Moving house is the third most stressful thing people deal with after life-threatening illness and divorce. But why does it have to be this way?
Kev Monk, 42, has enjoyed a successful career within digital growth businesses. A former MD Europe, MD B2B and group operations director at online retail giant AO, he also served as COO at Manchester Airport Group’s digital agency MAGO.
He was most recently CEO at PassMeFast, where he led a turnaround and navigated the business through COVID to become a national profitable enterprise.
However, through it all he has moved house almost 20 times. Aware of how painful the experience can be, he was motivated to found Moove House at the start of this year to make buying and selling property faster, easier and fairer.
He has chosen to launch first of all in Bolton, a Greater Manchester town which saw over 3,500 property transactions registered in 2023 at an average value of £228K. Approximately 2,000 properties are currently for sale in the area.
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Monk believes that the stress is created through the ongoing presence of three major factors.
First, due to a lack of speed, with the average time to transaction increasing from 80 days in 2007 to now over 160 days, coupled with a lack of housing stock and high demand.
Secondly, the market shuns the opportunities of online, particularly around digital communication; it chooses to rely upon long and tenuous communication chains to exchange information between buyer and seller.
Thirdly, a lack of transparency when it comes to offers on properties, with ‘gazumping’ affecting three in 10 purchases and even some bids being withheld by estate agents.
Moove has built an online property platform that aims to streamline and simplify the process by giving buyers and sellers all the tools, information and support required to transact directly with one another.
Based on those principles, Moove aims to offer a new way for sellers to list and market their own properties while maintaining access to online property portals and industry toolkits.
“Having been through the pain of moving house almost 20 times, it was time to put my skills to use in solving these big pain points,” said Monk.
“We have huge plans to dramatically enable sellers and buyers to take control of the process and move at a faster pace. We’re entirely guided by making the process faster, fairer and easier for our customers.”
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