British entrepreneur and investor William Reeve is CEO of Goodlord and previously co-founded LoveFilm and Secret Escapes.
When William Reeve went into the offices of struggling property tech company Goodlord in 2018, effectively as a visiting consultant before a three-week family holiday and prior to joining it as CEO, he wanted to “ensure that stuff got done”. He went on to turn around the firm’s ailing fortunes.
Having previously co-founded LoveFilm and invested in around 50 companies, Reeve identified that the tech specialists – the beating heart of the company – and the leadership team were working disjointedly from each other. He hoped to return with a company in sync.
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By hook or by crook, the serial entrepreneur began to turn the ailing Goodlord’s fortunes four years after it was founded in 2014 by two brothers and a friend who pushed the vision that you should be able to rent a home in one minute.
Over a decade later, Goodlord still aims to cut administration time in the private rental sector and the proptech now supports more than one million tenants, landlords and letting agents each year.
Goodlord still aims to cut administration time in the private rental sector. ·Hispanolistic via Getty Images
The idea of using a mobile phone for property at the company’s outset was revolutionary. “In 2014, the phone was transformational,” says Reeve. “If you could book holidays and food delivered to your house in minutes, if you could do all that on your phone, how come one of the most fundamental things of organising the roof over your head was still stuck in the dark ages?”
Growing up at home in Cambridgeshire, Reeve was a self-confessed “computer geek”. When the BBC Micro was launched, it was the only computer he wanted for three years. “I found it quite mesmerising and became quite good at it,” he notes.
By the time he arrived at Oxford for university, he had already dipped into the tech business world and had three computer games published in his teens.
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After university Reeve went on to work for global consultancy McKinsey as a junior consultant, where he demonstrated his leadership traits after finding himself on a ‘short-straw project’ at a chemical factory in the north of England with an ex-SAS soldier as his manager.
“It was a highly functional team and it got me thinking about the difference between management, leadership and high-performance teams,” recalls Reeve.
After a few years at McKinsey, he realised clients were trying to find data and forecasts on the internet and later set up industry analytics firm Fletcher Research in 1999 – with its first report on football before internet data kickstarted the business. “I knew it would be successful and a ready market for clients,” he says.
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William Reeve was also a co-founder of travel website Secret Escapes in 2010. ·GH tech
The company was later acquired by Forrester Research and it made Reeve a millionaire by the time he was 30, sparking a career of successful start-ups and windfalls. In 2002, he co-founded LoveFilm, the online rental service which was sold to Amazon in 2011 in a deal that put a £200m valuation on the website.
“At some level, the thing about technology when it comes along is that it’s new and lets you do what nobody else has done before,” says Reeve. “Creating something that is similar to what is out there and better has been quite a pattern for me.”
Reeve also co-founded travel firm Secret Escapes and has sat on the boards of Zoopla, Paddy Power and Dunelm. He has also chaired digital wealth manager Nutmeg and healthy snack brand Graze, which were acquired by JP Morgan and Carlyle respectively.
By the time British investor Robin Klein came calling for him to take a look at lettings software platform Goodlord, Reeve was past the point of becoming a sole founder again and best placed to help existing organisations.
Goodlord has now been profitable for nearly two years and with more than 10 million tenants in the private rental sector, Reeve says Goodlord’s long-term vision is “to make the industry and renting better and, for that to be meaningful, we would have had some impact on every private rental tenancy in the UK”.
William Reeve is CEO at proptech Goodlord, which builds technology that makes rental process faster.
Asked about the state of England’s rental market — the average UK asking rent hit a record £1,577 in August — the entrepreneur says the market has long been overdue for reform. He points out that a raft of changes to the Renters’ Rights Bill is set to become law this month and suggests there could be a mixed impact of the legislation.
“There is already an imbalance in the market between supply and demand,” says Reeve. “Landlords are currently feeling under pressure and what the bill is trying to do is tilt the market more in favour of tenants, with unintended consequences and rents likely to be pushed up. That’s the worry.
“But there is some good stuff in there and from our view it is to help the industry, how it complies with the law and make the most of new opportunities.”
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Reeve has run firms through the dot com boom, 2008 crash and, more recently, during COVID and one theme runs true through his career rollercoaster — a refusal to panic.
In the case of Goodlord, he describes a “dramatic moment” during the pandemic when competitors pulled out of the insurance market which protects landlords from rent not being paid.
It left Goodlord, which today employs 325 staff, as the leading provider with its tech platform proving an exception to the rule and able to keep promises to agents.
“It grew our revenue and in a market share took us from scrappy challenger to one of the industry leaders almost overnight,” adds Reeve, in another successful nod to his tech-first mindset.
“Fundamentally boards are about backseat driving. There is no such thing as a good backseat driver and the value they are adding is negative by nature. What I mean by that is that it is protecting the business, governance and an element of saying no to things.
“For entrepreneurs, board meetings can be quite frustrating. There are maybe people there asking questions that aren’t that smart, and with transparently different agendas for the business succeeding.
“But I have been on quite a few boards where it has been positive and impactful, identifying new opportunities or making crucial introductions. The key thing is that everybody has to understand that they aren’t holding the steering wheel.”
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