Independent commercial property agent, Tom Maskell has launched a new company called Wikiagent.com, which has been designed to make the marketing of commercial property across the UK more efficient and effective for fellow chartered surveyors and agents.
Wikiagent.com is the first, crowd-sourced, agent to agent, email marketing service. Allowing commercial property agents from all areas and specialisms to share their available properties with other agents via email, agents also receive property details in accordance with their specific preferences, free of charge. The difference between this and other email marketing systems is that members are responsible for managing their own contact information – taking away the time-consuming task of creating and maintaining their in-house databases.
Premium members are also able to use the system to issue property requirements to members as well as track the popularity of their email, so that any leads can be followed up and reported back to the client.
As an investment agent, the difficulty of managing contact data was an issue that Tom had experienced first-hand: “When I set-up on my own in 2007 as an investment surveyor, I had to start from scratch to create my own contact database. Despite all the hard work that went into this, the data very quickly became out of date and the thought of repeating the process on a regular basis to keep the list up-to-date filled me with dread. After all, agents want to do deals not databases.
“In the property industry, we rely heavily on email marketing to promote our properties to other agents and databases are a vital tool in enabling this activity. However, a database is only as good as the accuracy of the data within it and as it only takes one lead to make a sale, having an accurate database that you can rely on really is imperative.
“Wikiagent is a simple and cost effective solution to an issue that all agents experience from multinationals to one-man bands.”
The simple collaborative model has attracted a great deal of interest from property agents across the UK with hundreds of members from over 200 firms, including representatives from CBRE, JLL and GVA, signing up during the soft launch and promising feedback being received from users.
Tim Kenney of property agency Kenney Moore, added: “Keeping track of contact data, particularly in the property sector, is difficult for a variety of reasons; contacts not only move around from company to company, but they also change their specialisms within those companies and over the last 10 years, we’ve certainly seen a blurring of lines between in-town retail, out of town retail, leisure, hospitability and roadside.
“The idea of having a one-stop base for every agent’s contact information, controlled and updated by the agent, seems brilliantly simple as we will only receive information directly appropriate to the job that we’re doing at the time.”
Tom Maskell has 12 years’ experience in commercial property, previously working for FHP Property Consultants, Lambert Smith Hampton and Cushman & Wakefield, before setting up as an independent investment agent in 2007, acting for a range of clients across the UK.
Wikiagent is free to register and will immediately allow users to start sharing and receiving property information, with the premium service (for sharing requirements and tracking downloads) priced at £10 per month per user. For more information, visit www.Wikiagent.com.