He’s a former President of ARLA Propertymark, the UK’s foremost professional body for accredited agents, where he aims to help lift good agents up while driving rogues out of the sector. And he’s also a tireless advocate for mental health in the estate and lettings industry as well as a dad of two.
Interview with
When you wear that many hats, you can’t afford to spend hours each day on time-consuming admin – and so David turned to technology for help. In an interview with PropTech supplier marketplace Kerfuffle, he explained how time-saving technology has helped him to build a successful agency without sacrificing all his other personal and professional goals.
Building a dream business
Like a lot of letting agents, David is a people person. As far as he is concerned, the lettings business is about working with landlords and tenants, not highlighters and spreadsheets – and he’s proud of having built a business that reflects that.
“We’re a little independent agency, but we’ve got a process in place where we’re not a leaky bucket like a lot of the bigger companies. We don’t lose landlords unless they want to sell. We’ve got five-star Google reviews, we get comprehensive reviews, and we get people who love the service. That’s what I wanted to create with my business.”
When you go from being a letting agent on the beat to a business owner in the head office, it’s easy to get bogged down in the administration and lose sight of what made you fall in love with the industry in the first place. But by using technology to slash the admin burden, David has been able to stay hands-on and focus on the client relationships, and he’s still as excited about selling and letting properties as he was on day one.
“I don’t really look at figures,” he says. “My old employers used to say ‘David, you’re not really up to speed with your figures’. I said ‘I’ll tell you what. You measure the pig, and I’ll feed the pig’.”
As the owner of his own business, he can’t avoid looking at the numbers completely: in the end, he’s the one responsible for its financial health. But thanks to PayProp’s convenient dashboards and displays, measuring the pig doesn’t take long.
"I use it every morning, my first job of the day. You have a dashboard that shows your productivity. You can see what your income was, what was reconciled, what your commission was. You can do audit reports." David Votta, Owner of Votta Sales & Lettings
And while the reports are simple to understand and great for someone like David who prefers broad brushstrokes, the depth of data available also makes PayProp a powerful tool for dedicated number-crunchers. PayProp’s transaction records are created in real time from live bank data and can’t be manually edited.
