The Proptech Podcast with Kylie Davis: Recent Episodes
Kylie Davis
The Proptech Podcast explores innovation in real estate and the property industry. In each episode we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in real estate and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
In today's episode, we are diving deep into the world of artificial intelligence and real estate with Chris McGoldrick, the founder of ListAssist. ListAssist is an innovative AI-powered platform that is revolutionising the way home buyers search for properties and how real estate agents engage with potential clients.
Chris will share his journey of launching ListAssist and the unique challenges of entering the American real estate market from New Zealand. We'll uncover the secrets of their success, including their recent win at the Proptech Angel Investment Network Pitchfest and their exciting partnership with Howard Hannah, the largest privately-owned brokerage in North America.
But most importantly, we’re going to take a look at how ListAssist is harnessing the power of AI to make the experience of finding your dream home work just as it does to find the perfect tshirt online - or any other retail experience - using property features and data extracted from imagery together with natural language search.
Welcome to the PropTech Podcast! In this episode, we are delving into the world of co-ownership and its potential to revolutionise modern property ownership.
My guests are Lynda Coker and Liz Rochaix, the co-founders of Co-operty, an innovative platform designed to simplify and streamline the co-ownership journey.
Co-operty is tackling one of the biggest challenges facing aspiring homeowners: affordability which they tackle through digitising the long existing legal framework of tenants in common, and providing some security and asset protection around the idea of the Bank of Mum and Dad.
Whether you're a potential first time homebuyer or the parents of Milennial or Gen Z - this is a cracking episode.
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My guest in this episode is Michael Shaw, CEO of what at the time of the interview was a proptech called EnvisionVR, but they have, in the pursuant months, changed their name to Enviz.
Enviz creates immersive experiences for new - as yet unbuilt - property through floorplans and property models. Enviz supports architects and CGI studios to upload 3D designs allowing buyers to experience fully the new home they will be purchasing via their mobile phone, tablet or computer - you don’t need a full VR headset. And the design community don’t need expensive software.
And as you’ll hear in this episode, this results in more confident buyers, faster sales and even higher prices. And as you’ll learn from Michael, VR is just the beginning. There’s VR, AR and even XR.
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The first Virtual Reality headset was invented in 1968, and the technology got a huge bump in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus VR, so why has it taken so long for real estate and property to embrace it? On our first Proptech Panel for 2024, our President, Kylie Davis explores three different and compelling use cases for VR across both residential and commercial real estate. Josh Callaghan from Little HingesChristian Schwerdtfeger from IMMERSIVMichael Shaw from EnvisionVRGain exclusive insights into how to use VR in designing, buying, building, selling and maintaining property plus insights into how to integrate VR seamlessly into your real estate business.
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Creating new value from existing assets is one of the big benefits of digital disruption. So how is this playing out in the commercial property sector?Our Proptech Panel for February explores new ways commercial property owners can improve efficiency and realise new revenue streams in their existing buildings to revitalise and add value to tenants without even moving a brick.Join our host Carolyn Trickett from JLL Spark, together with our expert panel Chris Mason from MobileDock, Sean Lucas from Essensys, and Mosstyn Howell from UbiPark as we discuss how delivering better connectivity, parking and loading dock solutions can reduce return-to-office friction and support better building experiences.
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Now one of the biggest growth categories in the Proptech Awards for 2023 was tech for developers and off the plan sales.
And our next guests are a brand new startup specialising in disgitising how land is sold.
Landnow is a real time marketplace for land sales allowing the building industry to see exactly which blocks are available, their location and specifications to ensure they are suitable for different house designs and most importantly, the ability to put a block on hold. It replaces the very slow and laborious system of emailing pdfs of stock lists and constant phone and email tag - sometimes over a week or more - to see if a block was available to purchase.
Landnow launched in October in Perth where builder reps sell more than 70% of all land but they have big plans to go national.
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So buckle up for a niche - but super fascinating - Proptech in this episode with my guest Sean Lucas from Essensys.
Essensys deliver end to end solutions for digital access for flex spaces including connectivity, access control and network infrastructure.
Sounds simple but you know what they say - simple at the front means a lot of complication out the back. And the nature of shared office space with all different types of computers and systems plugging in exponentially increases that complication.
And with hybrid working changing so many of our office spaces, and flexible working space growing by a huge 30% globally, the services Essensys offers are in strong demand from commercial office owners.
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Brene Brown said famously that data is a story with soul. And our next guest is a Proptech founder working to put the soul into the development of new communities through the smart use of data.
Jessica Christiansen-Franks is the co-founder and CEO of Neighbourlytics, a data company that specialises in helping developers understand what makes communities genuinely tick.
From online restaurant reviews to event check-ins, the Neighbourlytics technology synthesises data from digital sources to see places through the eyes of local residents - helping citymakers understand, measure and monitor social wellbeing in the places they create and manage.
Jess co-founded Neighbourlytics in 2017, as digital transformation was starting to shape the future of citymaking and urban design and Neighbourlytics is now used by the majority of Australia’s leading property developers, asset managers, and urban planners to create better, connected neighbourhoods.
The ground-breaking technology was a multiple award winner at the Proptech Awards and has scaled rapidly, providing data and insights today for more than 2000 neighbourhoods across 12 countries.
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Now have you heard about the push to electrify Australia’s residential sector? It’s a concerted campaign driven by the Australian Government to meet a target where 82 per cent of our energy is generated through renewable sources rather than coal and gas by 2030.
And to hit this target, the vast majority of Australia’s 12 million existing home owners need to switch their homes off fossil fuels and onto solar or wind power. But where on earth do you start? This is something that I’m personally looking at for my home and the options - and the adulting required - is exhausting.
But my next guest is changing all that. Alex Houlston is the CEO and cofounder of Boom - also known as BoomPower - is an Aussie climate-tech business that delivers building electrification needs all in one platform to simplify electrifying homes, help with decisions and get access to reliable suppliers, while veryifying emission impacts. It’s being used by the banking sector to help their customers plan upgrades to their homes.
Alex has had an extensive career in the renewable energy sector before starting Boom in 2018 - and I don’t think his timing could have been any better
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Why does building a property cost so much? Well a lot of the reason is because of the lack of efficiency in the building industry, the manual systems and handoffs and updates managed through phone calls, email and onsite visits, gaps in the supply chain, the demands of governance which requires even more administrative work, and a lack of visibility across the entire process which culminates in defect correction at the end.
In fact, at least 13% of the cost of building is attributed to rework in some way, according to research by Deakin University.
But my guest in this episode is fixing all of that.
Justin Williams is the founder of ConstructionID by Wiseworking - a building process and document management platform that captures all of the information in a build - from design through to post-building management - in one system.
They were a winner in the Proptech Awards 2022 and a finalist again this year
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Now have you ever rushed into the office running late to realise once that you've left your security pass on the kitchen bench, or in a different handbag - and your day turns to custard because you need to be manually signed in?
Or dashed out to a client coffee, left your pass on your desk and spent half an hour after the meeting trying to find someone to let you through the security barriers while you get side-eyed by the front desk.
Is it just me who is completely hopeless when it comes to security passes? I don't think so.
Well my next guest is Steve Katanas, head of ANZ for physical access control from HID. HID offers identification as a service removing the need for lanyards and passes by putting your building identification and security passes into your phone using wallet technology. This offers significant productivity and security benefits while also supporting the easier automation of building access.
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If you’re a real estate agent, you’re going to love this next podcast. My guest is Cameron Shroeder from a brand new proptech - started in just January this year - called FallbackAI.
Fallback AI solves that problem that nearly all agents experience - a dislike of cold calling. It is AI that clones your voice and sends a voice mail to your contacts so that instead of spending hours calling and having your call rejected, you can get on with your day and deal with incoming calls from people who want to talk to you and spend more time closing.
Cameron is an experienced entrepreneur with a solid background marketing and Fallback AI is now looking for beta client after being tested by over 300 agents. So here to tell us all about it, Cameron Shroeder, welcome to the Proptech Podcast.
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We're all familiar with the idea of adding an extension or a pool to increase the value of our home. But what about your homes energy efficiency - or lack of it?
We are moving into a new era where the energy efficiency and carbon credentials of your home will soon play a significant role in how much your home will be worth.
And my next guest, Allys Todd is the co-founder and CEO of a Proptech helping homeowners - and property industry professionals - as this becomes reality.
Val.ai is a new startup whose AI is able to help valuers, financial institutions and insurance companies understand the climate risk inside their residential property portfolios with a complimentary product that provides the data and insights to home owners to understand what they need to do to make their home more energy efficient and the payback they can expect when they take action.
And with the large majority of Australia's existing residential housing stock rated only 2 stars out of an expected 7, upgrading our existing homes to make them more energy efficient and affordable to run is going to play a huge role in helping Australia hit our climate and carbon reduction targets.
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Buckle up people because in this episode of the Proptech Podcast we are doing a deep dive into the world of building and construction technology and its a doozy!
My guests are Murray Ellen and Andrew Giles from PT Blink and this is an extended episode because we got totally into a conversation about the problems that desperately need solving in construction and the role of technology to digitise manual work that has been done the same way for centuries.
PT Blink is a very exciting Proptech that is working to "industrialise" construction, using platform technology to manage the logistics and workflows of local building supply manufacturers anywhere to create custom designed flatpack multistorey buildings that can be assembled on site in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.
Murray is a leading expert is post tension steel technology and has conceived, designed and built major projects around the world including Australia, China, Hong Kong, Dubai and the Philippines - one of which includes Sydney's Olympic stadium. As well as being the founder of PT Blink is a governor of the Sydney University Warren Centre of Advanced Engineering.
Andrew is director of marketing and communications at PT Blink and has had an extensive corporate career in communications roles working for companies including Canon and Edelman. He is also on the Commercial Advisory committee of the Proptech Association Australia and an enthusiastic advocate for the sector.
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My guest in this episode is Sonja Markovic from an exciting new proptech called Evitat that is making it easier to renovate and build homes using materials and services that are energy efficient and have strong green and health credentials.
Evitat were the winners of the Most Innovative Startup in the Environment Social and Sustainability in the 2023 Proptech Awards and it has a great story. Evitat was born from the pain that Sonja experienced trying to restore a Queenslander that has been damaged by a cyclone - an experience that she says was like studying for a PhD.
And with a new rating system on the cards to be introduced for established homes, it's an area that's going to experience exponential demand and growth.
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There are always plenty of legal documents required whenever you buy or sell a residential property!
Conveyancing also involves multiple stakeholders, processes and tasks, which means that there are plenty of good opportunities in there for technology to help!
On this month’s The Proptech Panel, we explore the intersections of proptech and legaltech, including the innovations in the market such as:
digital ID checks virtual document signing automated contract preparation and review the safeguards around the large sums of money that are transferred on settlement.
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In this months panel, Proptech Association Vice President Jennifer Harrison was joined by:- Justin Williams from ConstructionID- Chris Polin from DLP Manager- Bart Crowther from PlanRadar The discuss revolved around"contech". Contech describes everything that is related to the building & construction phase of the real estate life cycle. This can include procurement, resourcing, project management, sub-contracting, site access and logistics, quality assurance, health & safety, defects management and more.ABOUT STONE & CHALKStone & Chalk is Australia’s largest innovation community. Our mission is to transform Australia into a sustainable, technology driven economy by supporting emerging tech startups and scaleups, corporations, and government at every stage of their innovation journey.WHY SHOULD I BECOME A RESIDENT?As a resident of Stone & Chalk, you can access:State-of-the-art hubs in the heart of Sydney, Melbourne and AdelaideA vibrant community of likeminded foundersA world-class network of investors, mentors, customers, and expertsExpert advice and guidance with a tailored business growth strategySTAY UP TO DATELinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/company/stone-&-chalk/ Instagram – www.instagram.com/stoneandchalk/ Twitter - www.twitter.com/stoneandchalk/ Facebook - www.facebook.com/stoneandchalk Website - www.stoneandchalk.com.au/Sign up to our newsletter - https://www.stoneandchalk.com.au/form...
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The Consumer Data Right (CDR) started in open banking in 2020, then moved into open energy in 2022, and non-bank lending will be next.Currently, customers can choose to share their banking and energy data with accredited third party data recipients. Data sharing is governed by consent-driven rules and happens automatically and electronically via secure APIs. As June is CDR Month, The Proptech Panel featured four expert guests:Tim Poskitt, Envestnet | YodleeAdam Vidal, BasiqNeil McVeigh, Greener, andRoss Sharman, Accurassiwho explained how the real estate sector can benefit from CDR data sharing and answer questions such as:What data is available through CDR?How can proptechs access it?What use cases are supported? Can CDR accelerate the journey to net zero?Where is CDR heading in the future?ABOUT STONE & CHALKStone & Chalk is Australia’s largest innovation community. Our mission is to transform Australia into a sustainable, technology driven economy by supporting emerging tech startups and scaleups, corporations, and government at every stage of their innovation journey.WHY SHOULD I BECOME A RESIDENT?As a resident of Stone & Chalk, you can access:State-of-the-art hubs in the heart of Sydney, Melbourne and AdelaideA vibrant community of likeminded foundersA world-class network of investors, mentors, customers, and expertsExpert advice and guidance with a tailored business growth strategySTAY UP TO DATELinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/company/stone-&-chalk/ Instagram – www.instagram.com/stoneandchalk/ Twitter - www.twitter.com/stoneandchalk/ Facebook - www.facebook.com/stoneandchalk Website - www.stoneandchalk.com.au/Sign up to our newsletter - https://www.stoneandchalk.com.au/form...
