The UK lettings market has long been in need of modernisation. For tenants and landlords alike, renting a property has meant juggling paperwork, regulations, and multiple disconnected services. Goodlord set out to change that.
Founded in London over a decade ago, the proptech company now serves over a million tenants a year and employs more than 300 people. Its blended model – combining SaaS software with insurance and consumer partnerships – has made it one of the UK’s most resilient proptech platforms.
We sat down with CEO William Reeve, a seasoned entrepreneur best known for co-founding LoveFilm (acquired by Amazon) and serving on the board of Zoopla, to hear about Goodlord’s journey, the challenges of scaling, and what’s next for the business.
Q&A with William Reeve
What inspired the creation of Goodlord?
Goodlord was created over ten years ago by three renters in London who were amazed at how outdated the process was. One of them worked at Foxtons and thought, “It’s got to be better than this.” Their mantra was that you should be able to rent a home in a minute. They wanted to bring the kind of digital experience you get when buying a book or booking a holiday to the lettings industry. Today, Goodlord works with small letting agents, handling around a million tenants a year in the UK, and offering them a digital journey that makes the whole process smoother.
What does Goodlord do today, and how does your business model work?
Goodlord is an online platform for the lettings industry. As mentioned earlier, we work with letting agents, who bring us landlords and tenants, and we handle around a million tenant journeys a year in the UK.
Our core is digitising the rental process, taking all the regulated, paperwork-heavy steps of moving into a home and turning them into a smooth online journey. Alongside that, we also sell insurance products to tenants and landlords, and we help tenants set up their new homes, including utilities.
So we’ve built a blended business model that combines software, insurance, and consumer partnerships. Some competitors focus on one of those, but nobody offers the same one-stop shop. That diversification gives us scale and resilience, and it lets us invest more in the technology that underpins everything we do.
When did you join Goodlord, and how did you navigate early challenges?
I joined in late 2017, and at that time the business was in a tough spot. It had just gone through a restructuring, there was little money left, and the technology strategy was a mess. We were in crisis management mode.
By 2018, we managed to recapitalise, which put us back on a growth track. Since then, the company has grown almost 20-fold – and we’ve done that organically, without any magic formula beyond focusing on execution and resilience.
What role has culture played in Goodlord’s growth?
Culture was one of the things that first attracted me to Goodlord. It was full of ambitious, talented people who were hungry to learn and build something great. My challenge as CEO was not to break what made the culture special.
I’ve always said the answers were in the room, not coming from me. The team had the talent, my role was to point them in the right direction. Even as we’ve grown to over 300 people, the culture still feels recognisable to those who were here at the start.
How did the business adapt during the pandemic and since Russia’s war in Ukraine?
For us, the pandemic and lockdowns that came into effect in early 2020 (just after Oxx invested, in fact) meant the government was telling people not to move houses, effectively cutting off our oxygen supply. Luckily, our insurance business gave us resilience, and we were actually able to thrive during that period.
Then in 2022, the Ukraine invasion disrupted energy markets, which impacted our utilities business. That was another challenge, but by late 2023 the market stabilised, and we reached profitability soon after.
What kind of support from investors has been most valuable throughout the growth journey?
Throughout my own career, I have had the opportunity to both work with investors, and also been one myself. I see a lot of value in the investor relationships. Looking at the Oxx relationship, one of the things that stand out is their domain knowledge. Bob Thomas knew the lettings space better than most VCs, and that helped us articulate our opportunities. At times, he’s felt like an extended member of the management team, particularly when we were hiring a CFO, which was a critical but difficult hire.
What’s next for Goodlord in 2025 and beyond?
We’ve become profitable, so we’re focused on maximising our strategic value rather than fundraising. The upcoming Renters’ Rights Bill in 2025 will create big changes in our industry. Our job is to make sure that represents opportunity, not threat, for us and our customers.
Beyond that, we see opportunities in launching new products and expanding internationally. There’s still plenty of room to grow.
Key lessons & learnings from Goodlord’s journey
- Diversification builds resilience: multiple revenue lines provide stability through external shocks.
- Culture is a growth asset: preserving ambition and talent has been central to scale.
- Investor fit matters: domain expertise and hands-on support are more valuable than endless introductions.
- Organic growth can still scale fast: Goodlord grew 20-fold without overreliance on inorganic levers.
- Regulation can be an opportunity: navigating policy changes with the right mindset creates an edge.
