Home Sales & Letting Direct Database Solution
Home Sales & Letting Direct Ltd commenced an alternative means of
selling and letting property. The company believed that most of the administration
could be conducted over the phone and that the vendor should benefit from
immediate promotion of their home at a low fixed price rather than the
usual delays in getting to market and high costs associated with traditional
Estate Agency methods.
The company was promoted via multimillion leaflet campaigns, yellow pages
and the web. Clients paid a single fee of £195 all inclusive to
have their property promoted on a "Hold until Sold" basis. This
fee included Full Colour brochures, For Sale / To Let sign, web based
promotion and call centre support and enquiry facility.
The system was designed to facilitate the rapid collation of basic data
and therefore immediate promotion of the property. On completion of the
database templates the property was immediately visable on the web and
call centre staff receiving enquiries from prospective purchasers could
start passing on details of that home. The client later returned photographs
and detailed descriptions to enable the brochure to be published. Copies
of which could be downloaded from the web in PDF format or mailed to interested
purchasers by the call centre.
Sadly the public did not respond in the volume achieved during
the initial trials and despite successfully selling over 300 homes in
the first few months the business ceased trading because the cost of leaflet
distribution was exceeding the sale income.
We are nevertheless proud of this early piece of work. Completed in November
1998, systems and concept design by Brian Watson, Visual Fox Pro programming
by Paul Arbuckle assisted by Justin Elia. The following images show the
process of entering a sale from a new caller. This process took about
10 minutes to complete and within minutes of finishing the call prospective
buyers could be gaining information about this new offering.
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