WIlliam Reeve is what he calls a “classic accidental owner.” The serial entrepreneur had no intention of renting out his flat in central London but had to give it up shortly after gaining his first rung on the property ladder. “I got married while I was there, and while I thought it was the perfect place, it turns out that some compromise was required,” he says.
Instead of keeping it a good place, the apartment now provides Reeve with an overview of its customers’ needs on the Goodlord online platform, which is designed to help agents, landlords and tenants reduce the amount of admin time spent for renting.
The hardships for England’s 11 million renters have never been more acute or high-profile, with official data showing last week that the average rent outside London had hit another record high. The housing sector is under pressure to prove conditions are improving for tenants amid a new government drive to improve tenants’ rights and greater scrutiny of the industry following the death of two-year-old boy Awaab Ishak from mold in a rental property.
Meanwhile, landlords are selling amid fears of tax hikes in next week’s budget, with some saying they feel more insulted than serial killers.
Reeve, who has run the company since it flirted with collapse in 2018, came to the sector with a fascinating history. The sale of his first technology business in 1999, the IT industry analytics firm Fletcher Research, prompted a series of investments and roles in startups that achieved successful “exits” to investors with healthy valuations.
These included co-founding travel firm Secret Escapes and sitting on the board of Zoopla. He also chaired wealth manager Nutmeg and food brand Graze, sold to JP Morgan and Carlyle respectively. Along with a group of tech luminaries, he co-founded LoveFilm in 2002, which was sold to Amazon nearly a decade later in a deal that valued it at £200m.
At Goodlord, he could finally land another big job as he approaches profitability after a troubled first decade. The focus is on capturing the market around people moving between tenancies. “Moving home is such a massive stress point – which we hope we can reduce. A lot of decisions have to be made that have financial consequences, which means a lot of businesses try to seize that moment,” says Reeve.
To that end, it offers everything from helping tenants switch broadband and energy contracts to providing an audit trail – particularly tenant references – for landlords. Goodlord’s focus is on ensnaring professional letting agents as clients, “to help make life easier and keep track of things”. He has “a constant drumbeat” of potential new services to consider – from collecting a few rent payments to tracking inventory. The platform is used by around 250,000 landlords and more than 500,000 renters every year.
“We’re trying to turn complicated things that everyone finds stressful and a tedious pain in the backside — like filling out a long insurance form — into a one-click thing,” he says.
The business, based in east London, showed promise after it was set up by Richard White and Tom Mundy in 2014, but a disastrous technology upgrade left it dangerously close to extinction when Reeve was asked to help six years ago.
He quickly identified that his technicians had broken away from the group, who were stationed in a nearby office above a stripped-down strip club. To draw attention to the division, he placed a double bed in the boardroom and called a company-wide meeting. “My argument was, I want that side of the business and that side of the business to start being practically as intimate as being in bed together.
“The kiss of death in my world is when you learn the IT team’s report to the CFO. I’m the opposite – technicians take a seat at the table. Everything happens through them.”
Now, he says, relentless fundraising has put Goodlord on a stable footing, but some “bumps” have appeared in recent years for the owners – tax changes made by George Osborne in 2016 to try to deflate the buy-to-let market and then growing. interest rates and finally the tenants’ (reform) bill, which he calls “the big fat straw” that broke the camel’s back. The long-awaited bill would end no-fault evictions and ban blanket rental bans for people on benefits or people with children and pets.
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“The owners are looking at the bill thinking, ‘I was fed up.’ [before]I’m not making much money, my mortgage costs have gone up, I’ve been told I need to invest in environmental things, and now you’re telling me I need to allow people with pets in my home – you know what, I’m done. ‘ What it’s doing is angering landlords and that’s going to make the market a tougher place for renters.” Reeve says the effect has been that some smaller owners are selling up to larger outfits.
He believes rent controls are a “terrible” idea, adding: “It seems like the magic bullet, but it just makes things worse … the market [as it is] it may be unsatisfactory, but it is the least unsatisfactory of all the alternatives. You have to be careful about tilting it all in one direction.”
As a teenager, he was a “computer guy” and quickly learned a lesson in market uncertainty. At the age of 16, he developed a game called pipelinelocated on a North Sea oil rig. While preparing to launch, the Piper Alpha disaster killed 167 workers on a rig in 1988 off the coast of Aberdeen. The game reset to a space station and was successful. But a “money-motivated” Reeve shunned the industry, taking a job at IBM and carving out a career dominated by technology.
Reeve has made more than 50 investments in his career, including business banking firm Tide, job site Adzuna and small gig specialist Sofar Sounds. Could Goodlord be the next big thing for the exit king?
“We’re in no rush,” Reeves says. “We’re going through the woods fundraising.” He adds that “exits are usually created by opportunities,” when a deal is preferable to a commercial partnership with complementary companies. “These opportunities can happen.”
CV
Age 51
The family “Australian wife and family, British father, American mother, so the Anglosphere extended family. There are no children.”
Pay “Quite difficult to say because most of it is in stock options, the value of which is very difficult to calculate.”
EDUCATION MEng in engineering, economics and management from Oxford University, where he won a scholarship.
The last break A week in Kefalonia with his UK family.
Best advice ever given “To be more ambitious.”
Biggest career mistake “I had several opportunities to move to the US – first to study and then through the sale of my first business to a Boston-based company – but I didn’t. That may have been a mistake, given the advantages American tech businesses have and the valuations they achieve.”
A phrase he overuses “‘To be honest’ – I don’t say it much, but to say it even once is once too much – I’m always honest!”
How to relax “Listening to music – mostly old pop/rock/casual dance music, being by the water and eating out with friends, pretty much anywhere.”