Yoan Bratoev, founder of BuildLink OS.
I built BuildLink because the tools UK property investors rely on should not look older than I am. This is the story, and what the tool now does about it.
I am young. I do not have a seven-figure portfolio, and I am not going to for a while. What I had was a list of every deal I wanted to buy and could not afford, and a spreadsheet I built to pretend I could. Fifteen tabs, hand-copied data from Rightmove, formulas lifted from a 2012 forum post. Four hours per property just to reach a number I did not trust.
The more investors I spoke to, the more I realised nobody was running anything different. Experienced landlords with ten, twenty, fifty properties. All using versions of the same spreadsheet. Screenshots of Excel cells passed around WhatsApp groups. PDFs of yield calculators last updated in 2014. Due diligence done by eye on a Friday night because the deal goes to someone else on Monday.
The tools an industry that moves hundreds of billions of pounds a year relies on are not serious tools. They are muscle memory and copy-paste.
I kept waiting for someone to build the modern version. The thing that looks like the software running fintech, aviation, logistics. A tool that does the boring part in sixty seconds and hands the decision back. Nobody was building it.
So I did. No outside money, no team at first. Just the thing the industry needed to exist, built by someone who wanted to be in the industry and could not get in through the usual door.
BuildLink reads the Land Registry for title history. It reads the EPC register for energy performance and the 2028 MEES risk. It reads Companies House for the freeholder. It compares the asking price to actual sold transactions nearby. It scans 412 other signals that can kill a UK property deal. It writes the result as a memo a mortgage broker will accept.
Fifteen analyses every month. No card required. If BuildLink misses something or catches something wrong, email me directly.