EG Meets… Chas Barr of Haptic EPC

Chas Barr, managing director and founder of Haptic EPC, tells us why ChatGPT may be the greatest salesperson you never knew you had. I founded Haptic EPC in 2022 following a decade in office fit-out, I needed to be my own boss again but had built up such a lovely network of contacts-turned-friends that I couldn’t bear to leave property altogether. We set up with the chief goal of becoming the agent and landlord-facing commercial EPC provider in central London. I’m pleased to say it has gone tremendously well, notwithstanding the usual few hairy moments that any new business goes through – it is still the best thing I’ve done in years. Introductory elevator-pitch done. Just last week I received a call from a prospective client, an affable Frenchman with a deep understanding of the property game – he had two large student halls of residence in London’s Midtown that were leased to an overseas university for its London campus. A lease event had triggered a requirement that new commercial EPCs be issued on both and would I be interested in surveying them. As 70,000 sq ft jobs don’t just waltz in every day, I assured him that yes, we were keen as mustard and the conversation continued. Mystery shopper “So far so non-story” I hear you scream, but it was the end of this conversation that was to drop my jaw. While chuckling to himself, he asked me if I would like to know where he had got my details from. As any fellow small business owner will tell you this is a red rag to a bull. My mind raced – could it be good old Google which I had spent months taming? That wouldn’t have raised a smile I thought and so I sped matrix-style through a roll-call of likely characters that could be involved. With such a pair of properties in such a place, perhaps it was even one of those truly random thunderbolts that property occasionally blesses us with – his friend’s aunt overhearing something at the Co-op fish counter perhaps? Nope, none of the above. He had asked ChatGPT and been told authoritatively that we fit the bill. AI has been such a hot topic for the last 18 months that one would be forgiven for being a bit fed up of hearing about how it will transform all of our lives in difficult to imagine ways but here I was with the first, real-world deal (certainly that I had heard of) in London property. We have been deluged with press releases from emerging proptech firms that will harness AI to find your ideal development sites or gauge compatible tenants ad nauseam but here was a deal cut of the cleanest cloth: enquiry + advice = solution. Intelligent marketing For the sake of full transparency, I should say that I had dabbled with this back in January when I trained my own generative pre-trained transformer to be able to estimate approximate EPC scores for commercial buildings. While it proved uncannily accurate it was only available to subscribers of the platform and was in my mind an interesting gimmick for only the keenest of enthusiasts. Needless to say I still shamelessly promoted it at the time but never seriously thought about it earning its keep, so to speak. But here is the interesting thing: our charming French client hadn’t used my iteration of the software, rather the AI as a whole had learnt about my company and, when prompted, it recalled our location and expertise and understood why we were best placed to help him. We may well look back on this piece in years to come laughingly, just as we look back at those much-memed articles that suggested the internet or mobile phones were a flash in the pan but just like with those new-fangled innovations, I think it is time the industry as a whole sat up and started paying attention. The fact that Google is rolling out AI-based searches tells you everything you need to know.