free agency website, is already available and being used by agents, access to the Marketplace for the first agents is expected in early 2019.
