The Viking Chats: navigating the choppy waters of property, technology and business

Kristjan Byfield
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Welcome aboard The Viking Chats—the podcast where property, tech, and business collide in candid, no-fluff conversations. Hosted by Kristjan Byfield—lettings veteran, proptech pioneer, and co-founder of Base Property Specialists and The Depositary—this show dives deep into the real-world challenges and bold innovations shaping the future of the housing sector and beyond.Each episode, Kristjan drops anchor with industry leaders, disruptors, and entrepreneurs to unpack the messy, inspiring, and often chaotic reality of running a modern business in a rapidly evolving landscape. Expect sharp insights, honest stories, and the occasional Viking metaphor—all served with Kristjan’s trademark wit and big-hearted honesty.Whether you’re in lettings, launching a startup, or just love a good story about navigating change—this podcast is your compass in the storm.

  1. 2h ago

    'If You Make It Look Easy, People Assume It Is' with Mouna Patel

    If you’re really good at what you do, there’s a strange problem: you can make it look so easy that people start wondering what they’re paying you for. That dilemma sits at the heart of this episode of Viking Chats, as Kristjan sits down with Mouna Patel, Enterprise Account Executive at Goodlord, for a wide-ranging conversation about letting agents, technology, compliance, expertise and the challenge of demonstrating value in an increasingly complex industry. Mouna's route into proptech isn't the usual one. Before joining Goodlord, she spent more than six years on the agency side with Connells Group, starting as a trainee negotiator and eventually progressing into senior roles managing flagship London branches. She therefore understands first-hand both the realities of working inside a busy lettings operation and the challenge technology businesses face when trying to build solutions that actually work within one. They begin by looking at just how much attitudes towards technology have changed. When Mouna joined Goodlord around five years ago, many agencies were still heavily reliant on manual processes, fragmented systems and, in some cases, physical paperwork. Today, conversations about integrations, automation, AI and connected tech stacks have become increasingly mainstream. But simply having more technology doesn't necessarily mean having a better business. Kristjan and Mouna discuss the importance of creating a connected ecosystem rather than accumulating software, and why agents need to be particularly careful that they don't end up running their tech rather than running their business. As CRMs become more open and specialist solutions become easier to integrate, the opportunity for agencies is enormous, but only if the technology genuinely removes work rather than simply moving it somewhere else. That leads into one of the biggest themes of the conversation: how do letting agents demonstrate the value of everything their clients never see? Kristjan shares a recent experience at Base involving a longstanding landlord who decided to take the management of two properties back in-house. From the landlord's perspective, the visible service appeared relatively simple: the tenant had remained in place for years, there hadn't been a recent rent increase and arranging a gas safety certificate didn't seem particularly complicated. The reality was rather different. As An began explaining the responsibilities that would now sit with the landlord, what initially appeared to be a fairly simple handover quickly expanded into deposits, prescribed information, tenancy documentation, compliance records and a growing regulatory landscape. It highlighted a problem familiar to many good managing agents: when you've spent years quietly taking care of everything, your client can understandably lose sight of just how much “everything” actually involves. Kristjan also recalls another landlord who decided to let properties himself because, from the outside, the process didn't appear especially difficult. He successfully found a tenant and got the tenancy underway, only for a subsequent conversation with Base to reveal a series of compliance requirements and checks he hadn't realised he needed to complete. Halfway through working through the list, his reaction was telling: “Is this what you do on every let?” It raises an uncomfortable question for the industry. If your clients don't understand what you do, is that their fault, or have agents become too good at keeping the complexity hidden? Mouna brings in a similar example from outside agency. Her brother is an experienced electrician who can sometimes diagnose and resolve a problem extremely quickly, only to have