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I am very excited about my next guest, Andrew Cox, because he is from a brand new proptech just launched called SensorGlobal.
Sensor Global is doing groundbreaking work saving lives with next generation internet of things software designed specially for residential properties.
IoT are smart devices that are connected to cloud-based software. Sensor Global’s first product is a new automated smoke alarm system that will revolutionise how smoke alarms are monitored and managed in rental properties across the country because the fact that they are constantly connected means they no longer require annual physical inspections to remain compliant. And this will make life easier for both tenants and property managers. But they also have a raft of new devices planned for market.
Andrew has extensive experience in both the property, construction and proptech industry, having successfully exited Property Safe to Australia’s Home Trades Hub (a Joint Venture between IAG Insurance and RACV) in 2021. He’s a proptech entrepreneur who knows his product, knows its purpose and is very clear on his company’s vision and how he is going to achieve them.
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My guest in this episode is Jennifer Harrison, a communications and PR expert with Reputation Edge and the vice president of the Proptech Association of Australia, where she was one of the first to put up her hand and get involved in the association.
Jennifer had an extensive career in the corporate banking sector and fintechs, is part of IdeaSpies which specialises in identifying emerging exciting technology, and is one of the powerhouses behind the Proptech Awards, working on the mammoth task of finding and coordinating the judging.
In this episode, we give an overview on the winners of the 2023 Proptech Awards and provide some tips and insights into why they won and how to create a winning entry for next years awards.
With 33 winners - this is a longer episode - but well worth the listen, so buckle up.
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This week on the Proptech Podcast my guest is Shelley Horton, the executive manager of mortgage solutions at PropTrack, the property data arm of Realestate.com.au
Shelley has a long track record in the property industry, starting her career as a property valuer holding various roles at Genworth, and then becoming a buyers agent and consultant to large corporates including Macquarie and CoreLogic. So she’s experienced the property valuation and the risk analysis of the industry from nearly every angle.
Now at REA, she’s responsible for PropTrack expanding the valuation, risk and mortgage products being created from their data with a keen eye to the kinds of insights that property buyers and sellers want to know.
And in this interview we discuss the importance of good quality data in helping consumers make confident decisions and how the property data industry is changing.
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My guest in this episode is Joe Rossi, the national sales and go-to-market director of the property data provider National Property Group.
National Property Group connects Australian property professionals with ready-to-use, property data, marketing and sales platforms to power strategic business growth. They have a long heritage in the property industry - for those with long memories, they were born out of EAC and Red Square which makes them - as they state - a 60 year old startup.
But they launched as National Property Group in 2020 and now boast 12 million property records, 107 million property images and 250 m records on sales and lease listings - and an API that is open and affordable for proptechs to experiment with.
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In this episode we meet Andy McColgan, CEO and director of construction Proptech Procuracon.
Andy's 15 years combined experience as a site inspector at Ogilvie Construction and project manager and project director at APP Construction gave him first hand experience into the pain and inefficiencies around construction tendering processes. And Procuracon is working to remove the pain points - and even inherent bias - that exists in traditional ways of trying to find the right suppliers and contractors.
The Perth based startup came through the Curtain University accelerator program and was recently the winner of the Proptech HubWA Emerging Technology of the Year
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My guest is this episode is Will Alexander, CEO of New Zealand Proptech Renti, which is making it easier for property managers to provide a better service to tenants, and help them to apply for rental properties more easily and move in more quickly.
Will has had an extensive career in real estate. Before joining Renti, he was the general manager of Property Brokers, spent a total of seven years at Barfoot & Thompson, represented the property management sector to the REINZ and worked at Auckland Property Management.
Renti and MoovMe are his second tech startup after he spent two years as founder of MoreMinutes, a proptech designed to help property managers get more out of their day.
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My guest in this episode is Scott Bateman, CEO of property management proptech Kolmeo. Scott’s career started in banking, working for BT Financial Group and Bank of Melbourne, before he was convinced to join Little Real Estate, founded by billionaire businessman and philanthropist Paul Little who was managing director of Toll Holdings from 1985 until his retirement in 2011.
In this interview, Scott tells us the rather fabulous story of how the legacy technology stack of AgentPlus both pivoted and accelerated to become Kolmeo during the Covid pandemic and lockdowns - a transformation that Scott describes as jumping out of a plane and assembling the parachute. But it took Kolmeo from concept to running some of the largest rent rolls in the country and it’s a cracking interview.
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My guest in this episode is Jake Isman, founder of new proptech startup Propti - that’s spelt P.R.O.P.T.I
Propti is a one stop shop for the plethora of property reports needed across a property transaction - whether that’s building and pest, strata management, property valuations and even more technical reports like engineering and soil analysis - creating a simple, verified and faster way to identify the right information provider and obtain the right report quickly and affordably.
In this conversation, we discuss the hidden labour of reports - the thousands of hours and emails that are undertaken weekly by administrators across the property ecosystem to find specialists who can provide the right report in the right area, brief in the request and manage its delivery.
Just like banks have a valuation panel of verified experts that they go to to provide valuations, Propti takes this concept and expands it across the entire report ecosystem that saves agents, conveyancers, mortgage brokers and buyers time and a lot of stress.
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My guest in this episode is the fabulous Isaac Coonan, founder and head of Proptech BNE or Proptech Brisbane, which specialises in promoting the value of Proptech to south east Queensland.
Isaac and his team have recently released the Australian Proptech Economic Impact Report - a landmark document that is now in its third year that captures the data about the Proptech ecosystem across Australia and analyses the contribution it makes to the economy.
The Proptech Association of Australia - and I personally - have been very proud to collaborate with ProptechBNE on this great initiative and this year, we delivered the first Proptech Map as part of the report.
And so this episode is a bit different to a typical podcast as Isaac and I - who as Isaac rightly points out could talk under wet concrete - discuss the key findings of the report and the trends and current behaviours of the Australian Proptech ecosystem.
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There are always plenty of legal documents required whenever you buy or sell a residential property! Conveyancing also involves multiple stakeholders, processes and tasks, which means that there are plenty of good opportunities in there for technology to help! On this month’s The Proptech Panel, we explore the intersections of proptech and legaltech, including the innovations in the market such as:digital ID checksvirtual document signingautomated contract preparation and reviewthe safeguards around the large sums of money that are transferred on settlement.
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In this months edition of The Proptech Panel Association Australia Vice President Jennifer Harrison hosted a conversation with three of our winners from the Proptech Awards 2022: Robert Coorey, Co-Founder at Archistar.aiTrish Mackie-Smith, Co-Founder at inndoxMickael Roger, Co-Founder at PropHero They shared their founder's journey stories and, in particular, the challenges that can arise when you go out to a traditional market with something that is innovative and tech-enabled. ABOUT STONE & CHALKStone & Chalk is Australia’s largest innovation community. Our mission is to transform Australia into a sustainable, technology driven economy by supporting emerging tech startups and scaleups, corporations, and government at every stage of their innovation journey.WHY SHOULD I BECOME A RESIDENT?As a resident of Stone & Chalk, you can access:State-of-the-art hubs in the heart of Sydney, Melbourne and AdelaideA vibrant community of likeminded foundersA world-class network of investors, mentors, customers, and expertsExpert advice and guidance with a tailored business growth strategySTAY UP TO DATELinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/company/stone-&-chalk/ Instagram – www.instagram.com/stoneandchalk/ Twitter - www.twitter.com/stoneandchalk/ Facebook - www.facebook.com/stoneandchalk Website - www.stoneandchalk.com.au/
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My guest in this episode is the irrepressible Peter Schravemade, the head of Australia’s premier proptech accelerator, the REACH Australia program, director of the Proptech Association Australia and someone I am very proud to call a dear friend.
Pete took up the mantle of the Reach program this year after many years at BoxBrownie, one of the posterboys for scaling Australian proptech where he grew the business into 129 countries through his seemingly constant attendance at industry events around the world and well earned reputation for being great company and quick to shout a beer.
Now a warning – Pete and I can talk under wet concrete and we do in this episode - as Pete talks through the 2023 Reach Cohort and we go down a few rabbitholes. It’s slightly longer than normal, but worth the listen as we cover a veritable whose who of exciting proptechs well worth watching.
https://www.reachau.com/2023class
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My guests in this episode are Richie Ragel and Michael Cleary, long time friends with marketing backgrounds who turned their side hustle of property investing into a buyers agency that specialised in helping the expat market buy and sell property in Australia.
The pair have since expanded the business into a full service model that supports all elements of researching, selecting, owning, managing and even renovating property for not just expats, but anyone. And they are in the process of building out a tech stack to ensure all elements of the business are tech enabled.
And where did their crazy name come from? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out!
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When America sneezes, will Australia catch a cold? What changes will major layoffs and restructures by US tech giants, the "right sizing" of VC interest and global economic pace changes have on Australian proptech?Hosted by Founder & CEO of Instarent, AJ Chand, in conversation with:Ari Ginsburg, Startup Advisor, EarnnestPeter Schravemade, Managing Partner, REACHMarisa Warren, Co-Founder & General Partner, ALIAVIA Ventures
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My guest in this episode is Christina Lennie, chief customer officer of StaffLink.
StaffLink began as a property management Proptech founded by Corey Davis, Joel Davis and Bryn Humble but now has expanded to remove pain across all areas where processes and tech cross over including sales and even Strata.
It was born out of the real life experiences - and pain - of running a real estate office and all its solutions are still tested at Image Property.
This is a fabulous conversation with Christina as we look at the intersection of outsourcing, processes and Proptech.
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My guest in this episode is Tony Tadros the managing partner of SaleFish which is a self described Transaction Service Engine that joins the dots between a CRM and Pexa in the house and land companies.
Tony had a career in real estate selling land packages before embarking on a tech solution to solve some of the pain points he regularly experienced. And in one of those weird coincidences, it was during this time he discovered that a Canadian firm was on a similar track and so the two collaborated and he is now responsible for launching SaleFish in Australia.
Sales and land in Australia is an $8.2 billion dollar industry and it combines all the pain of buying a property with the double whammy of then dealing with the stress of building. So. Much. Fun!! So it's no surprise that this sector is seeing a surge of innovation.
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My guest in this episode is Glenn Marland, the Property director at Capstone Recruitment, one of Australia’s most established recruitment firms across the property and proptech space.
Getting your people right is absolutely essential in proptech and indeed in any business. You need to attract a team that has both the skills and the temperament to grow with you and help take your company to the next level. So in this episode Glenn and I discuss the current employment landscape, the common mistakes that proptechs make when hiring staff and how to avoid them.
Plus the recruitment industry was one of the first to be disrupted by technology with job websites among some of the first platforms to monetise digital through the posting of job ads. And yet we still have recruitment firms who specialise in delivering service and expert knowledge – so there’s some great insights for the future of real estate in this episode as well.
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In this episode of the Proptech Podcast, get ready for a deep dive into the world of payments. My guest in this episode is James Foster, CEO of Ezypay - a man whose depth of knowledge of the history - and future - of the Australian payment system is matched only by his passion.
In this podcast, James explains the legacy of current payment systems, the pain they cause for property renters and buyers - not to mention paying all those bills that come with living in a property - and the new world of PayTo which is about to revolutionise how we all make regular payments. We also look at the work Ezypay is doing with partnerships in the proptech space to speed up adoption.
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PropTech Panel: Proptech in 2023 - What Lies Ahead?
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My guest in this episode is Derek Feebrey, the CEO and cofounder of Trendspek, an asset intelligence software for the commercial property sector.
Derek and his co-founders Fiona Church and Mitchell Deam, are all former commercial airline pilots - previously with Qantas - who fell into proptech by establishing one of Australia’s first businesses to own and operate drones, back in the day when you actually needed to be a commercial pilot to operate one.
They realised the potential of drone footage to capture property assets - especially for assets that were difficult or dangerous to send an inspector up a rope, and for large scale infrastructure projects.
But over the past six years the business has now morphed into what they call ‘precision asset intelligence’ which is a complete asset identification, tracking and management solution, with drone footage being just one small part of what they do.
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My guest in this episode is Chris Polin, founder of the very new Australian construction tech startup, DLP Manager.
DLP stands for Defect Liability Period and it refers to the legal period that builders must repair any defects on a new build which can be anywhere up to around 10 years.
Chris himself has 16 years experience in the building industry including time at Lendlease and the NSW Government and has personal first hand knowledge of the work, stress and reputational damage that defects can cause a building company - and the emotional trauma they create for new owners.
DLP Manager was launched in April 2022 after Chris did work for a client that involved a defect list on an Exce sheet that was over 900 rows long. Eeek!
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We've got a really special episode for you today.
Some of the most popular episodes of the Proptech Podcast this year have been interviews with Simon Baker, founder of The Proptech Group and one of the founding fathers of Australian proptech, and in a later episode Joe Hanna, CEO on running an ASX listed scaling Proptech.
Completely separately, David Bowie, CEO of MRI Software also notched up a place in the top 10 discussing his vision to make a 30 year old Proptech future forward.
So when MRI Software announced last month that they proposed to buy the Proptech Group we figured it was very big news for listeners.
The deal - still to be approved by regulators - is at 60c a share giving Proptech Group a value of $93.4 million and all being well, it should go through in February 2023.
It’s been part of a bigger acquisition strategy that MRI Software have been executing over the past 12 months under David, so we wanted to get him back on the show and hear more about it because it will significantly impact the shape of the Australian proptech landscape.
