“If you are an office agent, Kato has a 10 out of 10 rating - it is open on my computer all the time”

West End Experts 

Founded in 1962, RIB has been a longstanding commercial property agency focused on Central London office and retail leasing and sales. RIB are widely recognised as leading agents in Fitzrovia (where 50% of their stock is) and with over 130 instructions on the market, are considered one of the most active. With seven agents in the team they are also able to cover all other submarkets in the West End including Soho, Marylebone and Mayfair. 

RIB pride themselves on their speed to market, which means their instructions can be seen by the widest pool of applicants. With varied and often quirky properties on their books, time is of the essence and they need to get in front of as many applicants as possible - across the many portals, as they never know where the right applicant might be lurking. To further enhance their brand and exposure for their client’s buildings, their CEO Antony Antoniou is starring in the new property agency reality TV programme “Selling Super Prime”! Their clients range from Camden Council, to The Langham Estate, TfL, and many private clients.

With all of these instructions, RIB has completed a number of noticeable transactions. Highlights include a 6,939 sq ft letting to Meta on Kings Cross for their server-room requirements, as well as Plantworks, Kings Cross (so called for the 2,000 plants that inhabit it) to Davines UK - just a glimpse of the unusual mix of work that RIB are involved in!

RIB’s Old Agency Workflow 

Henry Bacon is Head of the Commercial Leasing team at RIB, having been with the business for over six years. He says: “We adopted Kato at the end of 2019. We realised there was a lot of double data entry across the business”. The business was using various marketing portals and multiple platforms and did not keep records of properties they had let. All enquiries from portals were being responded to via Outlook. 

Henry explains that one of their biggest challenges was with the marketing portals. With subscriptions to Rightmove, Zoopla, On the Market and NovaLoca, they would spend half a day uploading just one of their many disposal instructions. “This one activity alone was costing us hours in valuable time - our admin team were picking this up but we would rather their time be better spent - everyone in our team needs to be efficient with their time”. 

In 2019, RIB were introduced to Kato through their work with the West End Agents Society, which we are the technology partner for. Despite Henry's initial scepticism from working with an alternative software system at his previous company, he was impressed by what Kato could offer.

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Easy Transition & Improved Efficiency 

A lot of Kato customers once feared the disruption a change of systems might bring and the impact it might have on business. RIB found that getting up and running with Kato was easy and quick with no disruption to their day-to-day business. 

“The onboarding process was smooth - Kato offered continuous training to all of our team members and the reality is it only took a few workshops. They exported all of our data into the platform so it was oven ready.” 

Three years into our partnership with RIB, fee earners are now saving on average 9 hours per week. Henry says: “Kato is our main system - I know what my team is doing, what inspections are booked, where our applicants are coming from and their search status - it is our daily dashboard that is open on my computer at all times. Prior to adoption we didn’t keep on top of our transactional data - it is really easy now. With all the spare time we have got back from low impact tasks we can now focus on new business development opportunities”. 

Since joining the community of leasing agents using Kato, RIB have now gone from five users to 11 and we look forward to helping support them with their continued growth! Would you like to save up to 9 hours per week or more, allowing you time to win more business? Click here for a Kato demo.  

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