a customer question the cost because the job didn't take very long. Yet they aren't really paying for those few minutes. They're paying for the years of knowledge that allowed him to identify the problem and know exactly what needed doing. Kristjan likens it to the famous story of the engineer who repairs a broken engine by knowing precisely where to hit it with a hammer. The value isn't in swinging the hammer. The value is knowing where to hit. That distinction between time spent and expertise applied becomes increasingly important as lettings grows more complicated. The conversation then turns to the people inside agencies who often possess the greatest depth of operational and compliance knowledge, but receive the least public visibility for it. Negotiators, valuers and business owners naturally tend to occupy the front of house, while some of the industry's most knowledgeable people are quietly working behind the scenes in property management, administration, compliance and operations. These are frequently the people making sure the i's are dotted, the t's are crossed and nothing important gets forgotten. As Mouna and Kristjan discuss, they're also often the people carrying that responsibility home with them, occasionally waking in the middle of the night wondering whether an important document was sent or a deadline was met. So perhaps agencies need to get better at giving those people a voice. Mouna asks what would happen if businesses did more to empower their operational teams with the tools and confidence to communicate their expertise. They don't necessarily need to become salespeople, nor does everyone need to turn themselves into a polished social-media personality. Sometimes it could simply mean helping somebody explain to a landlord why something matters, giving them a useful talk track for a common question, or allowing their knowledge to become part of the agency's wider content. Kristjan expands on that idea by looking at how AI has dramatically lowered the barriers to content creation. A knowledgeable property manager no longer needs to lose half a day trying to turn an interesting case into a 1,000-word article. They can use their own experience as the raw material, answer a handful of questions and use AI to help structure that expertise into useful content. The important word there is help. For Kristjan, the opportunity isn't to fill the internet with generic AI-generated articles. It is to use technology to make it easier for genuine human expertise to be shared. A real conversation, a difficult case, a compliance issue somebody has just solved or a question landlords repeatedly ask can become a blog, video, podcast or series of short social clips without demanding an enormous amount of additional time from the person who actually knows the subject. In fact, this very episode becomes part of that discussion. Viking Chats itself is designed around authentic conversations which can subsequently become multiple pieces of useful content without losing the personalities and experience that made the original conversation interesting. Mouna and Kristjan also discuss Goodlord's growth, the evolution of proptech over the last decade and the changing expectations of agents. Mouna reflects on moving from a large corporate agency into technology, the wider perspective she has gained from seeing how very different businesses operate, and why consulting with agencies about their challenges is one of the parts of her role she enjoys most. They also touch on the increasingly important relationship between Goodlord and The Depositary. Goodlord helps agencies manage the beginning of the tenancy journey, while The Depositary focuses on making the conclusion easier, faster and better. With an integration between the two platforms now live, Goodlord clients using The Depositary can remove much of the duplicate data entry traditionally required when beginning the end-of-tenancy process, with further opportunities to connect the two journeys being explored.  Away from work, there's also time to discover what Mouna did before she ever entered estate agency, celebrate a rather significant recent personal milestone, discuss dogs, poker nights and look ahead to another busy property-industry conference season. At its heart, though, this episode is about value. The value of experience. The value of knowledgeable people. The value of technology that genuinely removes work. The value of compliance that quietly happens in the background. And the importance of making sure that, while we make all of those things easier for our customers, we don't make them so invisible that nobody understands what they're worth. Because sometimes making something look easy is the clearest sign that somebody really knows what they're doing. Send us Fan Mail

