There is something I keep coming up against in property, and the more I think about it, the more I realise it is one of the reasons change is so difficult to achieve. Almost everybody agrees that the current system needs improving. Estate agents complain about portal costs and dependency. Conveyancers talk about duplication, poor information and endless chasing. Brokers are frustrated at being pushed to the edges of the transaction. Buyers and sellers are baffled that something as important as moving home can still involve so many disconnected systems, emails, phone calls and repeated requests for the same information.
Then somebody comes along and tries to build something different, and one of the first questions is often whether it is free.
I understand why people ask. Property businesses already pay for a lot. There are portals, CRMs, case management systems, insurance, compliance, software, marketing, lead generation, professional memberships and everything else that has somehow become part of the cost of doing business. Nobody wants yet another bill landing on the desk. But there is a problem with expecting every new alternative to be free. If we only support innovation when it costs us nothing, we may be making it almost impossible for that innovation to survive.
We have seen this before with new platforms and portals. They come into the market with ambitious plans to challenge established players, but they know they need users quickly, so they feel they have little choice but to give the product away. Free listings. Free membership. Free access. Free everything, at least to begin with. Of course people sign up. Why wouldn't they? The problem is that while the user is paying nothing, the company behind the platform is still paying for almost everything.
Developers need paying. Servers cost money. Security costs money. Data costs money. Support costs money. Legal advice, insurance, compliance, APIs, storage, communications and ongoing development all cost money. Even a relatively lean technology company can spend an extraordinary amount simply keeping a serious platform running. If the business has raised millions from investors, it can sometimes absorb those losses for years while it chases scale.
For a bootstrapped startup, that simply isn't possible. There are only so many years founders can personally subsidise everybody else's free software.
And I think this is something people often don't see. From the outside, they see a website, an app or a platform and assume the cost of providing it must be tiny. What they don't see is everything underneath it, the years of development, the people involved, the infrastructure, the constant fixing, testing, upgrading and protecting.
They also don't necessarily see the third-party costs that sit inside some services. Take property searches as an obvious example. A local authority search cannot simply be made free because a technology platform has found a clever way to deliver it. There are real costs involved in obtaining that information, including charges originating from local authorities and other organisations involved in producing the search. Somebody has to pay those costs.
Technology can make that process better. It can make it quicker, more connected and easier to manage. It can remove duplication and reduce unnecessary administration. But it cannot magically remove a genuine underlying cost. The same applies to identity checks, data services, document verification, communications infrastructure and plenty of other services that sit behind modern property technology. There is a big difference between removing unnecessary cost and pretending necessary cost does not exist.
What I find particularly interesting is that we have somehow become comfortable paying substantial amounts to established providers because those costs have become normal. A portal bill is normal. A CRM bill is normal. Advertising spend is normal. Lead generation is normal. Referral fees have become normal in parts of the industry. Yet when a new platform appears and says, "We are trying to build an alternative to some of this," even a relatively modest fee can suddenly feel like too much.
Perhaps part of that is simply risk. Nobody wants to be the person who pays for something that turns out not to work. That is completely understandable. But if everybody waits until a new solution is completely proven before they support it, who exactly is supposed to get it to that point? That is the bit I think we need to talk about more. Early users of a new platform are not quite the same as customers joining five years later. They are helping shape what that platform becomes.
They are the people who can say, "This makes sense to a developer, but it doesn't work like this in an estate agency." They can tell you that a conveyancer would never use a particular workflow in the way it has been designed. A broker can explain what information is useful at transaction level and what absolutely should remain inside their own regulated systems. That kind of feedback is enormously valuable. If the startup is sensible, it listens. And that creates what I think is the real opportunity for a win-win. The startup gets something it desperately needs: genuine users, live transactions, practical feedback and enough revenue to keep building. The early adopter gets something too: influence.
They get a chance to shape a product while it is still flexible enough to be shaped. That is quite different from joining a giant platform years later and being told how the system works, what it costs and what the terms are. Of course, that doesn't mean businesses should simply hand money to every startup with a nice logo and a pitch deck. Startups have responsibilities too.
They need to be transparent about what they are building and what people are paying for. If something is still developing, say so. If a third-party service carries an unavoidable cost, explain it. If early users are genuinely helping shape the product, involve them properly rather than pretending everything is already perfect.
And perhaps most importantly, remember the people who backed you when you were small. Those early supporters are taking a risk as well. They are giving you their time, their feedback, their reputation and sometimes their clients or transactions to help prove that what you have built actually works in the real world. That support should mean something.
