Neil’s team also sells residential properties and land, works with developers and provides block and estate management services. Providing all these diverse services to local tenants, landlords and homebuyers helped Neil and his brother Matthew to build a successful family business, but it also came with some big administrative overheads.
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Besides putting directors under stress, excessive admin was also limiting the agency’s potential for growth. Charles David Casson’s expansion plan was in part to acquire portfolios from other local agents, and this meant their processes had to be extremely scalable to accommodate sudden surges of extra admin.
"When PayProp’s sales team came to see us, we were just about to acquire another agency. It was going to double the size of our company. It was great timing: I could see how PayProp would help us scale the business, and that’s what convinced me. We implemented PayProp as part of the acquisition." Neil Baldock, Director
Four years on, Neil says that it was a great decision for Charles David Casson.
"PayProp has been instrumental in growing our business, especially in terms of streamlining our processes, saving time and finding efficiencies." Neil Baldock, Director
But beyond these headline benefits, PayProp has also helped the team to play to their strengths and develop specialised services that clients can’t get enough of.
Working together
Charles David Casson’s links with other local agencies go further than an acquisitive interest. As well as working with individual landlords, the team also provides outsourced property management services to other agencies.
With any other rental payment processing platform, accommodating such a unique and complex arrangement could have been an administrative nightmare: not just matching incoming and outgoing payments to the correct landlord, tenant and property, but also assigning everything to the correct business and providing regular reports. But thanks to PayProp’s smart reconciliation system, it’s a snap.
"PayProp has been great for providing outsourced property management. It’s the transparency: we can show other agents what income is going to them and what is coming to us." Neil Baldock, Director
And when Charles David Casson does buy out another lettings portfolio, PayProp is once again there to do what it does best: streamline the process.
“Previously when we did an acquisition, we had to manually enter all the new details. Now we can just upload the data exports into PayProp.
It saves a lot of administration time.”
Curing HMO headaches
While Charles David Casson works with all kinds of residential rentals, they specialise in houses of multiple occupation (HMOs), which are often held up by lettings experts as one of the toughest types of property to manage. On top of navigating local licensing laws and managing disputes between residents, agents also have to collect, attribute, pay out and potentially chase up rent payments from multiple tenants for one property and landlord – a task that he says he has streamlined no end using PayProp.
“We get multiple payments coming in from five or six tenants sharing a house, and what we can do is hold that money in the Property account and then pay out to the landlord in one go every month,” says Neil. “It’s a nice, simple payment structure for the landlord. They can see all the payments coming in throughout the month [using the PayProp Owner app], the one payment going to them, and then all the expenses as well.”