  2. Sep 16

    The People Writing the Rules Need to Understand the Game with Rachel Hanniquet-Brooking

    Rachel Hanniquet-Brooking has had one of those careers that makes considerably more sense when you look backwards than it probably did while she was living it. She grew up internationally, spending parts of her childhood in Singapore, America and Australia thanks to her father's career as a ship's captain. She left school without much interest in university and started working at McDonald's in Australia, an experience she still talks about with enormous affection because of what it taught her about systems, service, management and taking pride in doing a job properly. From there came five-star hotels in tropical Queensland, looking after guests including AC/DC, Claudia Schiffer and Bill Clinton, followed by travel and tourism, where Rachel helped develop experiences for holidaymakers and found herself doing things like sourcing helicopter whale-watching trips and swimming with sharks. It sounds a long way from residential property, but listening to Rachel talk about her career, the connection becomes increasingly obvious. Whether somebody is staying in a hotel, going on holiday, renting a home or living in a large Build to Rent development, the physical product is only part of what they remember. The experience around it matters just as much. Rachel eventually found her way into property through Regent Street Direct, working within the management operation for the Crown Estate's Regent Street portfolio. What started with commercial property expanded into residential, destination marketing, facilities management and an education in placemaking on one of the most recognisable streets in the country. She subsequently moved into high street agency with Hamptons before joining Red Door Ventures, working with Newham Council's development programme, and later Grainger during a major period of Build to Rent delivery. More recently, Rachel became Managing Director of APO Group and is now doing advisory work while considering what the next chapter of an already varied career might look like. In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan and Rachel explore what all of those different experiences have taught her about housing, service and the way our industry operates. Inevitably, that leads them towards one of the biggest questions facing the rental sector today: how do you regulate an incredibly complicated housing market without creating consequences you never intended? Neither Rachel nor Kristjan is arguing against regulation. In fact, Rachel is explicitly supportive of legislation, registers and greater professionalisation of the rental sector. Good regulation protects residents, raises standards and helps remove operators who should never have been providing housing in the first place. The frustration comes when the practical consequences of regulation appear not to have been properly understood by the people designing it. Property licensing provides plenty of examples. The original rationale is easy to support: identify rented homes, establish minimum standards and give local authorities greater ability to tackle poor conditions and rogue landlords. The difficulty comes when professional operators and compliant landlords are paying substantial licensing fees while there remains a question over how effectively authorities are identifying the properties whose owners simply ignore the scheme altogether. For Build to Rent, the issue becomes even more complicated. Rachel talks about large professionally managed developments already operating within extensive regulatory frameworks, yet potentially facing enormous licensing bills across hundreds of individual apartments. Different local authorities can also have different processes, definitions and requirements, creating significant administrative work for businesses operating across multiple areas. The discussion becomes particularly interesting when Rachel and Kristjan get into HMO licensing. A property that most people would consider an ordinary self-contained flat can, under some local licensing schemes, fall within an HMO definition simply because of the number and relationship of the people living there. Kristjan shares a recent example of a landlord whose perfectly legitimate tenancy required an HMO licence from the local authority. Once that licence was granted, the lender became aware of it and warned the landlord that HMOs were prohibited under the mortgage product. The landlord had permission to let the property. The tenancy was legitimate. The agent had followed the council's licensing requirements. Yet complying with one set of rules potentially created a problem under another. It is a wonderfully mundane example of a much bigger problem. Housing does not operate as a series of isolated policy decisions. Change something in one part of the system and landlords, tenants, lenders, agents, investors and local authorities all respond to it, sometimes in ways policymakers may not have anticipated. The same principle runs through the conversation about the Renters' Rights reforms. There is plenty within the direction of travel that both Rachel and Kristjan support. Tenants should have safe homes. Bad landlords should be held accountable. People deserve proper protections and professional standards from those managing their homes. But good intentions do not remove the need to understand behaviour. Kristjan talks about landlords who had allowed long-standing tenants to remain substantially below market rent deciding to reset those rents as the regulatory environment changed. The concern was entirely predictable: if possession becomes harder and future rent increases more constrained, some landlords will reduce their exposure to that risk before the new rules take effect. The same question applies to rent tribunals. If tenants can challenge an increase with little downside while the landlord potentially waits months for an overloaded system to reach a decision, behaviour will change. If a tribunal can no longer award a higher market rent where a landlord had originally proposed something below market value, one of the incentives for that landlord to be deliberately generous may also disappear. None of this means the underlying protections are wrong. It means the detail matters. The conversation around rental bidding follows a similar pattern. Preventing tenants from being encouraged into bidding wars sounds straightforwardly positive, but if the advertised figure effectively becomes an upper limit, agents and landlords have an incentive to advertise higher and negotiate down rather than price lower and allow the market to establish the eventual figure. The result could be less transparency rather than more, particularly in a market where reliable achieved-rent data remains difficult to access. Rachel makes the point that Build to Rent has an advantage here. If you operate hundreds of apartments within the same development, you have an enormous amount of comparable evidence. You understand what different layouts, floors, aspects and views achieve because you can see those transactions happening within your own building. A private landlord with one apartment in a block doesn't have anything like that visibility. That brings the conversation back repeatedly to data and practical experience. Rachel has worked across traditional agency, institutional ownership, development, Build to Rent and customer operations. She has seen what happens at street level and what happens when decisions are being made across portfolios containing thousands of homes. Her argument is not that policymakers should simply do whatever the property industry asks. Industry participants have commercial interests and those need to be recognised too. Tenant groups also play an important role in highlighting poor practice and representing residents who might otherwise struggle to be h Send us Fan Mail

