The Challenge
Ridley Estates manages a portfolio of 380 residential rental properties across three London boroughs. They were running on a legacy property management platform that hadn't received a meaningful update in four years. The system had no Rightmove or Zoopla integration — every listing required manual re-entry on each portal — and no automated compliance tracking for EICR certificates, gas safety records, and EPC ratings.
As the portfolio grew, the manual compliance tracking became a serious liability. With increasing penalties for non-compliance under the Renting Homes legislation, the partners decided their current software was a growing risk rather than a tool.
The integration problem
Staff were spending an estimated 12 hours per week manually copying property listings to Rightmove and Zoopla, then updating them when prices or availability changed. For a 10-person agency, this was a significant portion of capacity doing zero-value work.
Our Solution
We built a central lettings CRM that treats properties, landlords, tenants, and tenancies as linked entities — with automated workflows triggered by status changes at each stage of the lettings lifecycle.
Property & Tenancy Management
Full property records with landlord links, tenancy histories, and maintenance records. Kanban-style pipeline view from initial valuation through to tenancy live. Every action timestamped and attributed.
Rightmove & Zoopla Sync
Listings created in the CRM push automatically to both portals via their respective APIs. Price changes, availability updates, and new photos sync in real time. Enquiries from both portals land directly in the CRM lead queue.
Fixflo Maintenance Integration
Maintenance requests raised by tenants in Fixflo appear as linked jobs in the CRM. Status updates sync both ways. Property managers have a unified view without switching between systems.
Compliance Tracker
Every property has a compliance dashboard showing EICR, gas safety, EPC, and EPCR expiry dates. Automated reminders 90, 60, and 30 days before expiry. Non-compliant properties blocked from re-listing until certificates are updated.
Tenancy Renewal Automation
CRM automatically initiates the renewal workflow 90 days before expiry — sending renewal proposals to landlords and tenants, tracking responses, and escalating to a property manager if no response received within 14 days.
Technical Approach
The Rightmove Realtime Data Feed (RTDF) integration required a certified data feed format — a somewhat arcane XML specification. We built a transformation layer that converts our internal property schema to RTDF-compliant XML and handles the asynchronous acknowledgement process Rightmove uses.
Data migration from the legacy system was handled carefully — 380 properties, 500+ active tenancies, and 7 years of historical records. We ran parallel systems for 4 weeks post-launch before decommissioning the old platform.
Technology Used
Results
"The compliance tracker alone was worth the investment. We went from dreading certificate renewal season to it being a non-event — the system just tells us what needs doing weeks in advance."
