ChainTracker.com has been started by Steven McAdam, a web usability consultant based in London. McAdam previously worked in the IT industry in a variety of commercial roles, including a spell at IBM, before changing career 4 years ago following a year of post-graduate studies.
Much is being done to improve the efficiency of the processes around buying and selling property (e.g. HIPs, electronic conveyancing). However, the way large numbers of clients, solicitors & estate agents communicate in sales chains remains stuck in the previous century.
Despite a general move towards web-based resources in all other aspects of property sales (e.g. marketing properties on the portals, accessing Land Registry data, single property conveyancing trackers, etc.), a web-based collaboration tool for chains has so far not emerged, until ChainTracker.com.
The solicitor and negotiator handling the sale of each property in a chain are specialists. The weak link in their processes is the inefficiency inherent in the sequential nature of communication up and down the chain. It takes too long.
The key role for ChainTracker.com is therefore to facilitate the communication of changes in the status of any one party to all the other parties in the chain.
A common mistake in designing web-based solutions is to be over-ambitious about what can be acheived. Trying to implement the whole process, as opposed to just those bits that benefit from a web-based solution, can lead to an over-complicated tool which is time consuming and awkward to use.
The function Chaintracker.com has been designed to perform, that of allowing several parties to update and view information on a property sales tracker, has been kept simple.
This ensures it will be easy to understand, and fast to use.
In order to make ChainTracker.com as accessible as possible, it is being made available to estate agents and solicitors free of charge. The basic tracker will also be free to the client, an upgrade (£18.50) being required only if the client wants to use the extended features of the tracker (email/text alerts, chain view).
It is hoped that this free-to-cheap pricing strategy will drive adoption. This strategy also allows ChainTracker.com to run on lower costs than would be the case if each estate agent and firm of solicitors needed intensively marketing to.
The ambition of ChainTracker.com is to be the default choice of online property sales tracker by everyone buying and/or selling property in the UK.