I’m loth to quote a press release verbatim but the summary provided by ThirdCity hits the spot – and it’s Sunday lunchtime!
In-Deed.net is an online residential conveyancing service designed to make the home sale process simpler, more transparent and less stressful for the 2.6 million homebuyers and sellers each year. It arrives at a time when one in five home sales fall through as a result of poor legal practices.
The initiative of Harry Hill, founder of Rightmove and former CEO of estate agency giants Countrywide, In-Deed uses web-based and mobile technology to help consumers to track the progress of their property purchase – from instruction through to completion.
The new venture has been designed as an antidote to the poor customer service prevalent in the property legal market. Homebuyers complaining about shoddy conveyancing see current services as slow (47%), confusing (26%) and a ‘rip off’ (30%). Half have had to chase property lawyers in an attempt to speed up their transaction, wasting, on average, 10 hours of their time.
The In-Deed service features a price guarantee, a no completion-no fee promise and a team of carefully selected, highly trained, regional property lawyers who commit to updating homebuyers proactively every two days at the very least.
Harry Hill said “Buying and selling a home in the UK is always stressful. Feudal methods of property transfer still apply unfortunately, and in the last five years increased price competition to secure a shrinking market has driven service standards in conveyancing that are unacceptable in many cases. The consumer is left in the dark about one of the most important transactions in their life. It’s time for a new script.
“We can’t change the UK legal system. What we can do is continue to work with some of the best people in the industry to bring conveyancing up to date. Our use of modern technologies simplifies the process and gives consumers more control over their property transaction at a time when they need all the help they can get.”
Harry Hill’s co-founder is long-term investor Peter Gordon who has spent nearly two decades at 3i turning small businesses into valuable ones. The duo has assembled a team of property, legal, IT and marketing specialists to spearhead the business and Philip Williamson – former Nationwide CEO and ex chairman of the Council of Mortgage Lenders – joins as a non-executive director.
The start up team have ambitions to take the highly fragmented online conveyancing market by storm and plan to become market leader within 3 years.
Hill added: “I’m not very good at being second or third. Together with a team I built Countrywide from a small estate agency group to the largest of its type in the world, and developed Rightmove which, now valued at £1.2bn, is best in class. Similarly, I believe In-Deed will dominate the conveyancing market and set service standards for others to aspire to.”
TV personality and home buying expert Phil Spencer will front the launch and a high profile marketing push, which kick off in the autumn.
The service launches 22nd May on http://www.In-Deed.net.
2011-05-22