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My guest in this episode is the irrepressible Brad Filliponi, co founder of Boxbrownie.com, one of Australia’s most globally successful proptechs with a website active in four languages, and operations in more than 112 countries around the world.Started by professional real estate photographer Brad and his friend, technical genius Mel Myers, BoxBrownie.com is a 24/7 photo editing company providing a range of services for real estate marketing, offering a no-subscription, pay-as-you-go service, with edits returned within 24 hours. They have a global team of more than 2000 editors and a team of 200, with home base being in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland.BoxBrownie have simplified so many elements of real estate photography and marketing, including creating floorplans, virtual staging and virtual tours, and in early 2023 they will raising the bar again with the launch of their new iPhone app, SnapSnapSnap which allows agents to take professional quality DSLR photos using just their mobile phone.--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theproptechpodcast/message
My guest in this episode is Bart Crowther, regional lead at PlanRadar an Austrian proptech that specialises in digitising workflow and communication sharing in the construction industry.
Bart has an impressive 25 year history and track record in the tech and workflow industries holding roles at businesses including Intelledox, Transformed, Commnia and Aconex.
He joined PlanRadar in March 2022 as part of the company’s expansion into Australia where construction is a $360b industry annually that is still overwhelming run with notepads, checklists, excel sheets and emails. And as Bart explains in this interview, with defects costing $6b a year in the construction industry, there’s a lot of work to do.
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We have a VERY timely topic up for discussion this week. My guest in this episode is Martin Boyd, Director of Cyber Security at Vertex Cyber Security.
Vertex Cyber Security specialises in end-to-end Cyber Security including cyber training, penetration testing, cyber audits, log monitoring and consultation. Prior to joining Vertex, Martin was a Cyber Security Lecturer at the Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub and prior to that, worked in Cyber Security for eight years at Commbank.
And you’d have to be living under a rock at the moment not to realise that Cyber Security is one of THE most important issues in technology in Australia with high profile companies like Optus and Medibank being hacked and experiencing significant data breaches. And just days after this interview was recorded, a Harcourts office in Melbourne experienced an incident that was widely reported.
Martin hosted an excellent roundtable at the recent Proptech Forum in Sydney and provided some somewhat terrifying insights into how hackers work and why real estate agencies are increasingly becoming a target. In this interview, we discuss the common mistakes made by both agencies and proptechs and what we all need to be doing to protect our personal information.
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My guest in this episode is the charming and inspirational Pablo Gil Brusola, CEO and cofounder of Prophero. Pablo is an entrepreneur with a track record for making things happen. His last startup, GrowPro was an educational travel concept that grew from 0-12M$ and more than 200 Team Members across 15 countries as a fully bootstrapped entity across nine years and prior to that he was an operations consultant at PwC. His new venture is Prophero is revolutionising property investing and despite being only a year old, is already launched across Australia and Pablo’s native Spain and was the winner of the Proptech Awards for Best Startup.
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My guest in this episode is Paul Stonham, the general manager of DLT Solutions at the ASX or Australian Stock Exchange.
DLT stands for Distributed Ledger Technology which is effectively blockchain technology. The ASX have been working hard for years to develop the technology to replace the CHESS system that manages shareholder information. And as part of their work in this area, they have created a ‘white label’ template for blockchain known as Synfini that is now available via an API so it can be applied to other uses.
And one of the first test cases, as Paul explains in this interview, has been in the property space by the NSW Building Services Commissioner as a way of tracking and tracing all of the ‘ingredients’ of multi storey residential towers to create a new rating system that will give new apartment buyers confidence about the quality of the build. And this is of course, an important development after the disasters of incidents like the Opal Towers in Sydney.
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My guest in this episode is Michael Bromley, the CEO of fintech and proptech accelerator Stone & Chalk.
Michael took on the CEO role of Stone & Chalk back in October last year after nine months at AustCyber before the merger and he has an extensive and impressive background as a senior executive and board advisor in the digital transformation space having held roles at RightPoint, Bank of Queensland, IAG Digital Labs, NBN Australia, Telstra, and even going right back to AOL.
Stone & Chalk was founded as a not for profit in Sydney in 2015 to help fintech startups commercialise and grow. From 40 startups in 2015, it now has around 200 startups in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide covering all areas of emerging technology including proptech. Currently around 30 proptechs call Stone & Chalk home and with demand so strong, they have just launched a Scale Up hub at the new Tech Central near Centra Station in Sydney.
In this conversation, Michael and I explore what proptech can learn from the growth curve of fintech, the innovation landscape in Australia and the value of accelerator programs, where the work needs to be done and the technology coming down the pipe that is going to rock our world even more than it has been already.
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Housing affordability and home ownership is one of the hottest topics going right now and my guest in this episode is Tim Harley, co-founder and CEO of OwnHome.com which is helping renters get into the market eight times faster thanks to their innovative rent-to-buy model.
Tim has a background in finance and fintech, having worked with overseas payment and currency exchange software, Wise, time in private investing, Macquarie and at Herbert Smith Freehills.
OwnHome.com were the winner of the Proptech for Good Award at the 2022 Proptech Awards hosted by the Proptech Association of Australia and in this interview, we explore the very meaty issue of housing affordability, and the challenges faced by renters in trying to save for a deposit, which currently takes a typical couple 10 years longer than previous generations.
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The Proptech Panel: DesignTech - future-proofing for surveyors and architects
Architectural design technology is a fantastic use case for proptech because it allows the humans to spend more time on relationships as well as the creative and aesthetic aspects of place-making.
And they have some of the coolest tech!
In this month’s The Proptech Panel, we’re talking geo-mapping, LiDAR data, drones, 3D laser scanning, point clouds and digital twins as well as feasibility, massing and compliance!
Join Proptech Association Australia Vice President Jennifer Harrison in conversation with our expert guests:
Simon Cookes, Founder & CEO, LARKI
Mohsen Kalantari, Co-Founder, Faramoon
Anycie Barakat, Head of Generative Design, Archistar
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Have you ever renovated a property? How did that go for you? If it was anything like some of the experiences I’ve had in the past, it involved a LOT of stress, running around trying to coordinate tradies, interpreting all sorts of unexpected things in contracts, multiple incidents of frayed tempers with your partner, an occasional divorce threat and an end result that was, yeah, okay I guess.
As we go down the disruption path in property, the one thing that I believe is more stressful than buying, selling or renting a home is actually building or renovating one.
So I’m very excited that my next guest is Tony Been, managing director at Houzz Australia & New Zealand.
Houzz is the leading platform for home renovation and design, providing people with everything
they need to improve their homes from start to finish.
On Houzz, people can find design inspiration, research and hire home professionals to complete their projects. While for home professionals, Houzz Pro provides an all-in-one software solution that empowers industry pros to promote their expertise, win clients and manage their projects efficiently and profitably.
The Houzz community is made up of millions of homeowners, home design enthusiasts and home improvement professionals around the world and Houzz is available on the web and as a
top-rated mobile app.
And as someone who has renovated before and after Houzz, I can personally attest to how much Houzz helps homeowners make renovating a lot easier.
Houzz was also the winner of the Most Innovative Proptech in the Efficiency and Optimisation category for Houzz Pro at the Proptech Awards hosted by the Proptech Association Australia, and it also took home the Established Supplier Proptech of the Year.
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My guest in this episode is Simon Myers, the head of sales at global property visualisation proptech, Diakrit.
Swedish-born, Diakrit globally has been a leader in property photography for 20 years, operating in 10 global markets, across more than 2000 real estate brands. Just last year, they marketed more than 200,000 homes with their solutions.
Diakrit came to Australia in 2016, originally on the back of News Corp as a major shareholder. But Diakrit founders Dick Karlsson, Martin Fritze and Pontus Lindholm bought back the company from News in 2018 and it is now independent.
Simon joined the Diakrit team at its inception in Australia having spent time previously in sales roles at Urban Angles, 4U Media, the REA Group and prior to that Victorian real estate powerhouse, Jellis Craig.
Diakrit were winners in the recent Proptech Awards held by the Proptech Association Australia in the hotly contested Sales & Marketing category for Established Suppliers with judges loving it’s innovative interactive tools for visual property marketing.
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My guest in this episode is Greg Story, founder and CEO of sustainability proptech My Greener Planet.
Greg has 35 years experience in the energy sector, most recently running solar and wind farms and prior to that specialised in energy infrastructure mergers, acquisitions and financing running infrastructure projects of $5b plus.
My Greener Planet is a digital platform that allows businesses and consumers to buy fractional ownership in functioning renewable energy farms, accessing both shareholder dividends and carbon credits.
MyGreener Planet was a winner in the 2022 Proptech Awards in the Smart City category as a startup.
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My guest in this episode is Prabhu Ramachandran, the CEO and founder of Facilio, a New York based proptech that started operating in Australia during the pandemic after repeated client requests.
Facilio is an all-in-one app suite for commercial property that provides a whole of portfolio approach and allows facilities teams to achieve efficiency between teams, transparency in operations and predictive sustainability performance.
Before founding Facilio in 2017, Prabhu had a successful career at the IT services and software business Zoho, holding the role of Director of WebNMS which was the IOT and telecom division, for nearly 17 years. There he led the strategy, innovation, product management, marketing and business development of enterprise-scale software solutions that hundreds of large organizations rely on for their connected services to this day.
And prior to that he was a product manager at Zoho for eight years. So combined, those two things put him in an excellent position to be able to understand a market and develop a software solution.
In this interview, Prabhu explains why Facilio - being based in New York and Chennai - decided to come to Australia and shares some of Facilio’s experiences with the decision making process of Australian property companies. I know you’re going to find it fascinating.
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My guest in this episode is Tom Wallace, the founder and CEO of Re-Leased Property Software. Founded in 2012 and based out of New Zealand, Re-Leased helps thousands of owners and property managers across the world run their commercial property business in the cloud.
An aspiring entrepreneur, Tom set up ReLeased straight out of university after seeing first hand the challenges that his father’s real estate business had managing its commercial properties. He was mentored by Rod Drury, founder of Xero who as it turns out also lives near Tom and who he cornered in a local coffee shop to get his advice.
Re-Leased was the winner of Xero's emerging add on of the year 2014, as well as finalist for add of on of the year for Australia and UK in 2017. And Tom was the winner of the Rising Star Category for New Zealand in the Talent Unleashed competition for 2014.
As Tom explains in this interview, ReLeased has been built for global scale and now has five global offices, and is continuing to expand throughout the world.
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My guests on this episode of the ProptechPodcast are Ben Swan, CEO and Gundeep Sidhu, founder of NowYouCan - which was the winner of the Most Innovative Property & Facilities Management Startup in the recent Proptech Awards held by the Proptech Association Australia.
Before establishing NowYouCan, Gundeep was the founder and CEO of AdviserLogic, a fully-integrated, web-based application for financial advisers to manage all facets of their business which was acquired by Morningstar in 2019.
Meanwhile Ben has been a developer of web/mobile applications since 1997 and extensively involved in the facility and building management space his whole professional career. Before joining NowYouCan he was co founder and chief of Rebel Donuts.
NowYouCan helps building managers, property managers and occupants to take control of their spaces with visual and simple incident reporting and resolution and as Gundeep tells us, it was inspired by a broken toilet in the offices of AdviserLogic that went unfixed for ages.
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My guest in this episode is John Foong, the new chief revenue officer at Domain, and an executive with a very impressive tech background of his own.
John’s career began as a consultant at McKinsey where he undertook his MBA at Stanford and worked across the US, Europe, Australia and even Africa. He joined Google in its early days and across 12 years held multiple roles, being ultimately responsible for growing Google’s Cloud Channel revenue into the billions of dollars.
Before joining Domain, he was Global Head of Account Management & Engineering at Uber, before bringing his family home to Australia to join Domain where he is now responsible for driving the growth across a portfolio that spans Residential, Commercial, Developer and Media, Agent Solutions, and Corporate Sales - all the way through to Customer Experience.
And in this episode, John tells us about the latest Domain acquisition of Real Base.
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The Proptech Panel: Proptechs that de-stress selling, settling and moving
Selling and moving home is a big project - in fact it can be one of life's most stressful events!
Thankfully proptech is the full package helping you to fund repairs and renovations so you can get the best price, digitally smooth the conveyancing process to settle smoothly and on time, and sort out the big move to your new home connecting your gas, electricity and more.
Join Proptech Australia Vice President Jennifer Harrison for this month's "learn at lunch" webinar with expert guests:
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Portia Miller, Marketing, SaleFunder
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Kylie Dillon, Co-Founder, Realtime Conveyancer
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Belinda Seers, Business Development, Direct Connect
If you are unable to make it, please still register and we will send you the recording.
Regards,
The Stone & Chalk Team
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How data is changing residential property investment?
When you are investing in property, it’s vitally important to make a smart decision, and in this day and age, that means making an informed decision with the benefit of data.
Did you know there are over 1 trillion data points covering more than 12 million residential properties in Australia?
These data points cover everything you need to know about a property’s investment prospects, including schools, transport infrastructure, rental yields, historical price growth, population growth, median dwelling and average rental prices ... and more.
Expert guests:
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Mickael Roger, Co-Founder, PropHero
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Eleanor Creagh, Senior Economist, PropTrack
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Ajay Ayyar, Founder, PropertyDirector
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How Proptech Can Partner With Fintech?
Property and finance are closely connected in more ways than one.
The Proptech Panel this month will focus on the intersections of property with open banking, financial data sharing and payments.
Join us to learn how proptech can partner with fintech to assist with multiple touchpoints involved in owning, renting and managing a property, for example, identify verification, credit risk, early warning signs, rent splitting, rent smoothing and trust accounts.
