What your agency software will never do
Hektor, Apimo, Netty and Adapt Immo do very well what they were designed for. The work that eats the week sits precisely where they stop.
Hektor, Apimo, Netty and Adapt Immo do very well what they were designed for. The work that eats the week sits precisely where they stop.
The French market for transaction software is mature and concentrated. Hektor claims on the order of 5,000 users and serves as the reference among independents. Apimo stands out for its multi-portal coverage and international reach. Netty, now Modelo, positions itself as an all-in-one. Adapt Immo and ImmoFacile complete the picture[1].
These are good products. They hold a listing portfolio, a buyer register, a file history, and they have done so long enough for agencies to have built their habits around them. Nobody has a serious reason to switch.
Transaction software is, in principle, a system of record. It knows where information is, it can retrieve it, it can relate it. What it does not do is produce text, decide on a moment, or assemble a document from scattered elements.
Take listing copy. The software knows the floor area, the number of rooms, the floor, the energy rating. It has a free text field. Somebody has to fill that field, every time, by hand. The software did everything asked of it, it stored and it returned. It did not write.
The same holds for buyer matching. Most of these products offer matching, usually on simple criteria: budget, area, number of rooms. A buyer who mentioned during a viewing that they could stretch thirty thousand for outside space fits none of those fields. That information lives in a negotiator's head, or in a free note the matching engine does not read.
Multi-portal publication illustrates the limit well. Most products include a gateway, often restricted to a subset of portals, or billed separately[1]. The gateway transports. It does not adapt the copy to each portal's format, it does not rewrite an over-long title, it does not notice that a listing has been live for ninety days without a single enquiry.
Each of those steps falls back on a human. None is difficult. All take a few minutes. And there are dozens of them a week.
The temptation is to wait for the vendor to add these functions. Two reasons not to count on it in the short term.
First, a vendor builds for its average. It ships listing generation that must suit five thousand agencies, which produces correct, impersonal copy, exactly what an agency does not want in its window. Calibrating to one agency's voice is not a problem a mass product solves.
Second, agencies do not work only inside their software. They work in their mailbox, in a spreadsheet, on the portals, sometimes in a signature tool. A vendor improves what happens on its own turf. The expensive work happens in the back and forth between those tools, and nobody owns that back and forth.
We never turn up proposing to replace transaction software, and we would decline an engagement framed that way. The software remains the agency's reference and it should stay that way. Our work sits in the space the vendor will not cover, namely producing what does not yet exist and moving things between tools. It is a less glamorous space than a system overhaul. It happens to be the one that costs the hours.