Bricks and Agent, a scale up that developed an innovative and market leading property maintenance platform has executed a three year agreement with global property services firm JLL to partner with Bricks and Agent across its vast portfolio of managed assets in office, residential, retail and residential.
Tenant property maintenance related services are traditionally disconnected and
individual for all stakeholders in the maintenance process, so connecting all of the
stakeholders in real time during the maintenance process allows for an ‘uberisation’
of what is often a very manual set of processes today.
James Peterson, Head of Asset & Digital Development at JLL says, “As a result of
the pandemic, we believe that many tenants will either downsize their facilities
management function within their teams or look to outsource the maintenance of
their tenancy spaces and are therefore keen to leverage the scale of pricing and risk
management of the property manager and landlord. Accordingly, JLL have
collaborated with B&A to expand and personalise their existing platform to now be
able to offer tenants in JLL managed properties all the services and pricing it has in
place for managing the base building.”
This includes services such as cleaning, plumbing, security, electrical and handyman
works. Due to the automated nature of JLL Services on Demand connecting the pre-
approved and priced marketplace with the tenants in real-time, no job is too large or
small and can be scheduled to suit. Notifications of the service providers arrival on
site, photos of completed work, feedback and secure payment enable one-off or
reoccurring works to be easily scheduled and delivered so the role of a typical
Tenant Facility Manager is significantly reduced.
This service can easily integrate in a white-label manner behind existing landlord or
building Apps or websites and comes in App, Desktop and Smart-Bot formats with
multi-lingual and omni-channel flexibility for any market and any demographic.
Bricks and Agent was founded in December 2016 by two experienced
entrepreneurs: Rafael Niesten and Jon Stul who have known each other since they
were 5 years old. Rafael had the tech experience whilst Jon had a background in
real estate.
There are more than 20 manual touch points in the average maintenance request.
This number swells with complexity and most of the processes are manual which
results in more than 5,400 touch points on a residential portfolio of just 100
properties. The Bricks and Agent platform, which is built on smarts and automation,
significantly reduced down the number of touch points saving 40+% of time in
dealing with maintenance.
“We have spent nearly 5 years building and refining a solution that significantly
solves pain points for property managers, tenants, owners and trades by not only
connecting them together but by providing the tools, workflows and automation that
enable the maintenance process to be simplified for all the stakeholders,” says
Rafael Niesten, Bricks and Agents Co Founder.
“We are delighted to be partnering with JLL and powering their Services on Demand platform. JLL is a global force in property management and it is a testament to the efforts of our team to have built what we regard as a global market leading platform in property maintenance.”
“Bricks and Agent are the ideal partner – proactive, flexible and fast. JLL has
significant scale and industry expertise and to be able to bring this to a proven digital
entrepreneurial platform to develop a game changer for our clients, both landlords
and tenants is very exciting,” said Mr Peterson.
