Review: Tepilo
Score:
68%
How about buying or selling a house on your phone? Or renting out a room? That's what Tepilo promises, and while the property market is a little bit scary (and please remember we are definitely not lawyers), this application looks to make the process as simple as possible for those looking to do some property work on their own.
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
Tepilo is a new application in the Ovi Store that promises to help you find a house to buy or rent from your smartphone’s screen. And it’s almost a personal promise, as founder Sarah Beeny’s face is prominently there (as it is on the companion website and her Channel 4 appearances in shows like Property Ladder). Having a founder so readily identified with a product is an interesting move, but she and her partners are proud of their business, so why not?
Just above Beeny is a simple tabbed dialog box – pop in your postcode and let the application know if you are looking to Buy a House, Rent a House,or just looking for a Flat Share. In fact, you don't even need to do that much, because you can go for the tab and “use your current location” through the GPS and other methods available on your handset.
Quick, slick, and easy to use. The hallmarks of any good application are here. I’ve not had the app crash on me (it's written in Qt), it has stayed responsive, and the scrolling lists, tapping through to properties and general searching show a nice UI that keeps it simple, just like the idea behind the business. There are areas for improvement though, and the gallery/image viewer is one. With the application locked in portrait mode, and most pictures presented in landscape orientation, there is a lot of wasted space on offer, and the lack of any sort of zoom is disappointing.
Registering for a My Tepilo account allows you to not only save searches (including the advanced searches which narrow down your options to the size, cost and type of property you are looking for), but also, if you head back to the main website, allows you to see the searches there and also list a house for sale or rent (this can only be done on the main website).
It’s important to note that this application provides the same information as the Tepilo website, and I’m sure they’ll feed on each other as the business grows.
What makes Tepilo interesting is that it is a place you can upload properties to without the use of a solicitor or estate agent – by cutting out the middleman and without charges or commission.
Of course Tepilo, being based on the housing market, needs to work out where the data is coming from and how to present it. Right now, the properties on offer are a bit sparse. Hit “Buy based on current location” (which would be North Edinburgh for me) and Tepilo returns eight results. A similar search (also without any filters for minimum and maximum price, distance, property type, rooms, etc) on the ESPC website returns 3406 properties. Of course, that’s data from many agents, solicitors and listings companies, Tepilo is just one. But if you understand that, then Tepilo might still be useful.
Anyone who’s been looking at the housing market recently (be it renting or buying) will know that you never rely on one single source. You look at newspapers, classified, groups of solicitors banding together, estate agent windows, online searches, the works. Given that, adding Tepilo in the mix if you are looking is a smart idea, but not one you would rely on.
It's interesting that the third tab, looking for a "single room / flat share" isn't actually powered by Tepilo, but by third party company SpareRoom. Click on this and your search parameters are passed over to a mobile website of SpareRoom and away you go. It's clearly labelled once you jump there, and the hand-off to the mobile website looks seamless and provides more functionality to the application.
The lack of volume in the buying and selling inventory might cause some issues for the other side of the equation, people looking to sell or rent their property. They’ll want to make sure that their property is seen by as many people as possible (also, if you are selling through a third party and want to list on Tepilo, check your contract carefully – we’re not lawyers and phrases like multiple agency fees could be scary and rack up fees for the selling party). If Tepilo can keep the growth of buyers and sellers in balance and on an upward trend, it becomes exponentially more useful each day.
Because this success is tied to the database that drives both the mobile application and the website, I think Tepilo has a good chance of becoming a successful little combination of web and mobile. It’s never going to be a 100% solution to the property market, but it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be a solution that (a) works and (b) pulls in the content.
Tepilo is mostly there with the first part, and the second part is now its main challenge. Yes, this is niche, but it’s not only potentially profitable for Tepilo, it’s also may be just what you need.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at