It might mean founder pricing. It might mean greater access to the people building the platform. It might mean influence over priorities or early access to new features. It might simply mean being treated as a genuine partner in the development process rather than another account number. I think this matters particularly for independent businesses.
Independent estate agents often tell us they are frustrated by their reliance on enormous portals. Independent conveyancers worry about panelisation and where work is increasingly controlled. Brokers talk about lead platforms and about organisations constantly trying to position themselves between adviser and customer. They want alternatives. But alternatives have to be built, and somebody has to fund that building.
If independent businesses continually say they want something different but will only support it once it is huge, polished and proven, there is a fairly predictable outcome. The businesses most capable of surviving long enough to become huge will generally be the ones with the deepest pockets, the biggest investors or the strongest corporate backing.
Then, a few years later, everybody complains that the market is dominated by enormous businesses again. We cannot have it both ways. We cannot demand independence while expecting somebody else to finance that independence indefinitely.
This is something we have had to confront ourselves with WiggyWam. Every feature has a real cost behind it. Every new workflow, every dashboard, every security improvement, every integration and every piece of infrastructure has to be designed, built, tested and maintained. We are also trying to build something that is much broader than a single piece of software.
There is the Moving Hub, which is designed to make transactions more connected and easier to progress. There is the property portal. There is the Marketplace, where professionals and suppliers can be discovered and generate opportunities. There is the ability for businesses to publish their own articles, podcasts, videos and other content. There is a social network running through it so people are not simply looking at static profiles, but actually interacting.
The real value comes from those things working together. But some things within that ecosystem simply cannot be free.
If a Seller's Pack includes specialist property searches, for example, the organisations providing those searches still need paying. Local authorities do not suddenly stop charging because the search happens to be accessed through WiggyWam. I would rather be completely open about that than play the game where something is described as free and the cost is quietly recovered somewhere else. At the same time, I think the people who support a platform like WiggyWam early should have a real voice in what it becomes.
If an estate agent tells us that something doesn't work during a live transaction, we want to hear it. If a solicitor sees a risk we haven't considered, they should challenge us. If a broker tells us we are asking for something that has no place inside a shared transaction environment, we would listen. That is not a weakness in an early platform. It is how good platforms become better. Some of the people who have the biggest influence on what eventually becomes a successful product are often the ones who were there while it still had rough edges.
They used it before everybody else did. They challenged the founders. They found the bits that didn't work. They asked awkward questions. They suggested things nobody on the development side had considered. Years later, everybody else arrives and assumes the finished product somehow appeared fully formed. It didn't. People helped build it.
I think property needs more of those people. Not people who blindly support every new idea. Not people who throw money at startups out of sympathy. But people who understand that if they genuinely want alternatives, there is a point where they have to participate in creating them.
That might mean paying a sensible subscription rather than insisting everything should be free. It might mean joining a paid pilot. It might mean accepting that a third-party product such as a search has a genuine cost attached to it. It might simply mean putting real transactions through something new and giving proper feedback instead of waiting to see whether everyone else goes first. Because that is how you change something. You cannot sit on the sidelines waiting for the perfect alternative to appear and then complain that nobody built one.
There is nothing wrong with expecting value for money. We absolutely should. There is nothing wrong with questioning pricing, challenging a startup or asking exactly what you get in return. But there is a difference between demanding value and demanding that innovation should cost nothing.
If we want genuine competition, independent technology businesses have to be capable of becoming sustainable. If we want new ideas, somebody has to be prepared to use them before they are completely proven.
And if we want platforms shaped around the needs of independent professionals rather than dictated to them once they are already dominant, then those professionals need to be involved while those platforms are still being shaped. Otherwise we risk repeating exactly the same cycle.
We complain about the established system. Somebody tries to build an alternative. We tell them we will only use it if it is free. They cannot sustain it, so they disappear, sell, or take outside investment to survive. Eventually the infrastructure ends up in the hands of another large organisation with enough capital to control it. Then we complain that somebody else is dictating the rules again. Perhaps the win-win is actually much simpler than we make it.
Startups need to recognise that early adopters are taking a chance on them and reward that trust with transparency, influence and genuine value. Professionals need to recognise that sustainable innovation has a cost and that supporting something early gives them an opportunity to help shape the very alternative they keep saying they want.
If we really want change in property, we cannot simply cheer from the sidelines while somebody else takes all the financial risk of building it. At some point, we have to decide whether we want change badly enough to help make it possible.