Rob Turnbull: Welcome to the Property Edge podcast today. I am delighted to be joined by Phil Harris from Harris Real Estate. Welcome Phil.

Phil Harris: Thank you. Thanks for having me Rob.

Rob Turnbull: Do appreciate coming on today. Now, for the listeners out there, could you just give a quick overview of firstly, your personal story and then the story of your real estate agency?

Phil Harris: Yeah, no worries. So, my personal story, keep it very brief. I started real estate at 20 years of age. I’ve been going at it for just over 20 years. I spent the first five years of my career working at Ray White inside a franchise. I did that for about five years. From there, that was in the inner southern suburbs of Adelaide. From there I moved over to Toop and Toop Real Estate, which is an independent agency, eastern suburbs of Adelaide. So I did just under five years at Toop and Toop as well, and we’ve now had Harris Real Estate for just shy of 13 years, I think. So, it’s been a pretty hard and fast journey.

Rob Turnbull: Yeah, I can see that. And I remember when Harris first started, I just kept on seeing these pink signboards pop up everywhere. And it was a real change for the industry. I think Woods Cannon did that for you guys. Is that right?

Phil Harris: Yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Woods Cannon, yeah. So I went through school with Aaron Woods. They were a great support, they still work with us today. So they’ve been on the whole journey, which has been great.

Rob Turnbull: You’ve had lots of mergers of the last 12, 18 months. If one thing I’ve noticed, I keep on having to update the CRM because you’ve got different agencies coming under the Harris banner. Do you see this consolidation that’s happening, not just with your business, but across the industry as something that’s going to be ongoing or is it going to get to a stage where there’s not much left or you just get big enough? How do you reckon that works?

Phil Harris: There’s definitely a larger gap that is occurring now. Particularly here to talk about technology today and there’s definitely some real blockers to technology succeeding in real estate. But it seems as though we are starting to see the emergence that we haven’t really seen in the past. We are starting to see a lot more larger independent agencies. So there is this consolidation. I’ve got some kind of theories behind that, which is, I saw some data recently saying that there’s 10,000 real estate agencies across Australia, and 80 percent of those agencies all have less than 10 employees. So the average real estate office is very, very small.

And so technology is going along at a rapid rate of knots in terms of the prop tech that’s being spent. But the actual consumer, that average office, 80 percent of those 10,000 offices, they don’t really have the expertise or the resource to actually roll out tech. So I feel like we’re starting to see much more of an emergence of, I would say more corporate style run organisations now. Larger, they have to be larger to have the revenue base to be able to have that middle level of management to roll out tech, to have people responsible for data, people responsible for innovation, proposals, all of those sort of things. I think that’s the way the industry is shaping up, larger, higher resourced organisations versus maybe that traditional corner store organisation. Not to say that’s going to disappear, but we’re starting to see a much larger gap between what some of the larger companies can provide as opposed to somebody in that smaller office environment. That’s what we’re starting to see.

Rob Turnbull: And one of the reasons I brought up consolidation is I figured that you probably have put a lot of overtime hours and paid your tech teams a bucket load for all the different people you bring on. There must be a lot of work to get their integration of their systems into the Harris mothership. Would that be right?

Phil Harris: Yeah, massively. So we have a full integration team for that. I think we’ve done about four acquisitions this year. And, yeah, we definitely every time we do one, we get a little bit better and we work out, we improve. We outsource certain things now to data experts and we’ve been able to kind of refine that process to bring it all together.

Rob Turnbull: So from a tech stack perspective, yours would have changed quite significantly since you started Harris 13 odd years ago. What’s been the biggest game changer for you in your mind? Has it been one system itself or a philosophy that you went through?

Phil Harris: If you think about kind of the two core pieces of tech that sit inside a real estate business, you’ve got your CRM for sales and then effectively your CRM for property management. So they’re still like the core of your business. Probably the biggest change in tech that we’ve seen is that those platforms, they’ve all, we’re on different platforms, obviously, to what we started at going back 13, 14 years ago, but probably the biggest integration we’ve now seen is that those tech platforms have become cloud based and they’ve now got big open APIs on both of those platforms now to be able to integrate with the rest of the tech stack.

Whereas previously, so I think kind of the, you know, for me, when I look at what makes a great innovative real estate agency. It’s definitely not about developing or innovating tech. I think that innovative agencies are now just agencies that have the ability to actually take a tech stack and integrate it and get more vertical penetration through the organisation as opposed to being half good at all of these different kind of tech stacks that you’ve got.

The innovation piece now is one’s ability to select the right tech and be able to integrate it across all of the other tech pieces across the group. So I think that’s more the skill set that sits inside tech. So I’d say the biggest change I’ve now seen is the ability to integrate across that tech stack as opposed to everything being in isolation previously.