  3. Sep 16

    Stop Being a Fanny and Back Yourself with Lucy Noonan

    Lucy Noonan started working in estate agency a week after her 16th birthday. Since then she’s been a negotiator, worked in lettings and franchising, managed the integration of acquired businesses, become an acquisitions director and, eventually, walked away from a secure corporate career to launch Atomic Consultancy. That last bit nearly didn’t happen. After leaving Lomond, Lucy had what she thought was a sensible plan. Friends in the industry were already calling her for advice about businesses they were considering buying, so she could see an opportunity to build a consultancy around acquisitions, valuations and project management. She did what any sensible former corporate employee would do, put together a proper business plan, thought carefully about the numbers and then took it to someone she trusted for an opinion. Christian Balshen’s assessment was fairly succinct: “I think it’s shit.” Thankfully, he wasn’t telling Lucy that she couldn’t build a business. Quite the opposite. He thought she had massively undersold herself and was allowing fear to dictate the size of her ambition. Rather than sitting behind other people’s acquisitions, he believed she should become a broker herself and use the experience she had accumulated to represent sellers properly. His advice, as Lucy remembers it, essentially boiled down to: stop being a fanny, back yourself and get on with it. Five years later, that decision looks pretty important. In this episode of The Viking Chats, Lucy joins Kristjan for a wonderfully wide-ranging conversation about the journey from teenage estate agent to founder of Atomic Consultancy, but this isn’t simply a conversation about M&A. It’s also about what happens when you build a business around something you genuinely love, what success starts to feel like once other people think you’ve achieved it, and why learning to let go can sometimes be considerably harder than starting the bloody thing in the first place. Lucy’s route into agency began at Hunters, back when it was still a relatively small operation centred around York. She worked weekends while studying, spent a summer helping with the company’s move into Manchester and eventually dropped out of university during her final semester after earning a place on Countrywide’s management development programme. It was proper old-school estate agency. Applicant cards, targets, bells being rung when deals came together and an enormous amount of telephone work. Lucy loved it. There are also stories involving sleeping underneath a desk after working rather too many hours, accidentally offering Gary Neville her own autograph and some fairly questionable early-career decision making, so this is not an entirely reverential trip down memory lane. After moving through independent agency, lettings and franchising, Lucy eventually found her way into acquisitions at LSL. That was where she started learning what happens behind the scenes when one agency buys another. It wasn’t simply about agreeing a price. Someone had to work out what happened to the staff, customers, data, suppliers, premises, telecoms, fleet and even the keys sitting in the branch on completion day. More importantly, she started seeing the transaction from the seller’s perspective. A business can be reduced to numbers surprisingly quickly. Revenue, recurring income, EBITDA, multiples, synergies and return on investment all matter, of course, but for the person selling it those numbers may represent 20 or 30 years of their life. Their employees are involved, their reputation is involved and, in many cases, a significant part of Send us Fan Mail

