Southam returns with new firm to shake up resi
Roger Southam, who sold his residential management firm Chainbow to Savills in 2018, has re-emerged with a new business he hopes will disrupt the lettings and management market.
Southam will chair Cohab, a venture with Canadian technology entrepreneur Saveli Kotz. The tech-focused firm charges an all-in lettings and management fee of 6%, versus as much as 20% via other players.
Southam describes the offering as “a clean sheet of paper, a reboot” of the lettings and management business.
Roger Southam, who sold his residential management firm Chainbow to Savills in 2018, has re-emerged with a new business he hopes will disrupt the lettings and management market.
Southam will chair Cohab, a venture with Canadian technology entrepreneur Saveli Kotz. The tech-focused firm charges an all-in lettings and management fee of 6%, versus as much as 20% via other players.
Southam describes the offering as “a clean sheet of paper, a reboot” of the lettings and management business.
“This technology platform takes you from cradle to grave of the letting journey,” he told EG in an exclusive interview about the launch. “It makes the renter’s journey painless, makes the landlord’s journey painless, and lets us offer a service at in insanely low fee. It sounded so innovative and so exciting, I’ve put my head above the parapet and come back into the UK market having been under the radar.”
Kotz struck on the idea for Cohab when moving his family to the UK from the Bahamas in 2021, during which time he struggled to get call-backs from agents and saw deal times drag out as agents “messed up every step of the way”.
“I wanted to disrupt agents like that,” said Kotz, who has developed three data centres in Canada and manages a 240-unit condominium block in Miami. “If their process takes so much work – we needed nearly 40 calls and e-mails, so much back and forth – that person is wasting their time. This is ripe for disruption if it’s that inefficient.”
Cohab has a 24/7 call centre but is focused on would-be tenants filling in a short form and using a website to book viewings rather than waiting for a call from an agent. The business uses what Kotz calls the “American open house” strategy, allowing multiple viewings at once. Scheduling the viewing automatically sets the individual up with a Cohab account. “We try to disrupt each part of this,” Kotz said.
Southam believes few agents have seen the problems with the lettings and management space before. “They just don’t look at it as being broken and don’t think about how we can change it,” he said. “You’ve seen a shift in the build-to-rent market but that’s tiny by comparison with the general lettings market. The general lettings market is so staid in its ways that I don’t think they would know where to start to disrupt it or rebuild it.”
Kotz is self-funding the business for now, with a hunt for external funding under way. Cohab will start by targeting single blocks of flats but will then aim to strike deals with major build-to-rent landlords. The business aims to have more than 100 properties on its books within the first two months of operation, with a target of 1,000 in its first year and 30,000 in the next two to three. Although these ambitions are for the UK only, Southam said the business will ultimately look to expand overseas.
