Launching the UK’s first online property social network
Ben Davis is a CEO of PropertyHeads Group, the company behind the launch of UK’s first property social network, PropertyHeads.com, designed to help everybody make smarter property choices. Here, we find out more
Tell us a bit more about PropertyHeads – what does it offer?
PropertyHeads is a new social network dedicated entirely to helping homebuyers and tenants to gain true to life insights into their future property moves. It enables prospective buyers and tenants to research their next property, evaluate home improvement decisions, access property reviews and even seek out the best tradespeople to use.
How do you think it differs from competition?
In my experience, traditional property search websites are moving too slowly when it comes to providing like-for-like property comparisons, instant messaging, flexible sharing of property details and property owner reviews. In contrast, we give buyers and tenants the information and contact network they need to make excellent property decisions, whilst helping sellers and landlords shine a light on their properties USPs.
It’s the UK’s first online property social network – what does this mean exactly?
PropertyHeads.com is much more than a property search engine. The new social network aspect provides the public with an easy to use collaborative social setting in order to make more informed choices around the right property, tradespeople and estate agents for them.
>Word of mouth continues to be one of the preferred ways to find a builder, plumber, estate agent or the best neighbourhoods to move to and PropertyHeads.com is the UK’s first website to proactively match the public with firms that their friends and connections already use and trust. Uniquely, PropertyHeads,com will suggest estate agents and other property businesses based on how connected they are to the user.
Property Heads includes a Tradesman Blacklist – tell us more about this?
Our Tradesmen Blacklist is a further tool to help our users identify the tradesmen people they want to work with – or not! It is the only database of UK tradesmen that have been convicted of a relevant offence. Everybody should check the Tradesmen Blacklist as part of the background checks they do before they hire a tradesman. It should massively reduce the instances of rogue tradesmen and Cowboy Builders preying on members of the public.
What challenges did you face when building the PropertyHeads social network?
I have been fortunate enough to have a great team of people around me. In particular Steve (CTO), James (COO) and Ellis (Front end developer) have gone above and beyond to get us where we are today. The size of the project is the biggest challenge, we are building a site that contains much of the data and functionality of Rightmove, Checkatrade and LinkedIn but of course on a fraction of the budget.
You are now about to launch your crowdfunding campaign with Seedrs – what are your future plans for PropertyHeads?
We think PropertyHeads has got massive potential. Ultimately we would like to think PropertyHeads could surpass national property sites much like the success LInkedIn has had replacing job boards in the last decade. The Seedrs campaign can be found at propertyheads.seedrs.com