Your Move is a subsidiary of LSL Property Services PLC, a leading provider of residential property services, including estate agency, rentals, valuation, surveys and advice on mortgages and non-investment insurance products. To serve its wide range of customers, the company was looking to replace its existing GUI rental management solution with a modern portal that provided online access to live property listings and key system integrations to external service providers.
"We wanted to offer our customers and clients a unique level of service by providing an innovative web-based portal,” said Tony McCann, Head of IT, Your Move. “Leveraging the latest digital technologies would help us to maximise the user experience for both our internal and external users.”
However, achieving those goals presented several challenges. The solution needed to be user-friendly and integrate easily with external services tied to Your Move’s sales process, including legal, insurance and survey providers.
It also had to deliver acceptable levels of availability, transparency and control to customers and users. Maintaining operational control over customers throughout the rental process was crucial for complying with strict and ever-changing regulatory requirements, as was the ability to produce granular, consolidated business reports for management and auditing purposes.
“Our previous GUI-based rental management system made the installation and rollout of upgrades complicated and time-consuming, because you’d have to complete them on every PC running the software,” said McCann. “Property managers had to manually enter data about the properties they were renting out, and ramping up new users was difficult because they had to learn the GUI-based system.”
McCann said that although the legacy system was able to perform about 90 percent of the functionality the company needed, modernising the application would bring numerous benefits. “Not only would modernising the project provide a much improved UI for customers and for internal users, it would enable centralised management and reduced associated costs, and training new property managers to use the system would be faster and easier.”