The landlord offering Netflix and broadband
Andy Martin meets William Reeve, the CEO of Goodlord, a platform trying to give the best possible renting experience
His father is a classics scholar and he grew up in Oxford and Cambridge. But his mother is an East Coast American, an accountant, and she bought him some shares in ITT for his seventh birthday. “What are shares, mummy?” he said. Whatever they were, he was hooked. William Reeve, now CEO of Goodlord, the online renting platform, was fated to become a prodigy entrepreneur.
He was also a talented teenage geek. While a student at the Perse School in Cambridge, he gravitated to the Computer Club where the Acorn BBC computer was then all the rage. Reeve and some of his schoolmates
came up with a game called “Pipeline”, set on a North Sea oil rig. The Piper Alpha disaster of 1988 meant that they had to hurriedly relocate the game to another planet altogether. “It did well critically, if not commercially,” says Reeve. The Acorn machine had gone into a terminal decline. “But it gave me a sense that I could earn my living from computers.” Before he had even left school, he had an offer of employment from an independent software company. Then IBM stepped in and lured him away with a 30 per cent higher salary. “That says a lot about me,” he says. “The bottom line has always been crucial. I’m more of an economist than anything.”
He was getting paid enough to fund a gap-year journey across the United States, west to east. At Oxford he studied engineering, economics and management, and he was drawn into management consultancy with McKinsey for a couple of years. He and a friend set up their own business doing online research for other companies. “We were trying to explain Amazon to our clients,” he says. But Reeve was ideally equipped for the rise of the internet. The question he asked himself was, how can a geek like me use the internet to play at business?
He was tempted by the idea of a UK Amazon but eventually, inspired by the example of Netflix, and against the background of blossoming Blockbuster Video stores, he co-founded the DVD rental company, Lovefilm (originally Screen Select) in 2003. After a series of mergers, with two million subscribers, they were the first to offer video streaming on demand in Europe. Reeve is modest about it. “It could have gone better. Lots of mistakes were made along the way.” They were bought out in 2010 by Amazon (which had been their biggest shareholder) for reportedly around $300m and Reeve’s Lovefilm child would finally grow into the giant that is Amazon Prime. “I was never a movie buff,” says Reeve, “but it made binge-watching possible. I’ve got a soft spot for scary popcorn. Some equally puerile mates and I still get together regularly to watch three horror films back-to-back.”
After that he became involved in a string of different ventures. “Do you want to talk about the successful ones or the unsuccessful ones?” he asks. He was one of the two founding investors in Zoopla, set up by his partner at Lovefilm, Alex Chesterman. Another excursion was Secret Escapes, an online travel company, and he spent a year in Dublin on the board of Paddy Power as their “undercover boss”. “What united them was managing tech at scale,” he says. “The tech business was always at the heart of it.”
I’ve been asking myself if the sky has fallen in. And I don’t think it has, at least where lettings are concerned
Goodlord came about in 2014, after three guys living in London, one of them an estate agent, all of them renting, and suffering trials and tribulations, decided that there had to be a better way. The aim of Goodlord was to take the strain out of renting by making it digital. Reeve was appointed in 2017 to redesign its cost structure.
“We don’t get involved in matchmaking,” says Reeve, that is, bringing together landlords and tenants. There are no listings with come-hither photos on their website. They get involved at the point where a deal has already been struck. “Agents use us as a software tool.” They have streamlined the complicated and time-consuming business of ID checking, taking references, signing documents, and setting up payments. The website advertises “automated chasing”. “We do all the faff,” says Reeve, simply. The ex-Lovefilm man is now offering Netflix to new tenants, as well as broadband, home insurance and utilities. “From walking past the window for the first time to opening the door, we aim to make it the best renting experience in the world,” says Reeve.
Goodlord, which has recently received £10m of equity funding, and can boast several hundred agents on
their lists, is a natural fit for “Generation Rent”. Only 60-70 per cent of people in this country are homeowners. That leaves a lot of potential renters. Reeve reckons close to 20 million, with 10 million rental households. “The lettings industry is a rock of stability in comparison with sales. In the world of lettings, not much changes. We survive crises well.”
1 June saw new lettings applications rise above 2019 levels for the first time since March. When I speak to William Reeve – over the phone, since we are both social distancing – he is mulling over the effects of the coronavirus crisis. “I’ve been asking myself if the sky has fallen in. And I don’t think it has, at least where lettings are concerned. It’s a much more stable space. Students will still need to find somewhere to live. It’s dry land where the waters are rising around everyone else.”