London PropTech Spinout Warns Of 'Patches Not Solutions'

M7 Real Estate has spun out PropTech venture Coyote as the CRE apps battle warms up.

Coyote threatens to shake up a PropTech market that too often offers “patches not solutions," according to Coyote CEO and M7 co-founder Oli Farago.

The software was developed by London-based M7, which has a Europe-wide portfolio of €4.1B assets under management. It is now taking its internal management dashboard to a wider market.

Coyote launched just weeks after JLL, Starwood Capital, shared workspace company Fora and startup investor Seedcamp took the wraps off Concrete, their PropTech joint venture. It comes as U.K. landlords and developers like British Land experiment with new PropTech solutions.

“We’ve not come across anybody else spinning out a PropTech business in the way M7 has," Farago said. "It might be a bit cheesy to say it, but this is built by property professionals for property professionals, and compares with other products that often don’t solve a real need or an actual problem for most people."

It targets property or investment managers, attempting to consolidate what he said could be 19 pieces of software through a property life cycle. Coyote's pool of investors think there is a real commercial opportunity to smarten up some very clunky property management protocols.

Take Coyote's treatment of leasing information. Farago said the moment a lease is signed is when the information is as accurate as it is ever going to be, because it has been through due diligence. Coyote will flow that information into a system much more accurately and quickly than getting a PDF file from lawyers and retyping it into property management software.

The result is a massive leap in efficiency.

"Coyote can really speed things up. We had 2,000 leases connected with a German purchase and Coyote was ready to bill rents in a couple of days. The old way would have taken weeks," he said.

Originally developed and devised as M7's in-house software, Coyote has continually evolved, learning from eight years of development, user feedback and investment and around a million user hours. Although Coyote is described as a spinout, Farago is anxious to stress that it is no mere bolt-on. “We build Coyote around M7, and M7 around Coyote — you can’t separate them,” he said.

The software has received official accreditation from leading industry representative bodies such as RICS and UKPA.