When Ben Ridgway and Jamie Cooke first set out to shake up the property industry in 2009 as two fresh-faced university graduates from Northumbria University, the average house sale outside of an auction took around 12 weeks to complete.
More than 15 years later, that figure can now stretch beyond “five or even six months”. And if you’ve tried to buy or sell a home lately, that number probably won’t come as much of a surprise as the process remains “very clunky and slow”.
For the duo, it’s further evidence that the problem they originally set out to solve is far from fixed.
“The vision and mission – it really hasn’t changed since we set up in 2009,” Jamie Cooke, co-founder of iamproperty, tells Prolific North. “We wanted to improve the transactional process in terms of buying and selling in the UK.”
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It’s why the pair set up Newcastle-headquartered proptech iamproperty, with a shared mission to make selling or buying a home easier, faster and more secure.
Since then, an idea between two university pals has boomed into a 750-strong business generating £61.2m in annual revenue, with its tech solutions and services now used by around 7,000 estate agent branches across the UK.
But despite some of that growth, Cooke says the scale of the problem they originally set out to tackle has increased.
“Whilst we’ve made sweeping improvements with the clients that we help and engage with, the market’s got worse. They’re still screaming for significant change,” he explains.
“We genuinely feel like we’re only really scratching the surface, in terms of what we’ve achieved and what’s possible.”
From tackling a ‘broken status quo’ to a £61m+ business
As plenty of good tech success stories go, the duo have been friends since meeting at Northumbria University, where they studied real estate management.
“We both came to the North East for university and never left!” Cooke says.
After seeing some of the property industry’s problems firsthand while working together at a North East auction house, they spotted a gap in the market to speed up the buying process while giving consumers more choice.
“We could see more consumers wanting options and choice, rather than the broken status quo of asking an estate agent to put a board up and hope for the best,” he says.
“I’d say that really ramped up our desire… I’d like to say strategy but we were 24. I can look back on it and go: ‘Yeah, that was the clear strategy we set out’ but we saw an opportunity.”
That idea was to offer sellers more speed and security while giving estate agents another option beyond the traditional sales process. But what do you do next with that vision as two graduates fresh out of university?
“The region was always really good to us and we left Northumbria University with a pretty good relationship. They helped us through a graduate scheme and paid for our office for the first year,” he explains.
“They actually paid our phone bill for the first year! Now, I don’t think they understood what they were getting themselves in for as we were a very phone-based organisation, even then. We had 10 employees by the end of the first year and they were all hammering the phones. I think they got a bit of a shock when they got that first bill through!”
He credits the university with providing important contacts across the region in those early days, connecting the duo with advisors and professional support.
That local network also helped them with something they didn’t have much experience in at the time: technology.
“Newcastle had then, but more so now, some phenomenal tech agencies. In our early days we teamed up with a local firm called Komodo, who we still use for certain projects.
“They helped us scope out everything from our website to the initial versions of what our tech platforms would look like for our tech business – that really helped us focus on what we need.”
Despite technology now sitting at the heart of a business, he admits its an area they’ve had to “grow” into.
“Ben and I aren’t what you call tech specialists. As we’ve grown the business and technology becomes the cornerstone of who we are and what we do, we’ve grown into that. But we were really leaning into that local knowledge and experience and it helped us shape who we are now.”
Pushing beyond its auction roots
Today, the scale of the business looks very different from the one he co-founded at just 24.
“We initially said we were going to purely look at auctions,” he says.
That led to the creation of a residential auction service called iamsold and the development of the ‘Modern Method of Auction’, designed to shake up the traditional auction service by bringing “more speed and security” to sellers while giving buyers more time to secure finance.
But he says they increasingly realised that consumers wanted more choice than the traditional property market was giving them.
“There’s a big myth that all sellers just want the very top price. Actually, lots of consumers want lots of different things.”
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It has ultimately pushed iamproperty beyond its auction roots, as the business has continued building the range of services it offers to estate agents and, in turn, their customers.
“We’re trying to help agents offer more choices to more consumers because not everyone just wants the same thing, and ultimately, that’s where we now find ourselves,” he explains.
“We’re broadening our range of service propositions to our agent base and, in turn, to their consumers to help bring more options, more choice, all focused around security, all focused on making the process better for a consumer.”
Today, iamproperty’s solutions now form what the business describes as a “connected ecosystem” for estate agents. It spans everything from digital client onboarding and conveyancing solution movebutler, a cloud-based iamproperty CRM, lead generation tool iamproperty Marketing Toolkit and the residential auction service iamsold.