Our Proptech Association Australia Vice President Jennifer Harrison will be speaking with three expert guests:
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Kyle Abourizk, Growth ANZ, Basiq
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Rebecca Ribeiro, Sales Executive, Zepto
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Jacob Serry, Co-Founder, LIZpay
Regards,
The Stone & Chalk Team
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Residential property is a $9 trillion asset class - it's Australia's favourite and most valuable way of building wealth. But owning a home is a lot of work - especially if you want to make improvements, renovate or sell. A new era of proptechs - technology businesses that specialise in property - are making life significantly easier for homeowners who want to build or upgrade.
If you are passionate about property or love real estate, join Proptech Association founder and president Kylie Davis for our Property Panel for October - part of the national Spark Festival.
We are delighted to feature three exciting new proptechs that are destined to make you enthusiastic about your next DIY project.
Tom Young - uDrew
Trish Mackie-Smith - Inndox
Marco Salinas - Hubble
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My guests in this episode are the CEO and founder of Inspect Real Estate, Andrew Reece and Kiera Cross the franchise group coordinator.
Inspect Real Estate is an Australia-based global property management software company that specialises in tech solutions for the real estate industry. From booking inspections, managing applications, tracking keys and many other time-saving products designed to streamline an agent and property manager’s daily tasks.
Andrew ran his own property management business for many years before starting Inspect Real Estate - and one of his first clients as a technology provider was Chris Rolls and Jason Rose, who back then owned Rental Express. Chris of course, went on to found Australia’s first proptech VC fund PieLab.
Andrew has always been a powerhouse of new ideas and hyper enthusiasm for improving rental experiences both for property managers and tenants, and in this episode, we discuss Inspect Real Estate’s new Tenant App which now has over a million users.
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My guest in this episode is an inspirational female proptech entrepreneur, Ludwina Dautovic, CEO and founder of RoomXchange.
RoomXchange is Australia’s first verified house sharing platform - designed to match house mates according to not just location and rent but based on personality, values and lifestyle, so you feel like you’re coming home to a friend.
The Rent Offset option provides the choice to pay rent or offset part or all of the rent by doing some additional jobs around the house. And their goal is to open up the millions of spare rooms across Australia by helping homeowners feel secure about opening up their homes to a tenant.
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The recent weather events have highlighted the importance of building roofs. Roofs are often forgotten because they are hard to maintain and potentially dangerous to access but water damage can cost a business operation time and money and impact on the health and safety of workers. However proptech is solving some of these roofing issues such as safely and rapidly identifying problems and implementing maintenance regimes. In addition, roofs also provide a great opportunity for owners and businesses to create money through capturing and using solar energy.
To learn more join the Proptech Association’s Secretary, Simon Hayes at 12pm (AEDT) on Tuesday 22 March 2022 as he conducts this month's “learn at lunch” webinar series speaking with roof experts:
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Derek Feebrey, CEO and Co-founder of Trendspek
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Georgie Fenwicke, CEO and Co-founder of Tellfrankie.com
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Richard Romanowski, Executive Director and Co-Founder of eleXsys Energy
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My guest in this episode is serial tech entrepreneur Mike Bird, CEO of Urban, Australia's largest online marketplace dedicated to brand new property.
Since July 2018, Urban has grown from 360k annual users to 3M, with home buyers collectively viewing a new property development every 10 seconds in 2020.
On the industry side, more than 2700 off the plan developments are being marketed and managed via Urban’s back end platform and it is now being used by developers such as Lendlease, Stockland, Mirvac & Frasers.
In 2020 Mike led the successful acquisition and merger with Property Observer - founded by well known property journalist Jonathan Chancellor -, one of Australia’s leading real estate news websites delivering an archive of 35,000 property articles while tripling the size of our content and editorial insights team.
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My guest this week is a proptech that recently received huge coverage in the Australian Financial Review for receiving $8m in its Series A funding from investors EVP & Regal which has allowed it to add another 40 people to its team in just a few weeks.
CanIBuild is an exciting proptech that pulls in huge datasets including local and state government legislation, home ownership, mapping and topography data to create a tool for builders - and their clients - to quickly answer the question “Can I Build” this house, pool, granny flat, shed - whatever - on a site, and to identify issues that are likely to affect location, aspect or cost of the build in advance.
It’s a complete rethink of the traditional processes that go into quoting, assessing, estimating and requoting for construction and is the brainchild of Tim Cocaro, founder and CEO, whose background is in both computer science and construction.
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My guest this week is Joe Hanna, CEO of the Proptech Group.
Joe started his career as a software developer before working at Fairfax in the days when classifieds and their rivers of gold were still a thing. He successfully made the transition across to the digital business and over the past decade or so has been working with Simon Baker on proptech startups and growing them into serious players, most recently in launching the Proptech Group - the fourth business he has taken to IPO.
In this interview, Joe and I discuss the changing dynamics of proptech for real estate agencies, the need to create your own lead generation and marketing ecosystem, and he generously shares his experiences on what it’s really like to list a proptech on the stock exchange.
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My guests in this episode is Steve Carulli, founder and non executive director of Cirrus8, new locally grown property management software for commercial real estate that is cloud-based, AI rich and highly flexible.
Steven has a 30 year plus history in commercial property ownership, management and real estate including four years as managing director and licensee at Jones Lang LeSalle for Western Australia and 21 years as a director of RealTrust Property Accounting Services, Australia's largest outsource property trust accounting service provider.
Cirrus8 was founded seven years ago, borne out of frustration with the then current suite of property management tools for commercial property, and is now rapidly growing market share among some of commercial real estate’s biggest brands.
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My guest this week is an exciting new proptech that is taking a completely different approach to technology that has been around for quite a while.
It’s Josh Callaghan is CEO of Little Hinges, which uses Virtual Tour technology as a gateway to a deeper and richer digital marketing experience. How intriguing is that idea?
Josh has more than 20 years of experience across financial services, fintech and startups, including stints at Canstar and the REIQ and Little Hinges were a startup winner in the inaugural Proptech Awards last year for sales and marketing.
What helped them win however, was not the high adoption of Virtual tours created by Covid, but the insights and analytics that Little Hinges is able to extract from the tours.
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Proptech Panel: Renting reimagined - How Technology is Transforming the Tenant Experience
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My guest this week is Amber Keogh, the national manager and face of an exciting new proptech in the off-the-plan space called Release.Me that makes releasing new developments and land sales fair and equitable.
Amber has an impressive career in business development and transformational projects in the proptech, building and asset space including consulting to major property businesses. In this interview we talk about the importance of transparency and fairness in releasing new apartment or land developments and the workflow advantages to developers and real estate agents from having the information all in one place.
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The Proptech Panel - Buying a Home - How is proptech making it easier to buy a home
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My guest this week is one of my most favourite people on the planet and a woman I am proud to call a dear friend - the amazing Kylie Dillon from Real Time Conveyancer.
Real Time Conveyancer is a new startup that delivers an end to end transaction and customer management system for Conveyancers.
Kylie has extensive experience in this field, with more than 19 years running her own conveyancing group, KDD Conveyancing in Perth, plus two years consulting with PEXA on the digital settlement universe doing a strategic analysis of how it impacted conveyancing.
It was at Pexa that she met her co-founder for Real Time Conveyancing, Mike Price and the two of them took a wild trip to Las Vegas to attend the INMAN Connect conference in 2019 where their thinking for their startup became real.
In this interview - which we did back in late December - Kylie talks about the disruption happening in the conveyancing space, the need for better conveyancing experiences for buyers and sellers and the challenges of getting a startup with such a big vision up and running, while also raising capital.
What I did not realise - nor, I think did anyone - is that while all of these things were going on - Mike had been diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer, and heartbreakingly, he passed away in January. So at the end of the interview, Kylie and I grabbed a second moment to remember Mike who was truly both a fantastic CTO and absolute rockstar of a bloke - and you’ll have to forgive us as we get a bit teary.
But here to tell us all about it, Kylie Dillon welcome to the Proptech Podcast!
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My guest this week is the founder of a powerful agency proptech - Shaun Moriarty, co-founder and CEO of Campaign Agent.
Shaun had more than 15 years experience in financial services, strategic risk management for new markets and technology, before a conversation on a ski-lift with an old friend who worked in real estate led to the formulation of CampaignAgent - a proptech that provides payment solutions for real estate agencies - in the form of easy to access finance for vendor paid marketing, agent commissions and even a form of bridging finance.
In this interview we talk about the depth and breadth of the real estate finance space which is much bigger than I realised. According to Shaun, the average marketing expenses of a sales campaign is around $4,900 a property and when you offer financial solutions to sellers, they are likely to invest 10 to 20% more in their campaigns.
And his skiing mate, Seth Watts, well he became his co-founder.
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My guests this week are Matt McGown and Natasha Anich from Console Cloud - a 30-year-old “startup” that after years of providing server-based software to property management and trust accounting, has reinvented itself to cloud-based software that is reimagining the role of property managers to include automation, asset management and profitability analysis of property portfolios.
Matt is the chief operating officer and Natasha is the head of customer success and in this interview we talk about how the role of property managers has changed, the technology trends and the importance of data and analytics in understanding the work that PMs are doing and where they can grow and improve their businesses. And how to retire and old platform!
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My guest this week is one of the founding fathers of Australian proptech - Simon Baker, chairman of the Proptech Group.
Simon was brought in by News Corp 20 years ago, back in the day when Realestate.com.au was just two weeks away from bankruptcy.
His analysis of the opportunity for News, led them to inject $2m in cash into REA, plus provide an additional $8m in marketing support and he took up the role of CEO, turning the business around and leading it to its IPO.
Given that the company now has a market cap of $15.35 billion, it’s fair to say that none of this would have been possible without Simon’s vision for the business back in the early 2000s.
In this interview, Simon and I discuss how he turned the business around, how proptech has changed - and stayed the same - over the past 20 years, and how he’s applying that vision to the Proptech Group where he is chairman. And believe me, his advice is timeless.
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Proptech Pathways: Straight from an Investor Investment Options for Proptechs
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My guest this week got the idea for his proptech after losing entire Saturdays driving around new housing estates in Melbourne, visiting multiple developers and trying to find a block of land to purchase, only to discover that nearly everything he looked at had been sold.
Qi Chen is a software engineer and computer developer who has experience in both real estate and marketing platforms, having worked with proptechs Landchecker.com.au and Urban.com.au, but it was his own frustration with buying a house and land package that got him thinking “there has to be a better way” and going out and doing it on his own.
And in just a few years, OpenLot is now a one-stop shop for house and land packages, helping buyers research and compare areas openly and transparently as well as choose the right area and developer to build their dream home. It currently boasts over 1500 housing estates in Victoria alone.
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My guest this week is David Holman, CEO of Direct Connect. David has had a long career in the energy industry. Before taking the role of CEO of Direct Connect in 2016, he was head of business development at Red Energy for 11 years, and has always specialised in keeping large scale businesses innovative and aligned with future trends, while never losing sight of the importance of great relationships with customers. Direct Connect is one of Australia's most established connection service providers but under David's leadership, the company has undergone a reinvigoration, increasing the types of services it's able to connect to, to expand from its origin in energy services, to include cleaning, removalists, insurance and even truck hire and delivering service that is tech enabled and deeply personal. And in this interview, David and I discussed the competitive marketplace of connection services, the challenges of innovating at scale and the challenges that both movers and real estate agencies are facing in the space.
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Have you ever gotten lost inside a large building like a hospital or shopping complex? It can happen to any of us, and we know how frustrating and sometimes overwhelming the experience can be. But imagine if you experience a vision impairment and have to deal with those feelings everywhere every day. How do you even work out where you are if you can’t find the signage to read the Braille?
The majority of our buildings are difficult - verging on impossible - places to navigate for those with a disability and our next guest is determined to fix that.
Dr Anna Wright is the CEO of BindiMaps, is a navigation app that works where traditional GPS does not - indoors. While this app offers convenience to most of us, it is fundamentally changing the way that those with a vision impairment or other disabilities can navigate our internal spaces independently and safely.
Anna had a long career in accounting, taxation and lecturing at UTS before a medical diagnosis of a disease that threatened to rob her of her sight led her to the life-changing decision to pivot to create BindiMaps.
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My guest this week is David Bowie. No, obviously not that David Bowie, although, of course, he gets that response all the time. But David Bowie, the senior vice president and managing director of MRI Software Asia Pacific. David has a 25 year history in the technology space, working for companies including PWC, IBM, Dimension Data and SaaS. And if you're not sure who MRI Software is, well, they are a global real estate solutions company that purchased Rockend back in 2019. David joined MRI just before the pandemic broke out and since then, he's made an impact as a transformative leader who has also acquired several well known Proptechs, including Australian CRM Box and Dice and New Zealand Proptech who is on location. David's a big believer in the importance of strong organisational cultures. And in this interview, we talk about the role of longstanding tech suppliers in the innovation ecosystem and driving change in large organisations, including the best way to handle rusted on clients who may not wish to upgrade.
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My guest this week is the founder of an intriguing new property investor proptech - Godfrey Dinh from FutureRent.
Godfrey has a 12 year history in banking, financial services and property investment having spent nearly four years as a vice president of commercial property at Deutsche Bank and a director of Sanctuary Partners.
FutureRent is a proptech that forwards you a full year of rent from your property investment as an upfront payment, and then lets you pay it back from your ongoing rent. It’s not a loan - and the repayments simply reduce your rent rather than stop it altogether. And there is no restriction on what you can use the money for - whether that’s to fund another property investment, or just solve a problem in your private life.
