What have we learnt over the past year?

An innovative product or service doesn’t just happen and it is rarely based on a true eureka moment. Here at Countrywide Surveying Services, our best innovations have emerged from an iteration of ideas. Through a heady mix of hard work, dedication and planning, these are then transformed into solutions which deliver for our clients, our customers and our people. It’s also fair to say that not all innovative ideas work. Many of these fail somewhere along the way, and these ‘fails’ represent an important step in the process.

Failing, and failing fast, allows you to learn what worked and, more importantly, what didn’t. Taking a trip back in time, it’s said that Thomas Edison took somewhere in the region of 1,000 attempts before he was successful in inventing the light bulb and aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright spent years, and mounted up numerous failures, before they achieved powered flight on December 17th 1903. The key to success is to learn from any mistakes, add knowledge along the way and keep pressing forward if there is sufficient belief in the idea.

I’m saying all this as I reflect on the first anniversary of Countrywide’s innovative Home Condition Report, HomeFact. To offer some background, initial discussions around the product started some four years before the actual launch. This outlines just how much time, energy and resource takes place behind the scenes on such a project. The truth is, there were many iterations of HomeFact prior to the launch but we learned from every single version, gathering feedback from our people, clients and customers to constantly refine the idea until we had a product we were proud to launch.

On the back of this anniversary, we conducted some research which found that almost two-thirds of users opted for the highest accolade when reviewing the performance of HomeFact. When asked the question ‘how well did HomeFact support your decision making when purchasing a property’, 60% said ‘extremely well’ and 35% replied ‘very well’. In addition, 97% of respondents said that HomeFact was informative, 97% also commented that it was useful, 35% felt it was unique and 64% viewed it as being good value for money.

This data was very encouraging but we can’t afford to rest on our laurels. This remains a constant work in progress, which leads to the question - what have we learnt over the past year?

It’s difficult to reflect on the last 12 months without mentioning the impact of Covid-19 and the many challenges we have had to overcome, not least moving from a physical valuation model to a high proportion of desktop valuations. This pushed us to develop a bespoke platform that makes desktop valuations not only more efficient for our surveyors but also reduces the overall risk for our clients. Each instruction is dynamically triaged against a lenders own rule set. As the valuer completes the desktop assessment it is aligned to each individual client’s requirements and presents guidance all the way through. We now have the ability to send bespoke questions to the homeowner/occupier which is vital in gaining a true understanding of the property and we can capture photos and videos securely within the system.

What’s next?

Our aim is to continue setting the bar for remote valuations and we remain committed to a forward-thinking product strategy and embracing all things PropTech. So, watch this space for further development as we continue the iteration process and our commitment to providing lenders, homeowners, home buyers/vendors, landlords and tenants with market leading products in what remains an ever-changing property market. And let me also just reiterate that 'normal' service will continue throughout the second national lockdown.