That auction operation alone sold £2.1bn worth of property during the latest financial year, up from £1.8bn the previous year, with the company now responsible for around “one in every 100” UK property sales through its auction proposition.
iamproperty’s expansion has continued through the acquisition of valuation and lead generation platform The ValPal Network earlier this year, as well as growing a number of strategic partnerships as it pushes into the central London market.
And there has been significant financial backing for that growth too. Alongside revenues rising to £61.2m, adjusted EBITDA climbed more than 14% to £17.2m and gross profit hit £50m for the financial year ended October 2025, while private equity and growth capital investor Perwyn has also invested in the business in 2023, marking the exit of previous investor LDC.
With all those successes and that expansion across the UK, Cooke remains very passionate about iamproperty’s North East roots that helped get the business off the ground in the first place.
Growing from the North East
While plenty of businesses may have struggled during the Covid period, he says one of the shifts it triggered “massively” helped iamproperty grow from the region.
“It helped us stay in the North East because we were able to recruit nationally. We have a very flexible working policy where people can work remotely, but we always have in office days quarterly, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. But a lot of the time together is here in the North East,” he explains.
“I think it just proves that you don’t need to be in London. I spend a lot of time down there dealing with our investors and seeing clients, as does Ben. But we don’t need to have a footprint there.”
Around half of the company’s 750-strong team is based in the North East, while the other half is “scattered” across the UK – something he says has helped iamproperty grow from a regional business into a national tech firm.
“It has been good for us because we have been on a very, very high growth curve for a business that’s approaching 17 in September. It’s crazy!
“And actually maintaining the level of operational growth has required us to grow our headcount in line with the opportunities and contracts and businesses that we’ve won. So whilst we are always loyal to the North East, being able to fish in a wider talent pool has enabled us to maintain that growth trajectory.”
But as iamproperty looks towards its next phase of growth, it’s not just where it recruits talent that could change. He believes AI could have a major impact on how its existing teams work too.
What could AI mean for iamproperty?
While one of the most talked about challenges around AI is what it could mean for jobs and the next generation of talent, he sees it as a “huge, exciting element” of iamproperty’s next phase of development.
“From a technology perspective, it’s hugely exciting as we look to increase our output. Every business, certainly of our age, will have legacy code that needs to be improved on and developed. Using technology in that way is great for us, because we can allow the thinking to be done on the future, rather than tidying up legacy code and platforms,” he explains.
But what is potentially more significant is what AI could mean for the wider iamproperty workforce.
“Whilst technology is at the heart of what we do, we have a big workforce on the phone, producing documentation, doing conveyancing, and we’re getting really excited about how we can use AI to enhance the work that those guys do.
“We don’t see it as: ‘we are going to suddenly substantially reduce our headcount’. What we’re excited about is ultimately our goal: to speed up our delivery and how a customer feels going through a process.”
Instead, he sees a big opportunity to automate some of the more repetitive tasks so employees can spend more time with customers.
“What we do best is holding the hand of a consumer through what is a pretty stressful process. So, the more that I can use AI and automation of workflows to take the ‘grunt work’ out of a person’s day, it allows them more time to talk to our business customers and also our consumer customers.”
He very much sees AI as a “huge” growth tool, although he acknowledges more widely there are roles and industries where people are “probably right to feel a little nervous about what it may mean for them”.
But for iamproperty, he looks at it from another angle.
“We’ve got a team of people who do amazing things for us. People are at the core of what we do. It’s probably more important than technology.
“But can we actually use technology to make them even better? And maybe we can do more with what we have.”
‘We’re not there yet’
That desire to “do more” extends well beyond AI.
“We always get lots of pats on the back for what we’ve done over the last 15 or so years. But we genuinely feel like we’re only scratching the surface.
“We wanted to make things better and faster. We can see that we’ve done that, where we’re playing a role in a transaction. But we want to do more and help more agents and, in turn, help more consumers have access to more opportunity.”
And iamproperty’s longer-term ambition is to completely move away from individual, siloed products towards one “ecosystem”, bringing its tools and services together on a single platform.
The aim is to make estate agent operations “smoother, better, more efficient, more effective, profitable” while ultimately improving the journey and “taking out some of those pain points” for both buyers and sellers at the other end.
For a company that has passed £60m in annual revenue and grown from an idea between two 24-year-olds into a 750-strong business, it already looks like they’ve made significant progress.
So, is iamproperty any closer to its original mission of fixing the “broken” home buying and selling process?
“We are supporting our agents to improve onboarding journeys for buyers and sellers. We’re probably onboarding between 10 and 20,000 consumers a month, which is improving their journey.
“We’re not there yet, and that comes back to my original point.I genuinely think we’re only scratching the surface!
“There’s a lot still to do and we’ve got a long way to go.”