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AUDIO NOW FIXED*
My guest this week is a legend of Australian and New Zealand real estate - the wonderful Chris Hanley, the principal of First National Byron and a renowned leader whose views on leadership, and building businesses that are sustainable, ethical, equitable and community-focused are highly sought after across the industry.
Chris holds a Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to literature and the community, as he is also the founder of the Byron Writers Festival and a life of service is at the core of everything Chris stands for.
It’s one of the things that motivated him to become the founder of the Rise Initiative, a group of agents initially brought together by a desire to help after the terrible Christchurch mosque massacre. The first Rise event demonstrated how powerful and how much good can be done when agents come together and are united around a common cause rather than dividing along franchise or company lines.
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My guest in this episode is Andrew Duncan, the founder and CEO of Sorted Services, an app that I personally love because it's an app that makes life simple by centralising all the annoying, difficult, and time-consuming things that you have to deal with as a homeowner, including the payment of utilities, insurance, and even maintenance all in one space.
Now, Andrew Duncan has more than 21 years experience in utility connections combined with entrepreneurial technology, businesses, servicing utility connections. And in this interview, we explore the incredible opportunity that is available in the property management space, in helping homeowners as well as renters to manage the adulting of owning and living in a property. So here to tell us all about it, Andrew Duncan, welcome to the PropTech podcast.
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My guest in this episode is one of the winners of the Proptech of the Year Awards, Marco Salinas, CEO and Founder of Hubble, which won the most innovative startup for the design and development category. Now Hubble is a wonderful piece of technology that shows how individual materials affect home living experiences. In every build or renovation project there's a raft of decisions to be made about the materials you choose, but how we tend to do that currently is based on aesthetics and price.
But what if it was easy to state your intended outcome, say making your home sustainable or low energy and that there was a bot to help you choose all the materials and could demonstrate to you just how effective they would be against your chosen goals? Well that's what Hubble, the technology designed by Marco, is now starting to do. Marco has studied energy innovation and emerging technologies at Stanford and has a Master's of Science from Carnegie Mellon. And more than 10 years experience as a software developer in the energy efficiency space.
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My guest in this episode is one of our winners of the Proptech of the year awards, Tom Young, CEO and founder of uDrew, which won the most innovative scale-up for the design and development category of the awards. uDrew is a world's fast-building technology platform that makes designing, planning and building your own projects faster and more affordable. And Tom has a 20-year-plus career as a structural draughtsman and engineer, and was a winner of the Curtin Ignition scholarship award in 2016.
And in this interview, we explore the extraordinary amounts of time and stress that exist around getting council approvals for even the simplest job of a new fence, a carport or a shed. And we look at how uDrew is streamlining that process with wins not just for homeowners, but for council planners. And we discuss the extraordinary potential of this technology and its ability to handle even bigger projects as it scales.
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My guest this week is Lisa Dowie, chief customer officer at PEXA, and one of the drivers behind PX Ventures. Lisa has been at PEXA since 2012, and it's fair to say that she's part of the team at PEXA that has been transforming the way property is transacted in Australia and around the globe. PEXA is an online exchange that keeps everyone in the picture as a property settlement progresses. And for anyone who has experienced the pain and frequently trauma of a traditional physical paper settlement, you might be surprised at how much easier the PEXA universe is making it for conveyancers, lawyers, banks, land registries, and yes, even buyers and sellers to settle a property these days, thanks to their technology and investment in the space. Now Lisa is passionate both about PEXA and innovation in the settlement area, and PEXA a big supporters of the proptech industry, hosting the Property X Awards each year, and also PX Ventures, a great initiative for the proptech startups and newbie entrepreneurs which we discuss in this podcast.
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My guest to kick off season two is Thomas Walkley, Co-founder and CEO of Erin Living. Thomas has an impressive background in the property industry having worked as an account manager at WIT Group for eight years, and as a property consultant for five specialising in large scale residential developments. He's taken his experiences from that time and has founded Erin Living to pioneer the future of multi residential living with Co-founder, Anthony Mazzei.
Now it's great to finally get him on the podcast because as a bit of a backstory for listeners, Thomas reached out to me about 18 months ago and asked me to join the advisory board of Erin Living because he was a huge fan of the podcast. But then he got all coy and kept declining my invitations to be on the show. But Erin Living is a very exciting mobile app that turns high-rise residential apartments into vertical villages. By creating a centralised place that allows residents and building owners to manage access and security with digital keys, to receive deliveries, manage parking, report maintenance issues in the building, and to share important notifications.
And it does all of this through a mix of Erin Living tech and integrations with other specialists proptechs, ensuring residents get the best of both worlds and developers can be flexible with the partners that they integrate with. It's like a remote control for your high-rise residential apartment all sitting inside your mobile phone.
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This was the first Proptech Mastery session was held just last week to examine the issue of data security in real estate and how so much of what we share over email is extremely risky business.
It was a cracking session hosted by yours truly with guests Sashini Walpola from Ashurst, Dr Jed Horner from AustCyber, Shane Goodwin from Inspect Real Estate and Owen Mooney from Box and Dice.
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Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-data-democracy-where-are-the-opportunities-for-data-collaboration-in-commerical-real-estate/
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Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/women-in-proptech-global-insights-australia-edition/
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Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-how-technology-is-changing-residential-mortgage-lending/
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Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-the-secrets-to-selling-and-buying-proptech-for-commercial-property/
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Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-how-proptech-contributes-to-sustainable-development/
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My guest this week is Rachel Kidwell from TCPinpoint, a proptech that anyone working in retail real estate is going to find super fascinating. Rachel is an inspiring Proptech entrepreneur who has used the pain she used to experience as a tenancy coordinator and fit out manager in the retail sector, to found TCPinpoint, a cloud-based collaboration tool that brings all the stakeholders involved in the retail tenancy delivery process into one platform.
Now, there's a lot of people involved in getting a new store open, from landlords and building engineers and facility managers to the shop designer, fitter and trades people. And that's just a few. And after such a turbulent time in retail over the past few years, the industry is due for some good news and ways to save. TCPinpoint was part of the retailX 2020 programme with the Taronga group. Rachel is also an inspiring female entrepreneur, a co-founder of Proptech South Australia, an activator with SheEO and a member of the SA Future Trends and Innovations Committee of the Proptech Council of Australia.
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My guest this week is a dear friend of mine and a partner in Proptech crime, the fabulous Isaac Coonan, founder of Proptech BNE, and author of the Australian Proptech Industry Roadmap. Isaac is the senior industry development manager of technology at the Brisbane economic development agency, which is part of Brisbane city council.
And he's also the founder of Proptech BNE, an initiative that supports the development of the property technology community in Brisbane and in Southeast Queensland. The two are a unique marriage that looks at Proptech through the lens of how Proptech can transform one of Australia's biggest cities and create jobs while also pursuing goals like smarter buildings and cities. To get a handle on any of this you need data, and last month Proptech BNE launched the Australian Proptech Industry Roadmap report. More than just a map with the logos of Proptech stuck on it, this is a great deep dive and the first attempt to capture data about the Australian Proptech universe. In terms of our makeup, our demographics, size, growth, and funding. It's been a huge undertaking, but Isaac pretty much knows everyone in Australian Proptech. So he is the perfect person to drive the project.
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This week is one for commercial agents and property owners in the industrial sector with an interview with Georgie Fenwicke from Tell Frankie. A new property and facilities maintenance PropTech that focuses on the unique needs of industrial property.
Now Tell Frankie is a New Zealand PropTech, and we seem to have a few of those at the moment. And Georgie has a fascinating background having worked in consulting at Deloitte New Zealand, and then for four years after that at Uber in the UK in its early days. Tell Frankie was born during the pandemic, but has got some impressive runs on the board already because of the unique nature of industrial property. And it's important to us, not just as an asset class, but in the role that our industrial buildings play in keeping our economies running.
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This week, we are looking at the extremely sexy sub-sector of PropTech, which is BMS management and the optimization of cooling and air conditioning equipment in commercial buildings, and the use of AI and big data-driven algorithms to maximise performance and provide transparency on how your systems are operating.
Now, what? You don't believe me, that this could actually be sexy? Well, I do get it. It's pretty dry or a cool topic. But my guests are Iain and Tim Stewart, co-founders of Exergenics, which was the winner of not just the Most Innovative Startup in the Smart Buildings and Cities category, but also the Startup of the Year at the recent PropTech Awards, 2021.
Now Exergenics caught the imagination of judges from both the residential and commercial space over our many other start-up winners, which is a testimony to Iain, who is an engineer, and Tim, the salesman and marketer, and their ability to explain their tech.
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Now, if you are like me and millions of others of homeowners out there, you have a drawer in your kitchen that is overflowing with old receipts, manuals, and warranties for all of the equipment in your home, plus a few old remotes, flat batteries, and pictures that the kids painted in kindie a lifetime ago. My guest this week is Trish Mackie-Smith, CEO and co-founder of inndox, a proptech that is a digital property logbook and was the winner of the Most Innovative Property and Facilities Management Startup Award at the PropTech Awards hosted by the Proptech Association of Australia.
Now, Trish has a very impressive professional background that qualifies her in this space. She is a former property lawyer and co-founder of Australia's most awarded building consultancy. She is the winner of the HIA 2019 Women in Building and Construction Awards Business Development Professional, and has led a campaign to improve seller disclosure for property buyers that is currently before Parliament. Trish started inndox with her husband, Andrew Mackie-Smith, who is actually Australia's most awarded building consultant, having won the Master Builders Queensland Building Consultant of the Year in 2017 and 2018 as well as Your Investment Property Magazine Best Building and Pest Business in Australia in 2018.
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This week we're taking a look at a new innovation in the commercial property space with an interview with Paula Guino, COO of Build-Apps, a platform that creates a common data model for property portfolios and allows you to aggregate a multitude of data sources so you have a clear view at both an individual property and an aggregated portfolio level.
Paula has a background as an entrepreneur and is a director of Proptech Brisbane, and before joining Build-Apps with founder Liam Murray, she was at CBRE looking after digital and technology delivery.
Now, Build-Apps uses the Microsoft 365 system and is modular, which means clients are already familiar with how a lot of it works and can adopt the technology piece by piece to get used to it before scaling to bigger adoption.
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My guest in this episode is Craig Deveson from Properti, and that's Properti spelt with an I, a proptech that turns your CRM into a social media machine, making it easy to create targeted posts for Facebook, Instagram, and other social media. Social media and how to do it is a huge issue for agents. New data from ActivePipe, authored by yours truly, found that 93% of agents believe digital and social media marketing is important to their success, but only 42% feel that their skills are good, and just 4% think that they are excellent. So there is a huge need for tech that simplifies and makes it easy to get results.
Now, Craig has a long track record creating technology businesses on Amazon Web Services, AWS. He and I first met a couple of years ago at The PropTech Summit, where he, Sarah Bell, and James Dearsley, and I ended the night propping up the bar and solving all the problems of the proptech universe.
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This week, a really interesting conversation about commercial property data and the move by the CSIRO to create a commonly-owned commercial data lake. My guest is Caoimhin Ardren, the Managing Director of DeltaQ, the energy management and efficiency consultants who are the originators of the commercial building energy rating scheme, NABERS. Now, if you're in commercial property, everyone knows the NABERS scheme. Now, Caoimhin has an intensive background in energy efficiency and consulting.
And in this interview, he and I discuss the back story to the NABERS programme, its successes, and how the model is now being used for an exciting new project with CSIRO to create a commercial property data lake. In the interview, we discuss how a commercial property data lake could power further innovation across commercial property while also creating the foundations for smart building rating system. It's a little bit geeky, but it's very exciting stuff.
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Special guest this week is Dean Fraser, founder of Brickfloor, a really exciting new proptech for home sellers, which guarantees that their home will sell for a market price, delivering certainty, peace of mind and price leverage for sellers, and allowing buyers to buy before they sell safely.
So, Dean is a lawyer and former investment banker who's also had a fascinating career innovating across food and fintech, and, in fact, Brickfloor won Emerging Fintech of the Year in 2020 from FinTech Australia, and Brickfloor is also a finalist in the Proptech awards.
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My guest this week is someone very well known to most in the residential real estate industry and someone I'm delighted to call a friend, the fabulous Steve Carroll, who is now CEO of Proptech startup HomeLoop.
Now Steve was the director of industryrelations@realestate.com.au for nearly 10 years. And during that time, he became one of the best and most polished presenters on real estate technology and how it was impacting on real estate agents and our clients. And I have watched him many times on stage and being blown away by his presentations. Steve also set up Digital Live, a programme that combined helping agents to build their digital presence and understand digital marketing with a fundraiser. And most recently he's been raising funds for an orphanage in Thailand, raising tens of thousands of dollars. It's a fabulous initiative.
Since leaving REA like many of us he's had a whirlwind year with COVID, but he's recently taken up the role of CEO at HomeLoop, a Proptech, the promises to streamline the communication process between buyers and agents, especially around that open for inspection process.
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My guest this week is Jill Chen, CEO of strata management platform Uxtrata. Now Jill is a super impressive proptech CEO. She has a bachelor of science in mathematics and computer science from the University of Auckland and has had 10 years experience in banking, and from there she moved into technology businesses that specialised in payment and business process improvement including time iterating on the WeChat system.
Uxtrata is a New Zealand based proptech that is disrupting, or probably more accurately, improving the strata management experience. Uxtrata specialises in AI driven business process improvements for strata companies with cloud based modules that streamline accounting, document management and communications, and they were part of the 2020 Australian Reach programme and they're now active in Australian and the Southeast Asian market.
