The Best Solutions in Property May Be the Ones You’ve Never Heard Of. Why?

There is a comforting idea in business that if you build something genuinely useful, eventually the market will find you. Build a great product, solve a real problem, look after your customers and word will spread.

I am increasingly convinced that, particularly in property, legal services and mortgage finance, it simply does not work like that. There are businesses across these industries building clever technology, specialist services and genuinely different solutions that many of their potential customers may never hear about. Not because their products are poor, and not necessarily because there is no demand for them. Sometimes they simply cannot get through the established routes to market. That matters because we can easily start confusing the companies we hear about most with the companies offering the best solutions. They are not necessarily the same thing.

Building the product can be easier than getting it seen

Anyone who has built a business from scratch will probably recognise what happens next. You identify a problem, spend months or years developing a solution, invest your own money, test it, refine it and finally reach the point where you need to get it in front of estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers or other property professionals.

Then you discover the second problem: distribution. You send press releases to industry publications. You contact journalists. You post on LinkedIn. You approach trade bodies. You submit stories, try to secure partnerships, attend conferences and perhaps pay for advertising where you can afford it. Quite often, very little happens.

At the same time, you keep seeing the same companies appearing in industry news, supplier programmes, conferences, webinars, podcasts and award sponsorships. The same executives are quoted. The same businesses become familiar names. Eventually familiarity itself begins to create credibility. The worse bit is, some of those news items are absolute rubbish, certainly not newsworthy, and certainly not what readers are interested in - no wonder many of these supposed 'industry news' platforms have much less engagement these days. I don't believe editors pick them on merit and that they are genuinely newsworthy.

I am also not suggesting every editor sits there deciding which advertiser deserves today's news coverage. I cannot evidence that and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. I understand that editors also receive a mountain of material that simply isn't newsworthy, and no business has an automatic right to free publicity.

What we can see, however, is a commercial structure in which money can buy visibility very effectively. Sponsored articles, email campaigns, advertising, conference stands, webinars, podcast opportunities and event sponsorship all provide established routes to an industry audience. There is nothing inherently wrong with that either. Media businesses have bills to pay.

The difficulty arises when a startup or smaller supplier with a genuinely interesting solution cannot afford those routes and its attempts to secure ordinary editorial coverage repeatedly disappear into a black hole. The result is an uneven marketplace for attention.

Visibility starts reinforcing itself

Once a supplier becomes familiar, everything becomes easier. More people recognise the name, which helps win customers. Customers generate case studies and testimonials. Those provide material for further coverage, awards and conference appearances, which create even more visibility.

The business may thoroughly deserve its success, but there is another company we rarely talk about: the one sitting outside that loop. Its product might be better. Its service might be more personal. It might cost less or solve a problem in a completely different way. But if nobody knows it exists, the market never gets the opportunity to compare.

That is particularly strange at a time when almost every part of property is talking about innovation. Government wants more technology. Estate agents are being asked to become more efficient. Conveyancers face enormous pressure around cost, communication and workload. Mortgage brokers are operating in an increasingly digital environment. We hear constant discussions about AI, automation, data, Material Information, transaction times and consumer experience.

Somewhere there will almost certainly be smaller businesses that have already solved parts of those problems. The real challenge may be that the people with the problems have never heard of the people with the answers.

Perhaps we need to stop asking permission

This is something we have had to learn ourselves with WiggyWam. There is only so long you can keep sending information to the same outlets, making the same approaches and wondering why stories about far smaller developments, or silly little what I would call 'backward-thinking stories' elsewhere get air time while yours receive silence.

Eventually, whether that silence is deliberate, commercial, editorial or simply the result of established relationships becomes almost irrelevant. You still have the same problem: you are not reaching the people you need to reach.

There comes a point when continuing to bash your head against the same brick wall is a poor use of energy. You can keep hitting it, becoming increasingly frustrated that nobody will open the gate, or you can start looking for another way through. Walk around it. Climb over it. If necessary, build another route entirely.

That is the conclusion we have reached. Rather than spend years complaining that the established channels do not give enough visibility to new businesses and alternative ideas, why not build somewhere that does?

That changes how I see the WiggyWam Marketplace

I increasingly see the WiggyWam Marketplace as much more than a directory.

Property is surrounded by an enormous ecosystem of businesses that most consumers, and even many professionals, barely know exists. PropTech and LegalTech sit alongside mortgage technology, searches, AML and compliance, surveying, photography, EPCs, inventories, insurance, removals, utilities, training, marketing, home improvement and hundreds of specialist trades and services.

Some are national businesses. Others are two people running an exceptional company in one town. Some have huge marketing budgets. Others have almost none. Why should that determine whether people can discover them?

