About Factorly
Built from the
inside out.
Factorly was started by a property owner in Glasgow who got tired of managing their building through letters, email chains, and unanswered calls. We're building the platform we wish existed — not the one that already does.
Our mission
Make property factoring in Scotland as straightforward as it should be.
Scotland has 306 registered property factor firms managing over 678,000 properties — a sector operating largely on legacy desktop software from the 2000s, generic platforms not designed for Scottish law, or spreadsheet-based workflows that buckle under the PF Act's audit requirements. Meanwhile, UK service charges have risen 32% in five years, regulatory complexity is increasing, and residents are taking factors to tribunal at record rates — primarily for communication failures.
Factorly was built by someone on the receiving end of exactly that. A property owner in Glasgow who looked at how their building was managed and recognised a solvable engineering problem — not a market gap spotted from a spreadsheet, but a daily frustration that comes from actually living it.
We believe technology, and increasingly AI, can transform what factoring looks like for everyone in the building — from the firm managing the charges to the owner checking their balance at midnight. The AI reads your portfolio and tells you what needs attention today. It drafts the letters. You review, edit, and send. That transformation starts with software that takes the industry seriously enough to build it properly.
The UK property management market is worth £37.8 billion. Scotland's residential property factoring sector — with its specific compliance obligations under the PF Act 2011 — has no modern SaaS platform built specifically for it. That's the gap Factorly was built to close.
Sources: Scottish Property Factor Register · IBISWorld 2025 · Property118 · Scottish Government housing statistics
The story
How we got here
01
Mid-2025
The problem becomes undeniable
The problem becomes undeniable
A letter arrives. Then another. Then an email chain with no clear resolution. This is how a property factor manages a Glasgow tenement in 2025 — the same way it was managed in 1995. Paper-based, slow, insecure, and with no way for residents to know what's happening with their own building. The question wasn't complicated: why hasn't anyone fixed this properly?
02
Late 2025
The decision to build
The decision to build
As a lead software engineer, the answer was also clear: the people who could fix this hadn't felt the problem themselves. That changed. Factorly was started not to build software for factors — but to build the platform that property owners and residents actually want to be on the receiving end of. One that respects their time, protects their data, and doesn't require a letter in the post to tell them something changed.
03
2026
Live and onboarding founding firms
Live and onboarding founding firms
The platform launched to early access with the full feature set live: service charges, GoCardless direct debit, meetings with quorum tracking, polls, contractor portal, WSOS management, complaints workflow, AI smart digest, AI document drafter, and a complete audit trail. Built to production standards — not MVP shortcuts. Now onboarding founding firms from across Scotland.
Why now
Three forces making this the right moment.
The timing isn't coincidence. Regulatory, market, and structural forces have converged in a way that makes the case for modern property management software stronger than it has ever been.
New 2024 regulations
The Property Factors (Registration) (Scotland) Regulations 2024, effective November 2024, introduce stricter requirements for data management, transparency, and secure communication. Firms still operating on paper and email face growing compliance exposure.
Market failure — externally validated
The UK Competition & Markets Authority found explicit consumer detriment in property factoring arrangements. The conclusion: the market needs better tooling, better accountability, and better transparency. Not more letters.
Communication is the #1 failure point
Failure to communicate is the leading reason Scottish residents refer their factor to the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland. It's not a people problem — it's a systems problem. Factorly fixes the system.
What we stand for
Four things we don't compromise on
Scotland-first
We didn't adapt a generic platform for Scotland — we built from a blank canvas with the Property Factors (Scotland) Act 2011, the PF Register, and Scottish tenement law as our starting point. Every decision is made with Scottish compliance in mind.
Compliance by design
Audit trails, written statement obligations, and dispute documentation are not afterthoughts bolted onto Factorly — they're woven into every workflow. When a PF Register inspection happens, your evidence is already there.
Engineering first
Factorly is built by a lead software engineer who holds the platform to production standards: type-safe APIs, automated test suites, security-hardened endpoints, and an audit trail designed to stand up to scrutiny. Technology done properly, not technology done quickly.
Built from the resident's side
The founder is a property owner in Glasgow. Every feature was designed by someone who will use this platform as a resident, not just sell it to factors. That changes every product decision — because we know what it feels like when communication fails.
Who's building this
Engineering-led.
Glasgow-based.
Lead software engineer who has built and led engineering teams across multiple organisations — and decided to build the platform he wanted to be on the receiving end of as a property owner in Glasgow.
LinkedInNot a team of consultants who spotted a market opportunity — an engineer who lives the problem. Being engineering-first means the right technology, built properly and applied thoughtfully, can do things for this industry that no amount of process improvement ever could. That includes AI: a daily digest that surfaces what actually needs attention, and document drafting that means PMs spend less time on boilerplate and more time on the problems that need a human.
Get started
Want to see what we've built?
Book a 30-minute demo and we'll walk through the platform live — no sales deck, just the software.