  4. Sep 2

    Buying PropTech Is the Easy Bit with Taylor Coleman of Tapi

    The property industry has never had more technology to choose from. CRMs, maintenance platforms, deposit solutions, referencing, inventories, AI tools, automation and an ever-growing collection of integrations all promise to make agents more efficient. So why do two agencies buy exactly the same piece of software and get completely different results from it? In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan is joined by Taylor Coleman of Tapi, the property maintenance platform that started life in New Zealand, expanded into Australia and is now making its mark in the UK. Taylor's route into PropTech wasn't exactly conventional. Born in the US, a former university American football player and finance graduate, he headed to Wellington after university to join a startup accelerator. There he met his future business partner, whose experience of waiting six months for a huge hole in his kitchen ceiling to be repaired helped inspire the original idea behind Tapi. The pair initially thought they could sell maintenance technology directly to private landlords. That went about as well as anyone familiar with the sector might expect. So they started knocking on the doors of letting agencies instead. What they discovered was an operational problem that will be painfully familiar to property managers everywhere. Maintenance involved too much administration, too many different people, too much chasing and far too much friction between residents, landlords, contractors and agents. Ten years later, Tapi works with around 90% of estate agents in New Zealand, has established itself in Australia and is now rolling out across the UK and Ireland.  But this conversation quickly moves beyond maintenance. Taylor and Kristjan get into one of the biggest challenges facing agents as the PropTech market matures: buying software doesn't transform a business. Using it properly might. Because signing up to a new platform is the easy bit. The harder part is integrating it with the rest of your technology, configuring it around the business, training the team properly, changing established processes and, crucially, getting people to stop doing things the old way. Kristjan shares The Depositary's experience of seeing dramatically different outcomes between clients using exactly the same platform. Some agencies properly implement the technology, integrate it with their existing suppliers, train their people and make the new workflow part of how the business operates. Within weeks, their teams are reporting huge reductions in workload. Others buy the same product but barely change anything. Integrations remain switched off, teams aren't properly trained, new starters don't know how the platform works and employees continue running old manual processes alongside the technology that's supposed to replace them. Six months later, management understandably wonders why the promised efficiency hasn't materialised.  Taylor sees exactly the same thing with maintenance. Good technology shouldn't simply digitise an existing process. It should remove unnecessary work from it. That can be surprisingly uncomfortable for people who have spent years personally managing every stage of a workflow. If a property manager is accustomed to monitoring a repair from initial report through landlord approval, contractor instruction, appointment, completion, invoice and payment, being told they no longer need to manually oversee 80% of that journey can initially feel like a loss of control. The irony is that this is exactly what the technology was purchased to achieve. Taylor and Kristjan discuss why successful PropTech adoption therefore requires more than a software demo and a login. Businesses need to think about how roles, processes and even KPIs should change once technology starts removing administrative work. They also explore another area where PropTech frequently gets things wrong: user experience. An agent might be prepared to attend a training session for a new business platform. Their landlords, residents and contractors certainly aren't. Nobody wants another portal to remember, another password to reset or another app they have to download simply to approve a repair or report a dripping tap. Taylor explains why Tapi has deliberately designed its maintenance journey around the behaviour of each user. Contractors can continue emailing invoices from systems such as Xero while Tapi matches the information in the background. Landlords can approve works directly from communications rather than being forced into another portal. Residents can report maintenance through an agency's website or a QR code in the property without downloading another app.  It's a philosophy Kristjan shares from building The Depositary: if technology crosses from the agency into the consumer experience, it has to be designed around the consumer rather than simply around what works for the agent. The pair also discuss the changing UK PropTech landscape and why integrations are finally becoming easier. Legacy systems and closed APIs historically made it difficult and expensive for emerging platforms to connect with agency CRMs. That is changing rapidly, with increasingly open ecosystems allowing specialist products to exchange data and enabling agents to build genuinely connected technology stacks rather than collections of isolated dashboards. For Taylor, that shift has helped Tapi arrive in the UK at an interesting moment. Having already proved its model in New Zealand and Australia, the business has been able to build integrations across several UK CRM platforms as it grows its presence here.  There is also plenty of discussion about AI, although refreshingly little of the usual suggestion that artificial intelligence is about to make everybody in property redundant. Taylor's view is considerably more practical. Estate agency remains a human business. Technology should remove the repetitive administration that prevents good people from being consultative, knowledgeable and useful to their customers. That means the measure of good PropTech shouldn't be how impressive the technology sounds. It should be whether residents find it easy to use, whether landlords engage with it, whether contractors actually adopt it and whether frontline employees genuinely get time back. Because a platform can have every feature imaginable, but if the people involved in the process don't use it properly, very little changes. From a six-metre hole in a Wellington kitchen ceiling to building a platform used across New Zealand and Australia, Taylor has learned a fair bit about what makes property technology stick. This is a wide-ranging, occasionally sweary and very practical conversation about maintenance, integrations, AI, UX, implementation and why agents need to take more responsibility for extracting value from the technology they buy. Buying PropTech is the easy bit. Changing the way your business works is where the real transformation happens. Send us Fan Mail

