Our Story

Most innovative ideas are usually conceived when people experience a problem and cannot find a solution that meets their requirements. It then requires someone brave enough to take that first step to create an ideal solution that will solve an existing problem, someone, just like our founder!

brightLET was created shortly after a serious family illness that occurred in 2015. Back then, our founder, Camran Khan, was working in the media & marketing sector in London, consulting for high-end brands, by helping them provide automated scalable solutions for online technology.

One day, Camran received a call from his mother to inform him that his father had suffered a heart attack. At the time, Camran’s father managed his own property portfolio but, upon returning home, Camran was told by his mother that he now needed to manage these properties. Naturally, Camran was reluctant, as he had a stable career in London and didn’t want to give up his day job. In the end, however, he had no choice and ended up taking on the task of managing his father’s property portfolio.

Assuming this would be an easy task, Camran instead found that tenants were contacting him during office hours with property issues that they expected to be addressed immediately. Being busy with his day job, Camran could only respond to tenants during his breaks or after office hours. Having to work 9 to 5, as well as manage several properties, soon became very inconvenient. Moreover, being a new landlord, Camran was afraid to fall into any legal or compliance issues. All of this meant that the only option he had was to hand the property portfolio over to an estate agent.

At the time, some of Camran’s father’s properties had been remortgaged and were on an interest-only rate. If you calculate the costs of an interest rate-based mortgage, plus a 10% management fee from the estate agent, then as a Landlord you are losing out on great rent yields. Nevertheless, Camran believed that using an estate agent was a great decision, as he thought that he would no longer need to deal with any tenant issues, since the day-to-day management of the properties/tenancies was the responsibility of the estate agent, meaning Camran could again focus on his career.

Nevertheless, Camran believed that using an estate agent was a great decision, as he thought that he would no longer need to deal with any tenant issues, since the day-to-day management of the properties was the responsibility of the estate agent, meaning Camran could again focus on his career.

Little did he know, however, that the estate agent would be calling him regularly to inform him about maintenance issues at his properties and to ask him what to do about them. Added to this were the constant voicemail messages informing him that tenants required an immediate response to such and such an issue and that he needed to get back to the estate agent ASAP. This all had Camran wondering why he was paying the estate agent a management fee, whilst still having to deal with tenant issues.

At around the same time (in 2015), cloud computing had become an industry standard for Internet-based systems, with many businesses now investing large amounts of time and money to migrate to the cloud. Camran, who specialises in automated systems, has always believed that any manual process that takes more than 3 minutes should be automated in order to save companies huge operational costs and overheads, so this is what he set about doing with brightLET. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Camran was shortlisted as one of the Top 10 Disruptive CTO’s in the UK in 2015.

Camran therefore started to look for a technology solution that he could use on a day-to-day basis to manage his father’s properties/tenancies. From his research, Camran found that there were some off-the-shelf products available but these were very limited in what they could do, for example, they focused only on tenancy, or only on management or only on property-related reminders. Furthermore, a lot of the landlords making use of these products were complaining about poor usability and an outdated user interface.

There was not (and there still isn’t, yet!) a marketplace offering all property needs for landlords and tenants from anywhere in the world.

Back then, Camran lived alone in a 1-bedroom apartment in London, and he decided to sacrifice his evenings and weekends to set himself the challenge of coming up with an automated solution that cuts out the estate agent, saves on time and agent fees, keeps landlords in-line with regulations, and eliminates all of the frustrations of both landlords and tenants. Camran believed that using an estate agent was simply an outdated practice for which there seemed to be no alternative when it came to letting or renting for a landlord or tenant respectively.

One of the key goals of creating the brightLET platform was to incorporate Camran's own frustrations as a landlord, alongside market research from fellow landlords into what they would like to see in such a platform. To quote Camran himself: “For the mass consumers using technology, it has to be as simple as possible and user-friendly. The real reason why a lot of technology companies fail is that some guy has had a crazy idea and just wants the idea to be born without conducting any real market research to find out what an end user actually requires”.

Camran thus started the development of the brightLET platform in March 2016. Throughout the development process, Camran has involved landlords and tenants to get their feedback for improvements, as well as to research new features to implement. In November 2016, brightLET was born (beta launch), and a focus group was held for landlords to test the product and provide feedback. This initial feedback was constructive and improvements were made to have a final product ready in January 2017.

If it hadn’t been for our founder’s family misfortune, brightLET would not exist today.

Our mission is to become a world leader in the property technology and real estate sector. This is just the beginning of our vision, and we have many phases that will always keep us ahead of our competition. We have a highly dedicated and talented team that is very passionate about our platform and works hard to create an open and harmonious environment, where we can develop both as a property solution and as a company.

Thank you for reading our story. We look forward to welcoming you to the brightLET family!