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Assentic Ltd. is a new client company of Ariadne Capital, which we believe has a great deal of potential and are very excited about.
The change in government legislation, resulting in the requirement of a Home Information Pack (HIP), is set to create a discontinuity in the market for the sale of residential property. The cost associated with building these packs is estimated at £200 per pack and Rightmove, a player in this space, is seeking to capitalize on this opportunity with a £200 million IPO. It has received three acquisition approaches from Trinity Mirror, DMGT and News Corp which on average were estimated at about £150 million.
Currently, there is no alternative to the preparation of the HIP. Assentic plans to exploit this discontinuity by
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John
Culbert
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introducing an internet-based collaboration platform, which will link and optimize the work of the parties involved in a sale of a property (namely, the estate agents, the conveyors and the surveyors). It is a "one-stop" solution covering all disciplines of such transactions.
Assentic is developing a "rich client" environment, running on desktop computers of the professional parties involved and allowing them to manage all aspects of residential property sale. The system will enable the collaborators to agree and set their own business rules and scales of charges on the system. The Assentic platform allows a user to work from any location and the "rich client" environment means that one does not need to be continuously connected to the internet to use it.
We are excited by this proposition, as Assentic's unique platform has almost no close competitors in the market. The Assentic solution will enable estate agents to implement the HIPs as a new profit centre and still be considerably cheaper to the end user than the conventional HIP builder approach that most stakeholders appear to be implementing. A further major benefit is that it ensures that the owners of the businesses retain control of their market. We at Ariadne believe that Assentic can seize this significant opportunity.
Assentic is currently raising £1M, its first round of funding for the finishing stages of product development and marketing activities.
The demo version of the platform will be available in January 2006 and an investor evening has also been scheduled for 10 January 2006.
If you would like to have more information about Assentic, please contact jenny@ariadnecapital.com