The Proptech Podcast with Kylie Davis

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.

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.ai Trish Mackie-Smith, Co-Founder at inndox Mickael 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 & CHALK Stone & 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 Adelaide A vibrant community of likeminded founders A world-class network of investors, mentors, customers, and experts Expert advice and guidance with a tailored business growth strategy STAY UP TO DATE LinkedIn – 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/

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!

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, Earnnest Peter Schravemade, Managing Partner, REACH Marisa Warren, Co-Founder & General Partner, ALIAVIA Ventures

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.

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.

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.

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.

PropTech Panel: Proptech in 2023 - What Lies Ahead?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

- Portia Miller, Marketing, SaleFunder

- Kylie Dillon, Co-Founder, Realtime Conveyancer 

- 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: 

- Mickael Roger, Co-Founder, PropHero 

- Eleanor Creagh, Senior Economist, PropTrack 

- 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: 

- Kyle Abourizk, Growth ANZ, Basiq 

- Rebecca Ribeiro, Sales Executive, Zepto 

- 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

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.

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.

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:   

- Derek Feebrey, CEO and Co-founder of Trendspek 

- Georgie Fenwicke, CEO and Co-founder of Tellfrankie.com 

- Richard Romanowski, Executive Director and Co-Founder of eleXsys Energy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Proptech Panel: Renting reimagined - How Technology is Transforming the Tenant Experience

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.

The Proptech Panel - Buying a Home - How is proptech making it easier to buy a home

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!

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.

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!

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.

Proptech Pathways: Straight from an Investor Investment Options for Proptechs

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-data-democracy-where-are-the-opportunities-for-data-collaboration-in-commerical-real-estate/

Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/women-in-proptech-global-insights-australia-edition/

Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-how-technology-is-changing-residential-mortgage-lending/

Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-the-secrets-to-selling-and-buying-proptech-for-commercial-property/

Watch the Proptech Panel here: https://proptechassociation.com.au/proptech-panel-how-proptech-contributes-to-sustainable-development/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

MadeComfy - Making short term rentals easy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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/

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.

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:

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.

Read the shownotes here:

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

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. 

See the full shownotes here

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.