  5. Aug 12

    What Got You Here Won’t Get You There with Sam Olliver

    What happens when the processes, systems and structures that helped build a successful agency are no longer the ones it needs to keep growing? In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan is joined by Sam Olliver, who has spent almost 25 years in agency, including nearly two decades with Michael Jones. Having experienced the business grow from a relatively small independent into a substantial regional operation, and subsequently become part of Lomond, Sam has seen first-hand how dramatically the needs of a business change as it evolves. Now, through his own consultancy, Olliver, he's using that experience to help agencies take a fresh look at how their businesses actually operate. Kristjan and Sam get into why buying good technology doesn't guarantee good results, why some businesses abandon perfectly capable software without ever really implementing it properly, and the often-overlooked gap between the decisions made at leadership level and what actually happens on the ground. They also explore centralisation, accountability, handovers, KPIs, staff engagement and the danger of managing a business purely through spreadsheets. There's a particularly interesting discussion around why involving your team in change matters without allowing "we've always done it this way" to become a veto on progress. More broadly, this is a conversation about business evolution. The people, processes and technology that get an agency through its first stage of growth won't necessarily be right for the next one, and sometimes it takes an outside perspective to spot where the friction really sits. A great listen for agency owners, directors, operations leaders and anyone wondering whether their business is genuinely set up for where it wants to go next. Send us Fan Mail

  6. Aug 12

    Why Does Everything Reward You Except Your Rent? with Josh Pavis

    We collect points when we fly, shop for groceries, stay in hotels and even buy a coffee. Yet for millions of renters, their single biggest monthly expense traditionally gives them absolutely nothing back. Why? In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan sits down with Josh Pavis, founder of BrickRewards, to talk about the surprisingly simple idea behind a new approach to rewarding renters. Josh's route into PropTech isn't exactly conventional. A talented hockey player who represented England and Great Britain, his sporting ambitions were abruptly interrupted by an injury just before his first senior GB game in Australia. What felt disastrous at the time ultimately pushed him towards entrepreneurship, starting his first business with his brother before going on to build and work with a number of different ventures. It was during a trip to America that Josh came across the concept of rent rewards and began wondering what a version built specifically for the UK could look like. The result is BrickRewards: a platform designed to give renters something back for paying the rent they were going to pay anyway, with rewards ranging from everyday savings on coffee, restaurants and groceries to the chance to have a month's rent paid. Kristjan and Josh talk about adapting an American idea for a very different UK market, why rewards need to be useful rather than purely aspirational, the inevitable "what's the catch?" question, and how the business actually makes money without charging renters to participate. They also explore why agents and landlords should care. At a time when household finances remain under pressure, could something as simple as helping residents get more from their biggest monthly expense become another small but meaningful part of delivering a better rental experience? Sometimes the best ideas are the ones that make you wonder why nobody was doing it already. Send us Fan Mail

  7. Aug 11

    What You Don't Know Can Cost You with Paul Conway

    How confident are you that your lettings business is fully compliant? If your answer is "pretty confident", this episode might make you think again. In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan is joined by Paul Conway, founder of Yuno, for a fascinating discussion about one of the biggest challenges facing the private rented sector: the ever-growing complexity of compliance. Paul's journey into property is anything but conventional. From working in the oil industry to property development, co-living and ultimately building one of the UK's most sophisticated compliance platforms, his career has been driven by solving operational problems that most people simply accept as part of the job. And nowhere is that more apparent than in today's lettings landscape. What starts as a conversation about property licensing quickly develops into a much broader discussion about the future of property management. Licensing schemes, planning regulations, fire safety, Awaab's Law, the Decent Homes Standard, Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards and the Renters' Rights Bill all point in the same direction. Compliance is no longer something agents can simply keep up with manually. Kristjan and Paul explore how regulation has evolved from a handful of legal requirements into a constantly moving target, with councils introducing new licensing schemes, changing boundaries, updating requirements and increasing enforcement powers. The reality is that what you don't know can now carry significant financial and legal consequences. The discussion also tackles one of the industry's biggest challenges: demonstrating value. As regulation becomes more technical, letting agents are doing more work than ever before, much of it invisible to landlords. Kristjan argues that one of the profession's biggest mistakes has been making complex work look easy, while Paul explains why better technology doesn't replace expertise—it gives agents the tools to apply it consistently and at scale. Together they discuss why smaller agencies may soon find it impossible to manage compliance manually, how technology can reduce risk without replacing people, and why educating landlords has become just as important as understanding the legislation itself. This isn't an episode designed to create fear. It's a conversation about preparation. Because the pace of regulatory change isn't slowing down, and the agencies that thrive over the next decade won't necessarily be the biggest. They'll be the ones who understand the risks, embrace the right technology and stay ahead of what's coming next. If you work in lettings, property management or the wider private rented sector, this episode is essential listening. Because sometimes, what you don't know really can cost you. Send us Fan Mail