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And, this week it's one for the commercial property owners and managers with an interview with Wayne Herbert from AI Assets. A smart new PropTech with some very big credentials that solves a problem nearly every building owner currently has with its asset register.
Now, AI Assets is an AI driven property asset management platform that makes it quick and easy to identify, capture, and manage the thousands of features, systems, materials, and devices that make up the asset register of any commercial or industrial building. The company used to be known as Aston Industries, but recently it changed its name to AI Assets to reflect the capability of its new platform. Which is used with some landmark projects with major property owners, including Woolworths, CommBank, and even the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Wayne has more than 20 years experience working in property valuations and asset management consulting himself. So, he knows firsthand how laborious, time-consuming, and problematic the traditional methods of capturing assets for an asset register is, and how powerful getting access to an up-to-date asset data can be when budgeting and reporting.
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My guests in this episode are Chris Spanos and Mike Thanos from IDS, a company that specialises in conducting high calibre, automated property valuations at scale for government agencies with technology that is likely to impact how our cities are planned. Now, Chris and I used to work together at CoreLogic. In fact, we sat next to each other for over a year as co-workers on the solutions team. So we'd love a chat, but we kept it together in this episode with minimal in-jokes. Chris is a General Counsel and Executive Director at IDS and is a finance and valuation industry specialist with a double-degree in law, economics, and econometrics.
While Mike is a founder and director at IDS with an extensive career as an entrepreneur in the lending industry. And this includes involvement with LIXI, which promotes data standards for lending an LTI, a mortgage documentation e-signing, and workflow business. With residential property ownership being one of the most valuable assets in the Australian economy, it's absolutely critical for governments at all levels to have accurate insights into property valuation.
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My guests in this episode are Ben Burton and Dominik Chmielewski from Rental Heroes, a natural language chatbot called Alex that is now assisting 37,000 tenants across Australia by handling their property related questions and issues.
Prior to getting together to set up Rental Heroes, Ben held senior leadership positions in both the telecommunications and insurance sectors, specialising in customer service digitization, while Dom, who also has a telecommunications background, has complimentary experience in project management and supply chain management.
Alex uses an app most of us already have on our phones, namely Facebook Messenger.
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My guest in this episode is Dean Katz, Founder of Third-Place.org, a startup born during COVID as an alternative to working from either home or the office. It helps you find a third place, a local cafe, a hotel, or other venues happy to help you pull out your laptop and sit for a few hours, or host a meeting. Now, Dean started Third Place with family members who work across hospitality and tech, and his own background is a corporate lawyer specialising in mergers and acquisitions.
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My guest in this episode is the wonderful Nigel Dalton, one of real estate's original big thinkers.
Now, most of us know him from his days at realestate.com.au where he led the REA Labs Project. He has recently joined software consultancy ThoughtWorks, expanding his background and training as a social scientist into a much more roving brief. Now in every episode of the PropTech Podcast, we ask our guests what they think the next five years will hold for the property industry.
In this podcast, Nigel gives us an in-depth look at the three major trends that are driving the future of real estate. Believe it or not, it doesn't really involve blockchain, AI, or big data. Instead, the future of real estate looks a lot more human.
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Now, this week is one for commercial agents with an interview with Chris Omeissah digital real estate leader at the digital twin company, Willow. Many of you will know Chris from his previous role at KPMG Australia, where he worked in the high growth ventures division as PropTech expert. He has a strong PropTech pedigree and is also a cohort mentor for REACH Australia. Now, if you're like me, you've heard of the term digital twin, but never really understood what it was or how on earth it related to PropTech. In this interview, Chris unpacks exactly what a digital twin is and how it relates to us creating smart buildings and smart cities. Now, smart cities are predicted to go from US dollars, 410 billion in 2020 up to $820.7 billion by 2025, according to smart cities global report, which was released last year. So this is a really high growth space. So strapping, we're going to get geeky about big data and buildings.
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And my guest in this episode is Mark Macduffie, managing director and one of the founders of Downsizer.com, a very brand new proptech that's launching in March this year that tackles the shared problems faced by couples wanting to sell the family move and move into something smaller. Mark has an impressive background in technology in the banking sector having worked in senior technology roles at CommBank for 11 years, as well as experienced building technology for banking, insurance, and not-for-profits across Australia and globally.
According to the ABS, there's more than seven million Australians over the age of 55 and a significant proportion of them own their own homes, many outright. And over the past 25 years, property values have risen by more than 400%. So that makes downsizers a highly valuable property sector, but they can still find it difficult to coordinate the financial hurdles required to purchase a new home even though they pose a very low default risk and even though the property they currently own that they will be selling is highly desirable. And at the same time, there are credit rules for new developments that are getting tougher.
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More than 45% of leads are lost each year in real estate, costing a typical real estate agency $1.2M in lost commission.
But big data, AI, content, and automation are dramatically changing how leads are identified in real estate, forcing agents to change how they respond and connect with potential clients.
Our November Proptech Panel introduces the disruptors radically changing lead generation in residential real estate, with Sarah Bell, Co-Founder at AIRE, Mona Chebbou, Head of Sales & Marketing at ActivePipe and Zoe Pointon, CEO and Cofounder at OpenAgent
This is the sixth in a series of events by the Proptech Association of Australia, sponsored by Stone & Chalk.
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Recent months have proven that it is possible to buy, sell, or rent even when you can't physically visit a property. So how much of this will continue as isolation ends? What are the ongoing benefits to buyers, sellers, and agents?
Join Peter Schravemade from Box Brownie, Tom Dorawa founder of Virtual Tours Creator and Nathan Krisanski founder of HomePrezzo who are all radically changing how we present and market real estate.
This event will be moderated by Kylie Davis, founder of the Proptech Association of Australia. This is the fifth in a series of events by the Proptech Association of Australia, sponsored by Stone & Chalk.
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This week is one for the commercial agents out there, with an interview with Scott Wilson from Forbury. Now Forbury is a commercial property valuation platform that allows commercial agents to confidently capture, calculate, and support the logic behind complicated commercial property valuations. Now, Scott's a mathematician with an honours degree in operations research, who has worked as an investment analyst and business consultant before joining Forbury as a co-founder about seven years ago.
Forbury is based in New Zealand but regards itself as an Australian PropTech because all of its clients are all Australian big six real estate agencies and property owners. Property valuations are the life source of the commercial property industry, but valuation logic is a closely guarded secret, a bit of a black box with every real estate agent having their own secret source.
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My guest in this episode is the fabulous Tara Christianson, digital strategist at realestate.com.au, and a self confessed nerd girl when it comes to real estate content and digital marketing. Now Tara helps real estate agents understand and navigate digital marketing. She's also a long time Inman ambassador, and she's a fantastic presenter if you've ever seen her on stage. Now, after the conversation with Damian Merchan from Spoke last week, I wanted to get Tara on the show to continue with the theme of digital marketing in real estate. In this discussion, we unpack further, how do you actually do this digital marketing thing? And we add some more meat to the bones of understanding how all the different elements of digital marketing work together. Now, it's a topic that Tara and I could and have been known to talk about for hours together, often with wine involved, but in the interest of public safety, we've kept this one shorter.
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My guest in this episode is Damian Merchan from Spoke. A product that makes it really easy for real estate agents to get better results with Facebook and Google ads. Now, Damian is a former real estate agent who began in the industry as a 20-year-old at Stockdale and Leggo. He sold land off the plan, and he's built his own development deals and a highly successful property development company. And while looking for a CRM for his business, he discovered this thing called RexLabs, with whom he'd worked back with his Stockdale and Leggo days. And he became an investor, and together they launched Spoke. Now, in this conversation, Damian and I discuss the growing role of social media in real estate, and how it fits into your whole marketing approach, and how to avoid common mistakes.
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My guest in this episode is Dave Garland, Managing Partner of Second Century Ventures and the REACH global programme, the number one PropTech accelerator in the world. And from its start as an accelerator of US based PropTechs through the National Association of Realtors, REACH has expanded over the past two years to create programmes in Australia, Canada, and soon in the UK. And given the success of Aussie PropTechs, such as ActivePipe, BoxBrownie, and RateMyAgent in the US programmes, we like to think that it was the Aussies who showed REACH that innovation was not just the purview of the US industry, and that we played a role in their expansion. Now, Dave has met literally hundreds of PropTech entrepreneurs across his career, and he has a highly honed instinct for what makes a technology successful in real estate, property management, and construction, and where the tech is going.
I wanted to get him on the show for two reasons. If you're a PropTech listener, you'll get some great insights into how to be successful, and the work you'll need to do to make it. And if you're a real estate agent, or property industry listener, this is also for you. Dave has his finger on the pulse of new technology coming through the pipe. And it's interesting to know all of this is being funded by the National Association of Realtors, the world's largest industry organisation, which is effectively residential real estate.
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To celebrate 50 episodes of the Proptech Podcast, we bring you some bonus content from The Proptech Association Australia Proptech Panels.
With housing affordability a critical topic, this panel discusses the innovations occurring in property ownership and new ways to buy properties. Guests Ewan Laughlin from BrickX, Daisy Ashworth from Mortgage Mates and Darren Younger from Bricklet are interviewed by Jennifer Harrison, vice president of the Proptech Association of Australia.
Thanks to the Proptech Association Australia and Stone & Chalk for making the content available.
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To celebrate 50 episodes of the Proptech Podcast, we bring you some bonus content from The Proptech Association Australia Proptech Panels.
On this third panel, my guests Dave Stewart from MarketBuy, Peter Matthews from Realtair/Auction Now and Peter Gibbons from Openn discuss how the digitisation and centralisation of documents in real estate is creating extraordinary efficiencies and time savings for agents, while making the sales process more transparent, and improving the experiences for buyers and sellers.
Thanks to the Proptech Association Australia and Stone & Chalk for making the content available.
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To celebrate 50 episodes of the Proptech Podcast, we bring you some bonus content from The Proptech Association Australia Proptech Panels.
On this panel, we discuss disruption in property management where Australian tech is a leader. Guests Mina Radhakrishnan from Different, Mark Trowell from Yabonza and AJ Chand from Instarent discuss how the trends of logistics, scale, transparency and self-service are changing the game for traditional property management.
Thanks to the Proptech Association Australia and Stone & Chalk for making the content available.
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To celebrate 50 episodes of the Proptech Podcast, we bring you some bonus content from The Proptech Association Australia Proptech Panels.
On this first panel, guests Eliza Owen from CoreLogic, Dan Evans from Macquarie Bank and Chris Rolls from PieLab Ventures discuss with me the impact of Covid-19 and lockdowns on the Australian property and proptech markets and discuss what the recovery is likely to be as we move towards 2021.
Thanks to the Proptech Association Australia and Stone & Chalk for making the content available.
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My guest in this episode is Mosstyn Howell, founder of UbiPark, a digital parking platform that makes it easy for us to travel smarter.
Now you may be wondering what has parking got to do with real estate? But did you know that 30% of urban traffic congestion is actually caused by people looking for parking? And in cities like London and Paris, a typical driver loses 165 hours a year being caught in traffic. So UbiPark helps building owners manage the parking experience with a white label app that both improves how tenants can use their parking spaces and speeds up entering and exiting parking without the need to fall out the window as I have been known to do, to grab one of those annoying tickets.
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This is one of the most exciting interviews I've done for a long time in my career. My guest in this episode is Richard Romanowski, executive director of Planet Ark Power, a proptech startup that in all seriousness, could save the planet and make Australia alone carbon neutral by 2035. And they can do that just by enabling our existing industrial and commercial properties to feature solar panels on their rooftops.
Why don't commercial and industrial buildings do that already? There's a deeply technical answer to that involving electricity waves that Richard explains to us in this episode and Planet Ark Power solves that through some clever use of AI and a well thought through business proposal that is utterly compelling to landlords. As an agent, you really want to make sure that you get your brain around this because the value this will add to properties is enormous but not to mention that it could spell the end to coal fired power.
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MadeComfy - Making short term rentals easy
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My guest in this episode is Anycie Barakat from Archistar, a big data and AI platform that is a game changer for property development, design and even planning. Now Anycie has a master's in architecture and is the lead computational designer at Archistar, a business that was founded by her brother, Dr. Ben Coorey.
And in this interview, we talk about the extraordinary power of generative design, how it's being turbocharged by aggregated data sets across council planning laws and extended property data sets. And the extraordinarily exciting opportunities that it's opening up, not only on how to save significant costs in developing property, but coming up with better design outcomes that are more efficient, more creative and better for us to live and work in.
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This week my guest is Deb Noller, CEO of Switch Automation.
By 2030 every building in Australia is going to smart, connected and digital, but if you own a portfolio of buildings - whether commercial, retail, industrial or residential - there are literally hundreds of different data sources out there from every device installed and supplier you use. So how do you pull all of that information into one place, harness the data from thousands of devices and use it to start to make proactive rather than reactive decisions about your investments?
Well, that’s what Switch Automation does. Deb has used her background in transport and systems engineering to apply it to property management and ownership to enable the buildings we work, live and play in to become smart, connected, more efficient and more responsive - effectively making them even better investments. Switch Automation were in the initial cohort of the Taronga Ventures RealX and have expanded into Asia.
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My guests in this episode are Jess Vesely and Daisy Ashworth, from Mortgage Mates, a Proptech that helps strangers connect to buy their ideal property together. Now, while Mortgage Mate sounds like a FinTech, Daisy and Jess both actually have backgrounds in the not-for-profit sector and are passionate about housing security, so they're coming at the whole issue of housing affordability from a very different angle to what you'd expect. They're looking at it through the lens as a social issue. Now, they describe themselves as Tinder for mortgages, which I love as a hook.
