Emily Moore meets Lewis Buckley and Allan Wood, the founders of Hiizzy, the ‘first pure consumer-toconsumer marketplace’ designed for those buying and selling property.
When Allan Wood’s son bought the home belonging to Lewis Buckley’s fiancée, the process, says Allan, went “swimmingly well”.
So well, in fact, that the transaction – carried out simply and speedily between the two parties – led both Allan and Lewis to think, in rather more detail than they might otherwise have done, about the typical approach to buying and selling property.
“I had also recently sold my house but I had followed the traditional approach of inviting an estate agent to handle the transaction for me,” said Allan. “This cost a significant amount of money and I didn’t feel that the service received warranted the cost. In fact, had a suitable platform existed, I would have been very happy to negotiate with the buyer and handle the sale without involving an agent.”
Convinced that they were not the only ones who would be happy to follow a less conventional approach to real-estate sales, Lewis, a Jersey advocate who had more recently been working in the finance industry, and Allan, the former global head of business development for Jersey Finance, decided to pool their resources and launch Hiizzy, a private marketplace, designed to “bring community together and turn the property market upside down”.
“Hiizzy was born from the frustrations we had experienced when buying and selling property in Jersey and a conviction that there had to be another way to do things,” said Lewis. “We therefore worked with Elixirr to develop a product which enables people to cut out the middleman and sell their own property.
“This is something which thousands of people are already trying to do. There are several Facebook groups where you can see houses for sale but listing a property on Facebook doesn’t give you the marketplace you need.
“Hiizzy – its name derived from the slang term ‘hizzy’, meaning house – gives people that marketplace, while the fantastic technology built into the platform gives people access to generative AI to help them write their property description. They can also upload as many photos as they want, use an app to create a floor plan and, through the platform, they can also create video reels for Instagram and TikTok.”
Other features of Hiizzy include an online booking system, enabling people to arrange viewings, a messaging facility so that sellers and potential buyers can communicate directly with one another and a dashboard which enables vendors to see how many times their property particulars have been looked at.
While the two Islanders founded and structured the business in Jersey and are using locally based tax, legal and marketing professions to support them, Hiizzy’s services are not constrained to our shores.
“The Jersey property market is pretty small,” said Lewis. “In a good year, you may see between two and three thousand transactions and obviously we are not seeing anything like that at the moment. However, in the UK, there are between one million and 1.5 million transactions a year, which is why we have launched Hiizzy in both Jersey and London.”
While focusing initially on those two jurisdictions, both Lewis and Allan believe that Hiizzy has a much broader future.
“Hiizzy has a global application,” said Lewis. “We believe that Hiizzy can go anywhere that people buy and sell property, and the platform has therefore been built as a scalable product to support that global aspiration.
“We launched in London because digital marketing is hugely expensive, so it made sense to start somewhere which offered the greatest opportunity to hit the maximum amount of people with that budget. The capital, with its seven million residents, seemed like the obvious choice.”
But it was not just the city’s population which made it the obvious choice for the two men.
“We have a lot of connections in London, so we are leveraging our networks there and taking advantage of the activities – such as the Ealing Marathon, which we sponsored – on our doorstep to raise awareness of our brand,” said Allan.
And while the property market may be in a somewhat subdued state at the moment, the men are undeterred by the less-than-buoyant environment.
“If we can make Hiizzy work at the bottom end, it will work at the top end,” said Lewis. “The product was ready to launch, so there was no point sitting on it for a year in the hope that market conditions might improve. If we had waited, someone else might have stepped into that space.
“Although the cost-of-living crisis in Jersey and the UK is affecting many people, there will always be people who need to sell their homes for whatever reason, and the cost of moving house is significant. Hiizzy presents a hugely discounted opportunity to do that and can therefore have a big impact on the costs and decision-making process associated with that.”
“In a perverse way, we have launched at the perfect time,” added Allan. “It takes six to 18 months to build a brand, and we are in that process. And it’s a challenging process, as you have to find different ways of reaching people. But if the Bank of England reduces interest rates later this year and again next year, our brand awareness should be growing just as the market starts to pick up again.”
As their brand grows, the duo also intend to expand Hiizzy’s customer base.
“Lewis’s background in law and trust, coupled with my experience working for Jersey Finance, puts us in a perfect position to roll this product out into key global markets and support the flow of capital into the Island or the UK,” said Allan. “A number of high-net-worth individuals in the Middle East, UAE and Asia are keen to invest in UK property and, through Hiizzy, we can broker that connectivity. We have already been approached by six jurisdictions, asking us to bring the product to them but we can’t do that until we are properly established in our home territories.
“We also plan to build an ecosystem consisting of tech-enabled companies offering conveyancing, surveying, property management and financial-services products such as mortgages and insurance. When this is in place, not only will you be able to list your property but you will also have access to the professionals who can help you on your journey. Since starting to develop Hiizzy, we have discovered a number of tech businesses which share our desire to disrupt the status quo in the property market.”
While they have plenty of ambitions, the men admit that one of the greatest challenges to bringing these to fruition is capital.
“Raising money has been the hardest part of the journey,” acknowledged Lewis. “In the UK, there are incentives, such as the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, which give investors tax relief on investments and help to generate a faster flow of investment into start-up opportunities. Jersey doesn’t offer anything like that, so raising capital is difficult, and I think that’s something the government could look at to support local entrepreneurs.
“There is a great community here, particularly in the digital space, and fantastic networking opportunities but getting people to part with their money and invest in a start-up is a real challenge. Happily, we are some way down that road and we hope that there will be enthusiasm for the second capital raise, which will support the new technology to facilitate our global-growth ambitions and allow us to realise the significant long-term opportunity which we see for Hiizzy.”
With around 150 properties – ranging from “narrow boats to a £2m apartment in Chelsea Harbour” – already listed on the platform, the men stress that the main reason for launching Hiizzy was to “give people a choice”.
“We are not saying that there isn’t a place in the world for estate agents, but we believe that people should be empowered to sell their property themselves if that’s what they want to do,” said Lewis. “Hiizzy is the first pure consumer-to-consumer marketplace to go live and, while we know that it won’t be for everyone, we are tremendously excited about its potential and the ability it offers to bring people together.”
And it is just not buyers and sellers who Lewis and Allan are hoping to support through Hiizzy.
“We are not just bringing people together in terms of cutting out the middleman, but are also focused on doing social good,” Allan explained. “It is a shocking statement that, every four minutes, one person is either made homeless or is at risk of homelessness. We therefore donate 10% of our revenue to charities – the JAYF in Jersey and New Horizon Youth Centre in London – which support homeless young people. This is such an important area to support because unless you stem the flow of homelessness in young people, you face a major problem in terms of what happens to those people as they get older.”
