Agent of change: how 14 years of headaches as an agent have helped shape Least.

If you have an hour to solve a problem, spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and just 5 minutes on the solution. Credit Albert Einstein with this. His point was that you need to know a problem inside out before you come up with the right solution. Living the problem is the key to solving the problem.

A criticism sometimes levelled at proptech firms, is that instead of spending adequate time wrestling with the problems the property industry faces, they prioritise designing the solution. They flip Einstein’s method on its head. The result; solutions that fail to hit the mark. You can have the smartest team, the slickest technology and the shiniest PowerPoint, but if your technology doesn’t actually solve a real-life headache for industry professionals, then it’s fundamentally useless.

At Least, we’ve experienced a fair few headaches in our time. Our founders come from the property industry; we’ve spent our ‘55 minutes’ living and breathing some of the biggest problems facing the sector. The result is that we have intimate knowledge of the problem we’ve set out to solve: improving the excruciatingly slow commercial leasing process.

For my own part, I spent 14 years as a commercial agent across both leasing and investment. Deals were a nightmare to progress, mainly because communication was so tedious. People were reactive, not proactive. Nothing was standardised. I remember the endless back-and-forth exchanges between various stakeholders. I think back to the late nights pacifying clients, or the frustration of last-minute legal changes and hold-ups. Above all, I remember thinking ‘there must be a better way than this’. Here’s the good news, there is.

All of the issues I faced have helped to create Least: a digital platform that gives all parties - agents, building owners, occupiers and lawyers - a faster, better leasing experience. Of course, I’m biased, but here’s my message to the sector on why now is the time for digital leasing to have its moment. The painfully slow, 14-week average leasing process that everyone hates can now be cut to under a week. The endless back-and-forth email exchanges can be digitised, and the negotiation journey centralised. Document chasing, track-changing and email hunting can be resigned to the past. Frustrating last-minute legal changes can be replaced with a standardised process that automates lawyers’ legally drafted leases.

Some of the deals I was involved in were truly painful. However, being immersed in the problem was ultimately invaluable. It’s enabled us to build a solution that meets the needs of the agency community, to the benefit of their clients. As a start-up, we still have a lot to learn.? We continue to learn the perspective of all agents and understand the pain points they suffer day-to-day. We invite agents to share those with us, so that Least can continue to deliver a faster, better leasing experience.

The question for agents now is simple: continue with the frustration of manual commercial leasing, or digitise the process, save time and get paid faster?