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My guest this week is Mark Trowell from the property management disruptor Yabonza. Now, Mark's first job was as a property manager but then he became involved in banking, and many of you may know him from his time at Macquarie. He was recently a guest on The Proptech Association of Australia's Proptech panel, and he made some really insightful comments that blew me away about the scalability of property management, and how the traditional model of geography and having a local office in property management is probably doing a lot of investors a disservice. So, I wanted to get him onto the show and explore that idea further.
Now, Yabonza is a full-service property management company that is direct to landlords and charges a fraction of the commission of traditional property management. But they are also increasingly working as an outsource property management arm to principals who do not want the hassle of managing their own rent rolls.
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My guest is Matt Waugh from Conexie. Conexie specialises in connecting both human and appliance data in our buildings, to help make them genuinely smart. And best of all, it works for residential houses as well as commercial buildings. This is an extremely exciting technology that combines the best of the internet of things, with observations by people. And if it's widely adopted, it could have a huge impact in helping us reduce the environmental impact of our buildings. As well as improve their safety and increase their healthiness. Now Matt is an AFR Top 100 Future Leader of Australia.
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This episode is another one that looks at better ways of transacting commercial real estate. My guest in this episode is Simon Hayes from LeaseSearch. Now one of the big issues with commercial real estate, especially in the industrial and big office leases, is that it's hard to compare apples with apples. Unlike residential, where a three bedroom home is going to be pretty easy to compare to other three bedroom homes in the suburb, the variations in commercial can be extensive, and the value of the different features or compromises are hard to compare and put a value on. Lease negotiation therefore can be complicated, including large spreadsheets of features and lease terms.
Now LeaseSearch makes all of that easy. It helps tenants identify the features they really need a property to have, and it connects tenants with landlords of suitable properties. It then speeds up the leasing process, ensuring all property and financial issues are covered, and saves time for everyone involved.
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My guest in this episode is AJ Chand, CEO and founder of InstaRent, a direct to landlords' platform that makes it easier for landlords to manage their own properties.
According to AJ, self-managing landlords make up nearly a third of the property rental market in Australia, looking after over one million properties. And that number is even higher in the UK and New Zealand. And InstaRentmakes it easy for landlords to manage their properties by providing an Airbnb style mobile app that lets them keep track of their rental properties from anywhere and to centralise their expenses and maintenance.
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This episode is one for the commercial real estate agents out there, in particular in the retail space. My guest in this episode is Simon Fonteyn, Managing Director of LeaseInfo, which specialises in retail space data. They have a new product called Accurait, which extracts retail lease data from contracts, and structures it so that it's completely searchable, removing the need to laboriously search through contracts manually. It's tech they've developed with the CSIRO.
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My guest in this episode is Peter Gibbons CEO of Openn Negotiation. That's Openn with two Ns, a West Australian sales negotiation platform that creates competitive, private treaty sales. Now Openn's special sauce is that it uses the psychology of an auction in a digital environment while offering the control of the private treaty process. As we discuss in this episode with the COVID-19 lockdowns continuing and increasing in some states, there's now more need than ever before for agents to be transparent with buyers and to look at ways to create even better experiences for sellers.
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Matt Webster from WebIT and ListOnce is my guest in this episode of the Proptech Podcast. WebIT is a first generation proptech, started about 20 years ago and one of its first contributions to real estate tech in Australia was a portal website for agents which went on to become realestateview.com.au. So it has a legacy of developing tech that pushes our industry forward and teaches us the importance of embracing new concepts.
It's most popular product is ListOnce which builds the data architecture that links real estate agents, CRM's, websites and the myriad of apps and technologies that agents now use and brings them all together so agencies can do more with their data. This was a delightful conversation with Matt who is a genuinely lovely person, about how data infrastructure is the essential plumbing that you need as an agency.
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My guest in this episode is Nikki Greenberg, who runs the Real Estate of the Future consultancy in New York and is head of Women in PropTech globally. Nikki is an Australian by adoption and has expertise in advising big end of town developers on how to embrace technology and innovation. And in this interview, we talk about whythere has never been a more important time to talk about innovation, and what life has been like in New York during the pandemic and during the Black Lives Matters protests. This is an interesting discussion about the unique skills that developers and the real estate industry have to visualise and plan for the future through our ability to manage big projects and build living environments from scratch. And Nikki's challenge to the industry in these unprecedented times is to tap into the energy of the elements of the international cities that we love to bring innovation toour built environments.
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My guest in this episode is Nick Bouris from Managed App, a property management proptech that caused a major stir when they first launched by claiming their technology did away for the need for trust accounts in real estate, but which have quickly become one of the leaders in second-generation property management software. Now, you may recognise Nick's last name. It's true, he is the son of Mark Bouris, entrepreneur and former CEO of Yellow Brick Road Mortgages. So in this interview, we talk about the challenges of launching a revolutionary idea in property management, the benefits of a high profile share register and the pros and cons of having a famous dad.
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My guest in this episode is someone for whom I've had a huge fangirl crush for many years. Clelia Peters is an innovator, operator and investor working in the real estate industry, now at Bain Capital Ventures. Clelia was the founder of MetaProp, a $40 million seed-stage venture fund focused exclusively on real estate technology, and one of the first sector-specific funds that were focused on PropTech.
This is actually the audio of the interview that I did with Clelia for the Inman Connect Now conference, which was the virtual conference held in June. I've had a few family issues happening with my parents that have made it difficult for me to coordinate interviews for the podcast. But this is a great interview packed with some insightful information on global PropTech trends, the global investment appetite, and what's coming, and also how it's all shaken down with COVID. So I really didn't want you to miss it.
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Mina Radhakrishnan from :Different is my guest in this episode. Mina is a serial entrepreneur with an enviable pedigree. She was both an early employee of Google and then Uber when it was just a startup. She landed on the idea of a property management proptech after she saw how much her father-in-law was paying to manage his investment property, the manual work that was involved, and the level of service he was getting.
Different is a true disruptor to the real estate business model in that it charges just a $100 flat fee per month to manage any property. And it has a keen focus on automation and processes to ensure that it can be a profitable business model.
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My guest in this episode is Darren Younger from Bricklet. Now Bricklet is a proptech startup in the fragmented ownership space. Using Bricklet, you're able to invest in fragments of property, but you still have your name on the title. So it's a property investment play targeted at millennials and that generation of Australians who are now struggling with housing affordability. According to it currently takes 8.6 years for a typical household to save for a 20% deposit on a home. What's interesting about Bricklet is the role that real estate agents can play in this new fragmented transaction.
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My guest in this episode is Domonic Thompson, national head of real estate at Macquarie Business Banking, one of the country's largest and certainly most engaged bankers to the real estate industry. Dom has more than 15 years' experience in banking in the real estate sector, and has been a driver behind the Macquarie Real Estate Pulse Check, a regular survey of the real estate industry. Their 2020 report has some powerful data that shows the connection between performance excellence and technology adoption.
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My guest in this episode is Peter Brewer, president of the Real Estate Institute Queensland, a real estate trainer, and a longtime Inman Ambassador. Peter has long been an advocate for the need for agents to embrace technology, and for real estate to become more consumer-friendly. For over a decade, he has brought home what he's learned from overseas conferences like Inman, and shared new techniques for marketing, social media, and adopting tech. In this interview, Pete and I chat about what Covid-19 has taught the real estate community, the challenges for franchises and real estate institutes and how the industry is being broken into two tribes. Plus we look at the highlights of the Inman Connect Now conference which starts this Tuesday, June 2 in the US.
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My guest in this episode is Anton Babkov from Rexlabs, one of the new generation real estate solution providers. Rexlabs has a series of products based around a truly mobile CRM that help agents stay connected with their clients, and maximise their relationships. Now, Anton is a bit of a boy genius. He used to code tech solutions when he was in high school for him mum, Lana, who worked in a real estate office with an agent called Damien Merchan, and he went on to a career in law. But fast forward 20 years, and Lana now runs the Rexlabs sales team, and Damien heads Spoke.io, which is the social solution that is part of Rex. In this interview, we look at the importance of mobile solutions for agents, why agents should be automating back end office functions and in a major aha moment, outline the perfect digital marketing toolkit and strategy for real estate. Enjoy!!
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Kasey McDonald, from the Property Management Training Academy is my guest in this episode. PMTA specialises in training property managers on embracing new technology, and improving the processes and practises of PMs, and working with principals, especially, to understand the value of their PM divisions, and how much more they could be bringing into their businesses.
This is a really insightful conversation with a few really lovely laughs, that looks at why property management is an undervalued asset in so many real estate businesses, and how to change that.
We also discuss the influence that coronavirus has had on technology adoption and kind of frighteningly, Kasey believes there's a hardcore group of principals out there that are still not convinced about the benefits of cloud-based technology. So we talk through how that's likely to play out for the industry, and how over the next few years, we're going to see the gap grow between highly successful PM businesses and the tech laggards.
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My guest in this episode is Fatek Chamma, Chief Experience Officer from Propic.
Propic is a modular system of solutions to common real estate issues from CRM through to lead generation, and franchise management. And with COVID-19 changing the industry so quickly right now, one of the problems Propic saw that needed a quick solution was creating AI that could help agents deal with the intensity of workflow created by a market with a lot of questions. They're making that available free right now to agencies during this period. So if you're curious to know how AI could help your business, this could be a great time to dip your toe into the water.
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I am super excited that my guest in this episode is the legendary Brad Inman, founder of Inman, the biggest real estate news company in the world. Brad has been a long-time champion for technology in real estate. And going to Inman has become a rite of passage for many Australian prop techs. But Brad is also a huge agitator for better and more transparent and frictionless service in real estate and the role of good agents or realtors in that service. This is a power-packed interview that looks at the gift that COVID-19 has given the real estate industry - and the power of unicorns!
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My guest in this episode is Raphael Niesten from Bricks + Agent - a platform that specialises in making it easy for property managers to organise maintenance. It is special in a couple of ways. First of all, it's integrated already into most of the big property management platforms out there. So it's a feature that's sitting inside the software that you're already familiar with and that you're already using, it's designed to save you thousands of hours that we know property managers lose each year inside that email tsunami, it stops the need for you to run everything through your email or through phone calls because it has pushed notifications telling you what needs attention and what has been actioned. But the most astonishing thing of all is that Bricks + Agent is absolutely free for property managers to use because their business model is based on being a marketplace for trades and services.
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Peter Matthews, CEO and Founder of Realtair is my guest in this episode. Pete has a long history in real estate as an agent – as a very successful principal of a group of offices, time as an exec in a big real estate franchise, and he still gets on the tools and before COVID-19 isolation could be found auctioning properties most weekends. So Peter really knows the pain points that agents experience in their day-to-day running of listing and selling. And his tech solution Realtair is an extraordinarily powerful tool in how it addresses that pain. Now as Peter explains in this episode if agents can streamline and standardise the 267 processes in their businesses they need to do for every transaction, it frees them up from the soul-destroying admin and allows them to deliver much better services.
This is an extremely positive and inspiring episode of the Proptech Podcast where Peter also talks about how isolation has forced us to embrace innovation and what the restart is going to look like. So restart, reboot – it’s what we need to start thinking about.
See shownote here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/04/episode-25-realtair/
See transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/04/episode-25-realtair-transcript/
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James Dearsley from Unissu is my guest in this episode. Unissu is a global platform that helps real estate agents procure the best technology. James is an international expert on Prop Tech and is based in the UK, which as we all know is a few weeks ahead of Australia on the COVID-19 curve. I wanted to get his views on what the impact of the virus has been on the UK property market so far and how he sees it affecting Prop Tech globally. This is a far-ranging interview and it goes a bit longer than normal - we cover everything from how COVID-19 is making us re-appreciate our homes and being home, the impact that it's going to have on the funding of Prop Tech. And James has a fantastic vision for democratising access to education around technology.
See shownote here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/04/episode-24-unissu/
See transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/04/episode-24-unissu-transcript/
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My guests in this episode is Ash Farrugia, founder of ActivePipe, a technology platform that has revolutionised how agents use email marketing to generate leads.
ActivePipe was one of the first Australian proptechs to be accepted into the Reach program in theUS paving the way for Aussie realtech businesses and helping establish our reputation for great property technology.
Ash and I did this interview on Tuesday, March 24 - just as the entire country, indeed the world, was going into shutdown over the Covid19 virus. We had both had extremely strange and quite stressful days - and I think you can hear that in our voices. It felt a bit weird to be talking about success and the future of proptech when everything around us was contracting. So while we did try to keep calm and carry on, we also tried to adapt to the circumstances by looking at the importance of digital marketing in the current environment.
See shownote here:
See transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/04/episode-23-activepipe-transcript/
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My guest in this episode is Adam Campbell from VaultRE, a new generation cloud-based CRM platform for real estate that works across sales, property management, and even trust accounting.
Adam and his business partner, Scott Wolf were the original founders of MyDesktop, and they sold the business to Fairfax, which became Domain where it became the dominant CRM platform in the industry. But they were made redundant several years ago, and yet they vowed to stay together as a team working on a new cloud-based CRM called VaultRE, that had all the features and functionality that MyDesktop had never been able to get the resources to develop. And two weeks ago, they pulled off another coup when they announced a new investor in the form of former realestate.com boss, Simon Baker. Using the money to purchase you guessed it, MyDesktop from Domain. It's an astonishing story.
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In this episode, instead of an interview, I talk about something close to my heart - the adoption of technology in the real estate industry. Why we need to do it better, how we should be looking at doing it, and how we need to step up to this challenge that's being thrown up to us right now through this global pandemic and look at how agents can become truly digital and mobile.
