How the company tripled their deal volume without adding a single hire

Tom Blackwell started the company with a simple value proposition: find better deals faster than investors could find themselves, and charge a packaging fee for the privilege. Six people, a clear process, and an intimate knowledge of a handful of postcodes. It worked well enough to build a client base and a reputation.

The problem was that the deal identification process hadn't scaled with the team. Every morning, Tom and two colleagues would spend the first three hours of the day manually filtering Rightmove — searching by price reduction, scanning long-days-on-market listings, cross-referencing against their own criteria. It was exhausting, inconsistent, and entirely dependent on who happened to be online first.

Opportunities were being missed. A property that had been reduced by 8% overnight in a target postcode might sit undiscovered until mid-morning. By then, a faster competitor might already have made contact. In a business where time-sensitive information is the entire product, relying on a manual morning scan was leaving deals on the table every week.

The volume cap was also becoming a problem. Client expectations were growing — investors wanted more deals, more consistently. But there was no obvious way to increase throughput without hiring more people to stare at Rightmove.