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York-Australian property data firm wins £100k funding

A property data company set up over Skype between York, UK and Brisbane, Australia has raised a £100,000 business loan from Finance Yorkshire.

Two former school friends, Kevin Hollinrake and Jeremy Ward, established the market intelligence firm for property together, despite being separated by thousands of miles.

Vizzihome is an online database that collates information on properties for sale or let, and now has more than 2bn records online.

The data is then cross referenced with market research to sell the information onto customers who range from estate agents to insurance and utility companies.

Vizzihome has now doubled in size year-on-year since the two friends and founders were reunited in York 18 months ago when Jeremy moved back to the UK.

Kevin commented: “Jeremy and I have known each other since we attended Easingwold School in York when we were young.”

After Kevin set up Hunters Estate Agents and Jeremy went into IT and moved to Australia, the two identified a gap in the market where they could converge their expertise.

Kevin continued: “We recognised estate agents needed information about their share of local housing transactions and it wasn’t easily available or up-to-date.

“The traditional way to gather this information was for people to walk down a street, counting and recording for sale and to let boards, but we developed a way to collect this information in an efficient way on a national scale and our information is gathered in real-time.”

Talking over the internet, the pair were able to set up the business while Jeremy still lived in Brisbane.

Kevin added: “Vizzihome provides business to business, market intelligence on home movers. It is non-personal data, we don’t record information on who lives there but simply that someone is moving home. It’s not about individuals, it’s about the property.”

Jeremy commented: “The business has been very successful because there is nobody else doing this. We invented our own unique system, It’s not just about getting the data it’s about how to make sense of it.

“We now have 200 major clients nationwide and we have expanded our data sales to businesses in other sectors like furnishings and insurance. We can also tell our customers, what their existing customers are doing and that they are on the move.”

Finance Yorkshire’s investment manager, Jonathan Craig, said: “Vizzihome is a unique business that is growing very quickly - around 50 per cent per annum.

“We were happy to help a business that is reaching a national customer market and the money will help towards developing software that helps processes their 200,000,000 lines of data at the touch of a button.”

Kevin concluded: “Finance Yorkshire was very helpful in a time when funding for businesses is hard, even if like us you are a profitable business. The team ask a lot of questions obviously, but the process is not laborious.

“The funding has enabled us to recruit two extra people which will give us broader access to sales. The money will also help to develop our software so it’s even easier to target the right people.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Miranda Dobson .