How a small team built a mighty portfolio

Living Smart blazed into the property industry in 2013, and show no signs of slowing down their development success.

Founders behind Living Smart are brothers, Ben and Tom Thorns. They've brought their experience as a Financial Consultant and Digital Marketer to the Greater Manchester property world.

They started as property investors providing professional letting management services, these two know what makes a great investment.

• Making waves in the build-to-let market
• Working team of two – a small number with mighty impact
• Using LandInsight since November 2017

Ben and Tom had big dreams of developing an incredible rental portfolio that included new-build and change-of-use conversion properties.

To do that, they needed to scale their business – and ultimately their processes – for growth.

That's when they found LandInsight.

By co-ordinating their processes and sourcing sites themselves, they started saving time and fees right away.

Ben and Tom can save sites of interest into their shared Sites Pipeline, where they can access property data like ownership and sites plans, then track them through the stages of development.

By streamlining their processes, Living Smart have boosted their efficiency by 5 times.

Planning history information is vital for Living Smart's conversion projects, as it helps them identify red flags just as quickly as it spots them hidden opportunities – which used to be a painstaking task.

Now, they can access all the information they need early and de-risk their developments in one place – the Planning Layer.

The result? A 100% planning success rate since adopting LandInsight.

Like most SMEs, using land agents became a huge drain on Ben and Tom's funds.

Using the deep search feature within LandInsight, they can quickly self-source off-market deals while filtering for any deal-breakers like size, use class, and planning status.

That means a list of suitable sites in just a few clicks.

By bringing strategy and structure to their workflow, they can now make quick decisions on high-margin opportunities they might otherwise have missed, to boost their growing portfolio.

With the help of LandInsight, they've sourced a minimum 30% GDV margin on all their deals found through the platform.