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David Howell, the notoriously quiet CEO of Dynamic Methods is my guest in this episode of the Proptech Podcast. I chose David that he is an international man of history in Proptech because everyone knows him, but he is impossibly hard to catch. Now, you might not have heard of Dynamic Methods itself, but you probably know of their products if you're an agent. They're the brains behind REI Forms across New South Wales, South Australia, WA, and most states, Realworks in Queensland, and now they've launched Forms Live in Victoria. And they specialise not just in forms and contracts, but in the workflows for agents and property managers around those forms. With more and more tech-enabled platforms streamlining those workflows, the quality of the forms going into these systems is really paramount. And that's Dynamic Methods' secret sauce. So if you didn't think a conversation about forms could actually be interesting, get ready to be surprised as we look at how forms really are the oil that's greasing the wheels of digital transactions in real estate.
Shownotes here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/03/episode-20-dynamic-methods/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/03/episode-20-dynamic-methods-transcript/
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My guests in this episode are Angus Ferguson and Daniel Portelli, the cofounders of Real Time Agent, a point of sale platform that streamlines the sales process from end to end that makes it faster and easier to transact.
The company started in Melbourne as BidTracker - an app that helped agent capture bidding data about their auctions, autogenerated clearance rates and automated the reporting to major media publications.
They stunned the proptech community in November last year when they announced they had sold to Domain in a deal worth a total of $35m when it completes at the end of the 2021 financial year. But one of the most interesting things about their business is their almost forensic analysis of the time their platform can save a typical agent because it reveals just how much time we lose doing admin and paperwork.
See Shownote here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/03/episode-18-realtimeagent/
See transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/03/episode-18-realtimeagent-transcript/
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Mark Armstrong, CEO of RateMyAgent is my guest in this episode – a company that Mark says is often mistaken as a lead generator for agents, but which in fact is a digital marketing business. This is a fascinating story of how Rate My Agent has grown over the past five years from being, of all things, an auction tipping contest website to becoming a listed ASX company valued at $250 million and Australia's largest review site for real estate agents which has now launched in the US. As Mark explains, 99% of the population pretty much Google everything before they purchase anything. And that includes real estate. In this episode, Mark explains how Rate My Agent works to help agents become undisruptable by helping them amplify what we do well and share that with the world regardless of the review platform that it occurs on.
Shownote here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-17-ratemyagent/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-17-ratemyagent-transcript/
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My guest in this episode is Nathan Krisanski, founder of HomePrezzo, a proptech marketing startup that helps real estate agents create marketing videos and reports quickly and easily to drive your new digital marketing campaigns.
HomePrezzo does a really great job enabling agents to create useful and helpful content that uses the latest property data for your local market and the properties that you're selling. And it allows you to do that in just a few minutes rather than the days and weeks it takes using that old school process of briefing a writer, pulling together the research, briefing a designer or shooting and editing video.
Now full transparency, Nathan and I are co-founders. But I really wanted to get Nathan on the show because my ambition for the PropTech Podcast has always been to help the industry not just understand the new technology that is out there, but some of the issues startups face and the grit they often show in overcoming them.
In this episode, Nath tells a story of how he came up with HomePrezzo and the idea behind it and why it's so important for agents to embrace digital marketing. He is also very candid about his own entrepreneurial journey, including the time when he nearly lost the business and how he turned that around and how he pulled himself through it up from the bootstraps. It’s a great story.
Shownote here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-16-homeprezzo/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-16-homeprezzo-transcript/
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Welcome to Episode 14 of the Proptech Podcast. My guest in this episode is Tom Dorawa, founder of Virtual Tours Creator and possibly one of the most positive people in proptech.
Virtual Tours Creator is a platform that makes it ridiculously easy - and affordable - for agents to create virtual reality walkthroughs for the properties they’re selling. In this episode, Tom explains the difference between a video walkthrough, a virtual tour, and augmented reality. Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been really clear on the differences so this explanation is really helpful. I hope it will give you an ‘aha!’ moment that helps you to see how extremely valuable a virtual tour can be to property buyers - and even landlords. And if it’s cheap and easy to do - why wouldn’t you offer this as a service?
Shownotes here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-15-virtual-tours-creator/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-15-virtual-tours-creator-transcript/
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Zoe Pointon, CEO of OpenAgent is my guest in this episode.
OpenAgent began eight years ago selling leads to agents on a transaction by transaction basis and taking a clip of the commission. But now they’ve grown and matured to become a sophisticated big data business that is partnering with select agencies to manage lead qualification, to give both agents and consumers a better real estate experience. And they’ve also pivoted their charging model.
They’re a great example of a PropTech business that has started out with a revolutionary idea, successfully scaled, grown, and now pivoted. Moving from being an industry outsider to a trusted data partner that can help agents grow their business, save time, and deliver better services to consumers.
Shownotes here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-14-openagent/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/02/episode-14-openagent-transcript/
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My guest in this episode is Shelli Trung, the head of the REACH programme in Australia and South-East Asia.
REACH have just recently announced their first cohort of proptechs from Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Shelli tells us about the programme and how the innovators are being supported by REACH are transforming real estate into the future.
If you’ve been following the rise of accelerators and venture capital in the proptech space, this is a really interesting interview because Shelli shares how the REACH programs across the different countries work together – and the opportunities this offers, not just for Australian and Kiwi companies wanting to expand overseas, but how overseas businesses are being given a leg up to come to our neck of the woods.
Shownotes here:https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/01/episode-13-reach/
Transcript here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2020/01/episode-13-reach-transcript/
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David Stewart is my guest in this episode of the Proptech Podcast. He’s the founder of Market Buy - one of the new platforms that is working to make the sales communication process more efficient and transparent.
Dave is well known in the industry. He’s still a working agent, so he has excellent insights into what does and doesn’t work for agents. And Market Buy is having some significant success helping agents deliver a better service to both buyers and sellers, by making it easy to understand what price the offers are at so that buyers don’t leave anything in the tank. At the same time, as Dave explains, Market Buy has some great transparency filters that agents can adjust to suit the circumstances of the sale.
Market Buy has won several REIV Innovator of the Year awards and is now heading off to launch in the US. In fact, as this episode goes to air, Dave is heading to the INMAN Conference in New York. I have serious FOMO!
Shownotes:
Transcript:
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In this episode, my guest is Michael Dornan, CEO of Moving Hub, a business that was an early innovator in the proptech space of connection services and which is continuing to raise the bar.
They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do - up there with divorce and death of a loved one. And isn’t it true that you don’t realise how much ‘stuff’ we have in our lives, until you need to pack it in a box and move somewhere else? Or all of the services that you use until you have to unplug them and reconnect them somewhere else. And how much time you can lose in your life by doing all that work.
MovingHub enables real estate agencies to offer all of these services without asking them to let go of their relationship with their customers. In this way, it’s a great service that enhances the role of the real estate agent in providing property services, rather than outsourcing it. Smart agents are using it to enhance and deepen their relationships with clients.
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My guest in this episode is Peter Schravemade from BoxBrownie - one of Australia’s strongest success stories in the residential proptech space.
BoxBrownie - to quote Pete - touches up photos. They’re an automated platform that makes it ridiculously easy for real estate agents to get property photos corrected - whether that’s removing shadows and fixing the lighting, changing overcast days to sunny, or even adding virtual furniture and renovations. They won a coveted spot on the NAR REach program for 2019 and completely dominating the conference circuit in the US using it to successfully launch the business globally.
BoxBrownie are some of the hardest workers on the conference circuit - they know everyone and they’re generous with their hospitality and connections and have been great ambassadors for Aussie proptech. In fact, Peter was recently named a 2019 Real Estate Top 50 Influencer by Elite Agent Magazine. In this episode, he shares the story of how its taken a team of complementary personalities - rather than a single founder - to grow BoxBrownie. And he shares how BoxBrownie have built their business in the US.
Read the shownotes here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2019/12/episode-10-boxbrownie/
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My guest in this episode is Justin Butterworth, a serial entrepreneur whose innovations have already changed how we rent property in Australia, and who, with his latest venture, "Snug" is working to shake us up all over again.
Snug is focused on making renting easier. It has three key ways it does this – Snug Match helps property managers find the best tenants faster, BondCover which is seeking to transform how a bond is paid and managed, and a truly revolutionary new venture that is looking at how we could use superannuation with a rent-to-buy investment scheme.
Justin with his background as an economist is a great example of the fresh thinking that's driving innovation in real estate, and turning long-held truths about how we do things on their heads. I hope you enjoy this episode.
Shownotes here
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My guest in this episode is Patrick Hill, CEO of Realm which many of you may know from the REI-endorsed communication app. But over the past few months, Patrick has been working on a second, significant project - introducing AI to property management with an AI called Claire.
Patrick talks us through the numbers of the 'busy' work that property managers do - including more than 1 million emails a year. And yet the job grows ever more stressful as PMs struggle to meet customer expectations. In such a space, AI in property management becomes a complete no brainer. Adopting this kind of technology gives us the tools to make customer service the centre of our businesses while making life less stressful for our staff. My prediction is that in five years time, we’ll look back at 2019 and wonder how on earth - and why on earth - we struggled to do it manually for so long.
Shownotes
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Chris Rolls, CEO of Australia’s first residential real estate venture capital fund is my guest in episode 7 of The Proptech Podcast.
Chris has one of the best grasps on technology in the Australian real estate industry, and his VC fund has evaluated more than 480 startup businesses over the past three years in the space. In this interview, we discuss the future trends you can expect to see in real estate - which include a stronger embracing of the gig economy, and the disruption of ‘principals’ (that’s the people, not the ethics). He believes agencies are going to become bigger, putting smaller businesses under pressure.
We talk about how even the Accelerator space is changing in real estate with the arrival of new funds such as NAR REach and a plethora of commercial real estate funds. And as he calls for the industry to ‘act’ to collaborate and fund innovation, I put a bit of heat on him about the lessons that the residential space could learn from the rise of the commercial real estate accelerators. Enjoy the show!
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My guest on the Proptech Podcast this week is Aimee Engelmann, CEO and founder of outsourcing business, Beepo. This is a really interesting conversation about the nexus between outsourcing and technology adoption in real estate. We cover how the skills you learn when you successfully outsource as an agent, are great training for adopting technology. And we look at how outsourcing is both being disrupted by some of the technology now out there, while also accelerating it - and how outsourcers are able to support the proptech industry through product feedback and client recommendations.
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My guest in this episode of The Proptech Podcast is Kate Chalk, chief executive of a South Australian-based startup called Reso. You may have heard about them in their previous iteration when they were called ReBid.
RESO are working to make the private treaty process of making offers and negotiation more transparent, while still offering the real estate agent complete control. And they have a full end to end contract management system that really puts everything an agent needs in one place and makes it easy to share with potential buyers.
The Proptech Podcast explores the area where real estate and technology collide. In each episode, we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
See the shownotes here: https://kyliecdavis.com.au/2019/11/episode-5-reso/
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My guest in this episode is Sandy Moore, CEO of property management startup OurProperty.
OurProperty is a cloud-based property management system that streamlines the work property managers do around managing and maintaining property. And it’s one of THOSE PM systems that ask the question, do you really need a trust account? And in this episode, Sandy makes a fairly strident case about why 'app stacking' doesn't work if you're trying to automate property management. I'm sure that's going to spark a debate!
The Proptech Podcast explores the area where real estate and technology collide. In each episode we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
See the shownotes here
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theproptechpodcast/message
In Episode 3 of The Proptech Podcast we meet Adrian Yong, a co-founder of Rentality. Rentality is a very new Australian startup, that is seeking to create a mid-term property market - longer than AirBnB but shorter than a full lease.
Rentality specialise in finding accommodation for professionals on secondment. They're working through property management teams inside agencies together with property developers to create a new style of rental market, so it's worth listening to hear about this $11.9 billion market that is right under our noses.
The Proptech Podcast explores the area where real estate and technology collide. In each episode we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
See the shownotes here
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theproptechpodcast/message
My guest in the second episode of The Proptech Podcast is Sarah Bell, co-founder of AIRE, and mother of Rita, the real estate robot.
This is a wide-ranging conversation about how AI is making us more human. We cover not just what AI is in real estate, but how we should be using it and how it’s making our lives easier. We also look at how AI builds relationships and shows us how to identify ‘passive’ requests for service, plus a very fun section on how holding onto your data is the equivalent of being a crazy newspaper hoarder.
The Proptech Podcast explores the area where real estate and technology collide. In each episode we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
See the shownotes here
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theproptechpodcast/message
The Proptech Podcast is where property and innovation collide. Each week we introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in real estate and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech.
In our first episode, meet Dan Swan, the founder of RealAR, which turns 2D floorplans into a virtual walkthrough. RealAR cures us all of a condition called 'aphantasia' - an inability to visualise 2D drawings as a 3D concept. Most of us have it - and the cost of this is significant in the building industry because it creates extraordinary fear and anxiety around whether what we've planned is actually going to work.
RealAR doesn't require a lot of expensive technology - it works on your smartphone. And it's set to revolutionize selling off-the-plan, architecturally designed homes and how we visualize renovations, new builds and even how councils approve developments.
See the shownotes here.
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It’s Kylie Davis here and I’m delighted to be your host on The Proptech Podcast as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide.
I passionately believe we need to create and grow a sense of community between the innovators and real estate agents and sharing our stories is a great way to do that.
The aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech and how they can create amazing property experiences.
So join us each week starting October 15.
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