  8. Aug 4

    The Industry Never Stands Still with Ed Mead

    How much has the property industry really changed over the last 50 years? In this episode of *The Viking Chats*, Kristjan sits down with one of the industry's most recognisable figures, Ed Mead. From his early days learning the ropes in London's estate agency scene during the 1970s, through helping build Douglas & Gordon into one of the capital's best-known brands, to founding Viewber and becoming one of property's most respected commentators, Ed has experienced almost every major shift the industry has gone through. As the episode title suggests, one thing has remained constant throughout his career.The industry never stands still. This is a conversation about what changes, what doesn't, and why the businesses that thrive are usually the ones prepared to evolve. Ed reflects on what made Douglas & Gordon different during its growth years, the importance of having great mentors early in your career, and why maintaining a healthy balance between work and life was one of the secrets to enjoying such a long career in agency. The discussion then moves into the creation of Viewber. Originally conceived as a way of solving a simple problem—how to cover more viewings outside normal office hours—it quickly evolved into something much bigger. Today, Viewber supports auction houses, estate agents, institutional landlords, social housing providers and property professionals across the UK through a nationwide network of thousands of local property representatives. Along the way, Kristjan and Ed explore why some technology businesses flourish while others disappear, why so much PropTech has historically been built by people who never truly understood agency, and how AI is changing not just the products we build but the speed at which businesses can innovate. There is also plenty of discussion around one of the industry's biggest talking points: regulation. From the Renters' Rights Bill and increasing compliance obligations to taxation, housing policy and the ever-changing political landscape, Kristjan and Ed debate whether governments genuinely understand the unintended consequences of housing legislation. They discuss the growing professionalism of the lettings sector, the changing profile of landlords, and why good intentions don't always produce good outcomes. The conversation also tackles qualification, training and professional standards within agency. Having once supported mandatory qualifications, Ed explains why his thinking has changed over the years, arguing that while poor operators undoubtedly exist, the overwhelming majority of agents are honest, hardworking professionals who care deeply about their clients. It's a refreshingly balanced discussion that avoids easy headlines in favour of thoughtful debate. Perhaps most importantly, this episode is about perspective. Ed has seen markets boom and crash. He's watched business models come and go. He's worked in traditional agency, built a successful technology company and advised the industry through decades of change. That experience gives him a unique vantage point on where the property sector has been—and where it may be heading next. Whether you're an estate agent, letting agent, PropTech founder, supplier or simply someone fascinated by how industries evolve, this episode offers a rare opportunity to hear from someone who has spent half a century adapting to change without ever losing sight of the fundamentals. Because in property, just when you think you've seen everything...The industry never stands still. Send us Fan Mail

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About

Welcome aboard The Viking Chats—the podcast where property, tech, and business collide in candid, no-fluff conversations. Hosted by Kristjan Byfield—lettings veteran, proptech pioneer, and co-founder of Base Property Specialists and The Depositary—this show dives deep into the real-world challenges and bold innovations shaping the future of the housing sector and beyond.Each episode, Kristjan drops anchor with industry leaders, disruptors, and entrepreneurs to unpack the messy, inspiring, and often chaotic reality of running a modern business in a rapidly evolving landscape. Expect sharp insights, honest stories, and the occasional Viking metaphor—all served with Kristjan’s trademark wit and big-hearted honesty.Whether you’re in lettings, launching a startup, or just love a good story about navigating change—this podcast is your compass in the storm.

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