It’s 2025. Imagine selecting, customising and buying a new-build house online from start to finish from your favourite armchair. Imagine a pleasant and transparent customer journey to follow, one that keeps you updated on every step of the purchase process, giving you peace of mind that you have complete visibility over the biggest purchase of your life. Fantasy or reality? More on that later!
Back to today and we probably all know someone who has had a disappointing and frustrating home buying experience. Lack of visibility and poor communication about what is happening are major contributing factors to many appalling customer experiences. Should it really be so dispiriting when buying, what is arguably the most important life purchase?
Case in point, a recent “Which?” magazine survey ranks buying a house as the most stressful experience in modern life, comfortably ahead of having a baby or even getting divorced. Clearly people feel very deeply about this experience and it’s no wonder. The process is stressful, archaic, and has not changed materially in 75 years. Consider these damning statistics:
- 39 per cent of all house sales in the UK fall-through every year
- Only five per cent of successful sales do so in the expected timeframe of 28 days
- This equates to £1 billion of lost fees, marketing spend and admin time
For housebuilders this has a massive impact. Sales teams and agents spend 60 per cent of their time doing unnecessary admin functions, meaning less time actively selling and slower conversion times.
Yet here we are in 2019, with technology appearing to be taking over our lives with an app for virtually everything you can think of, including a kitchen sink app (I kid you not). Yet where is technology when it comes to helping people to buy a house? Woefully absent historically, and not particularly surprising in a sector that invests very little in tech R&D. Yet there is finally a better way for people wishing to purchase a new build property using everyday technology: Yourkeys.
This is a super-easy online platform for new-build properties, where everyone involved in the sales process gets full visibility of the end to end purchase journey. Pick your dream new house, customise it the way you want, secure a mortgage offer, choose your conveyancer then negotiate with the housebuilder. Once the offer has been accepted, Yourkeys then accelerates the timeline by automating many of the 64 steps in the process and provides alerts and regular updates on the overall progress. Sounds futuristic perhaps, yet this is exactly what the online Yourkeys platform does and all from the comfort of your armchair.
Co-Founder Riccardo Dawson feels there are clear advantages to this approach.
“For house builders, it will help to increase the number of units sold, by enabling developers to sell their properties pre-sale, off-plan some years ahead of development completion. All stakeholders in the process agree to complete their tasks in the allotted timeframe and traffic light alert notifications are then sent out automatically if any of those timelines are breached. Yourkeys allows everyone to keep all parts of the puzzle together in one simple easy to access place and is the reason that exchange of contracts have been reduced to 21 days, rather than the industry average of 63 days. This is all about understanding the customer needs of buyers, house builders, and conveyancers, and streamlining the process to make things easier for everyone involved. Home buying made simple: finally!”