Hello, world

Hi, I’m Richard — CTO for Bricklane.

My team of engineers and scientists are building a technology led, data-driven approach to investing in residential property. We’ve learnt lots along the way, and want to use this space to share our experiences, methods, and ideas.

What is Bricklane?

Bricklane is a UK residential property investment & management company. We acquire, service and rent out residential properties, earning returns for investors from the rental income.

This concept isn’t new — property investment has been around for a while. Our approach uses technology to do this in a more efficient and scalable way, unlocking the majority of the property market for easy investment.

Basket, meet eggs

Investing in property traditionally requires a lot of upfront work to find and evaluate candidates, organise the purchase, and onboard tenants with a great experience.

For this reason investors will try to optimise by investing in many units in a single block of flats. Large institutional investors build portfolios of many blocks, each consisting of many apartments.

This helps reduce the overhead — buying 10 blocks of flats of equal specs is easier than 1000s of individual properties! Unfortunately, this reduces the choice available to tenants, and creates potential problems for the investor in terms of diversification and scale. This is because there is a limited number of these blocks available in the UK, and they make up a very small proportion of the total residential market.

These similar properties are not diverse — if the location of a block becomes undesirable, or no-one wants to rent this style of home, more of your portfolio is affected simultaneously.

Bricklane solves this by making it possible to build portfolios made up of individual properties, we do this by automating as much of the upfront work as we can, through the smart use of data & technology.

In 2016 we launched bricklane.com, aimed at everyday investors like you and I who wanted to invest in property. This became a proving ground for our internal platform, known as Compass.

Today, this has become the foundation of how we buy properties at scale, enabling us to support large investors with £100m+ mandates. Being technology driven has led us to discoveries that are seemingly exclusive to Bricklane, not to mention various exciting unique datasets and secret tools.

What’s next?

So far, we have mostly focused on acquiring properties efficiently, there’s many other areas to explore in future. We understand our properties are more than just bricks and mortar, they are people’s homes too. We believe we have an opportunity to use technology to dramatically improve the rental experience, from streamlining the application process to automating repairs and services.

We’re already lining up some articles, make sure you subscribe to be notified when they go live.