EDWARD DENT received his Master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. He is TEAM’s Director of Marketing. After 20 years working as a property consultant, he decided to turn developer.

Ed says: "Agents have a bad name but that is usually because they are held responsible for developers who don’t keep their promises. We had enough of being put in this position and decided the only way to change things was to become developers ourselves."

Q TEAM places great store by being honest. What does this mean, in practice?

Eddie: I am a poacher turned gamekeeper, so I’m in a position to expose some of the myths of the property industry. Selling homes generally involves an element of conning clients. We wanted to be honest with people,which meant we had to stop operating as middlemen. We decided to take responsibility for the homes we are selling, so we had to go into the building business.

Q But won’t your honesty shatter dreams that are tied into home ownership?

Eddie: The trouble is we don’t ask the right questions when we buy property. We allow ourselves to "buy" the dreams fed to us by agents. We were selling dreams that had hidden strings attached to them. However,developers make money by raising prices and cutting corners. Their attitude is "If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Everybody is doing well out of it, let’s buy another yacht or Aston Martin, prices are still going up". But it is a lazy and complacent approach. We believed that we could do better by everyone and still make money. So we set up TEAM

Q So how will you market a TEAM home?

Eddie: You often get more guarantee with a Skoda than you do when you buy a £1m house – not that I’ve got anything against Skodas! We will offer guarantees that are worth something. But we will also give people the facts about the locality – the crime rates, the OFSTED performance of the local school, things like that – rather than leading them on. There will be no trick photography or misleading advertising like "Close to Canary Wharf" – often true only if you travel by Harrier jump jet!

But we are not bible-bashing do-gooders. Honesty is a marketing challenge. We have been round the block a few times, and it gives me no pleasure to see people going to the slaughter like lambs. There will be no false hype from us. Our commitment is to give people a good deal, because that’s what we demand for ourselves. When we shake someone’s hand and pass them the keys, we want to be sure that they will not feel disappointed, and hey will continue to experience that pleasure for as long as they live there.

Q You are setting TEAM a very high standard!

Eddie: When you invest £300,000 in the stock market, your adviser has to give you an enormous amount of information, and the adviser is regulated. But when you buy a house for £300,000, no-one warns you that the market might crash and that your asset might end up being worth a lot less than you paid for it. Building societies are in the business of lending you money, and the lawyers are there to cover their backs, not yours.
But I can’t stress enough that a home is not an investment: it’s your home. That’s why we have to give people a good product, together with the best information about the neighbourhood they are thinking of buying into. They must want to live there, rather than acquiring property in a locality they know nothing about, out of desperation, because they can’t afford to live anywhere else.

Q Your ethical marketing strategy upsets all the rules of the game!

Eddie: My dream is not to have to do any marketing at all! That’s not as odd as it sounds. We want to sell lots of homes without having to advertise – after all, those marketing costs just go on to the price of the homes, which make them less affordable. To achieve that, we need people queuing up to buy a TEAM home because they know we produce dependable, predictable products at prices that can’t be beaten. If we succeed, we will have landowners coming to us to develop their land. And that’s when we will gear up our modern methods of construction (MMC) plant to begin putting a dent in the shortfall of homes in this country.