WiggyWam's Marketplace gives businesses somewhere to explain who they are, what they do and why somebody might choose them. They can build a profile, demonstrate their expertise, collect reviews and become discoverable by agents, conveyancers, brokers, landlords, buyers, sellers and other professionals. Its a shop window where the size of your advertising budget has no significance as it doesn't charge anything outside a tiny monthly subscription. That still leaves another problem, though. Having a profile is useful, but businesses also need a voice.

So why shouldn't businesses be allowed to tell their own stories?

This is where I think WiggyWam News can do something different. If a business has launched something genuinely interesting, undertaken useful research, solved a problem, reached an important milestone or has an informed view on something affecting the industry, we want to hear about it.

But I would like to take that further. Why shouldn't the people actually doing the work be able to write about it themselves?

A LegalTech founder may understand a particular conveyancing bottleneck better than a generalist journalist. A search provider may be able to explain problems within local authority information that most people never encounter. A mortgage technology business may have spent years looking at unnecessary administration. A surveyor may see patterns in housing stock long before they appear in a Government consultation. There is enormous expertise sitting inside businesses that rarely gets heard unless somebody else chooses to interview them. WiggyWam can give those people their own publishing route.

That does not mean turning the news section into an advertising free-for-all. There need to be rules. Articles should be useful, relevant and capable of standing up to reasonable scrutiny. We do not want pages of "we're delighted to announce" corporate fluff, exaggerated product claims or attacks on competitors. Anything published would still need to sit within WiggyWam's values and editorial standards, and those who abuse them will be removed.

But within those boundaries, I see no reason why somebody with genuine expertise should need permission from an established industry publication before they are allowed to contribute to the conversation. Let them write. Let readers decide whether what they have to say is valuable.

This does not mean abandoning journalism

There is an important distinction here because I do not want to replace one problem with another. Good journalism matters enormously. We need journalists who investigate, challenge claims, scrutinise powerful organisations and separate evidence from marketing. An open publishing platform should not blur the difference between independent reporting, contributed opinion and sponsored content. It should make those differences clearer.

If something is written by a supplier, say so. If it is sponsored, label it. If somebody is writing about a company in which they have a commercial interest, make that visible. If a claim requires evidence, expect evidence.

Readers are perfectly capable of deciding what they think when they are given enough information. That seems healthier to me than an industry in which businesses sometimes struggle to understand why one supplier receives enormous visibility and we all know their product is inferior, while another cannot get a response.

We must also make sure WiggyWam does not become another gatekeeper

There is an obvious trap here. It would be hypocritical to complain about closed ecosystems and then simply build another one. I don't want WiggyWam deciding that one PropTech, LegalTech or FinanceTech company for example, deserves to be seen while its competitor does not. If two businesses solve the same problem, let both have the opportunity to explain what they do. Let users look at their services, read what they have written, review their experiences and make comparisons. The market should decide who wins. The consumers should also decide.

That does not mean there are no standards. Bad actors, misleading claims and businesses operating outside our values do not get a free pass simply because we believe in open access. But there is an important difference between quality control and gatekeeping. One protects the audience. The other protects access. I want WiggyWam to do the former without becoming the latter.

Perhaps the industry has been looking for innovation in the wrong places

We seem increasingly comfortable with the idea that innovation needs to arrive through an accelerator, established trade body, major corporate partnership or well-funded technology company before the wider industry takes it seriously. Sometimes it will come from those places. Sometimes it will not.

It may come from a conveyancer who became so frustrated with a particular problem that they built their own solution. It may come from an estate agent who realised there was a better way of managing something. It may come from a mortgage broker, surveyor, search professional or software developer nobody in the property establishment has heard of.

It might have been built by five people rather than five hundred. They may not have a PR agency. They may never have sponsored an awards ceremony, appeared on a conference panel or joined the right accelerator. Their founder may be terrible at LinkedIn. None of that tells us whether their product is any good. We should be much more curious about the things we haven't heard about.

Maybe the answer is simply to build a different route

I have spent enough time worrying about why certain doors do not open. Increasingly, I think the answer is to stop standing outside them. That is what I want the WiggyWam Marketplace and news platform to become: another route into the property industry for businesses that have something worthwhile to offer.

Come and create your shop window. Explain what you do. Build your reputation. Write about the problems you understand. Tell people what you have learned. Share genuine news when you have it and contribute to the debate without waiting for somebody in an established publication to decide whether your name is important enough.

If the traditional media pick up your story too, fantastic. This is not about declaring war on the industry press. It is about making sure they are no longer the only route to being heard.

Because the biggest company is not automatically the best company, the most frequently quoted supplier is not necessarily the most innovative, and the business with the largest marketing budget does not have a monopoly on good ideas. Some of the best solutions to property's problems may already be sitting out there. You just haven't heard of them yet.

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