Rob Turnbull: Cain Cooke made that interesting point when we chatted to him recently. He’s seeing things and he just loved us to plug that thing in. And then, you know, if something better comes along, then you can unplug the first one and plug the next one in just as long as it’s pluggable. So, if you’re jumping into your agent’s hat, because I believe you’re still on the tools, right? What are the top pieces of real estate software that you couldn’t live without?

Phil Harris: Well, I think the major things from a salesperson’s perspective at the end of the day, the core functionality of a real estate agent is to be able to secure business. I’ve been doing it for 23 years now. So, at the end of the day, people who maybe don’t understand the real estate industry, the whole industry is based around getting listings. So if you can’t, if you get listings, you’ve got a career. If you can’t get listings, you don’t have a career. I don’t care how good you are at selling houses. If you can’t get stock, you’ll never do well at real estate. So I think you gotta start at the start. The starting point obviously starts with the CRM. So let’s assume you’ve got a good CRM in place, but after that, you’re gonna need to go, whatever software is based around lead generation and lead conversion, they’re the two kind of, that’s the software stack that you need to get in place.

So I would say products around lead generation around Rita and AI around generating actual call lists and SMS lists and actually working with data. But then after that, then you’ve got to look into that lead conversion platform for pre list kits, selling proposals and a digital workflow that kind of comes after that.

Rob Turnbull: Yeah. And so you mentioned AI just now, and that’s one thing that we’re discussing quite a bit on this podcast is the use of the current use of AI. But where do you think it’s going to go? So you use AI at the moment within your tech stack?

Phil Harris: Yeah, we do. Yeah. Well, in the form of Rita as that.

Rob Turnbull: There’s the dystopian future of some people saying that will be real estate AI’s calling up customers trying to get business in the future. And then there’s the more realistic view that it’s going to sit somewhere in your tech stack. Is that an area you’re pushing your tech guys to really focus on to try and give your team more ability out in the field? Because we’re seeing AI as a real ability to lift the output, the volume of an agent. Is that something you asking them to do?

Phil Harris: Not really, not at the moment. I don’t think that’s something that as an agency that you need to be first to market with, I think that the AI, the AI play, there’s a lot of noise in that market about automatic calls, automatic SMSs, and like, this is what I’m about to say. This is fact. This is not an opinion. Like, if you interviewed right now, the top 10 real estate agents in the country in Australia. So if you said Matt Steinway, Alexander Phillips, Will Phillips, Tom Hector, Arabella Hooper, whoever it might be. Their number one lead source right now, they’ve got a high quality CRM, they’ve got high quality relationships and they all make 20, 30 telephone calls every single day to real people.

Right? So I am happy to be humbled, but put the person online, he says, Oh yeah, I’ve just got this great piece of AI and it spits me out 10 listings per month. It’s not there yet. So I think AI is going to be a great assistance tool for maybe segregating a better data set at the end of the day though, it’s a human to human business that’ll get you a better short list of contacts, but the human relationship is not going to be replaced. But if somebody wants to jump online and tell me I’ve got it wrong and you’re listing to a robot is producing you 10 listings per month will show me, but I just haven’t seen it yet. Not across those great agents anyway.

Rob Turnbull: No, you’re right. And it was Emma from Turner’s saying that they use a chatbot to answer really simple, repetitive calls so that just doesn’t waste teammates time. But when it comes to anything else, they’re still person to person. It’s very human side of business. If you could design one piece of tech that you haven’t got now, something that you reckon would be a game changer for agents, or a piece of data that you could get a feed of, whether it be at the prospecting time or the conversion time, or at the analysis of your sales process, or even just building relationships with existing customers and making them a bit more solid. Is there any area there you think there’s a weakness in the market at the moment?

Phil Harris: I’m not necessarily convinced it would be new technology. I think where there’s a great opportunity is to bring in a middleware product that kind of sits between all this tech that’s out there and your CRM. And if an agent could have on one dashboard, that’s my, so it’s actually bringing all of it to one place to go, that’s who I need to call today. That’s who’s getting SMS today. The AI’s told me that that’s a likely list who I could focus on today. That’s where my KPIs are up to today. So I think there’s an opportunity where, and probably where I think the techies don’t really understand the industry is that you’re asking the average salesperson to turn up into a real estate office and like work with like 15 different pieces of tech and like make those calls, receive this, reply.

Somehow it needs to come to a format where I’ve got my one screen and I can just, in workflow, it’s all there on like, I guess it would, my description would be the ultimate agent dashboard of not new tech, but bringing all of those things to one central hub. Kind of like what Hamish and Andy are pushing with their, it’s like a Foxtel box onto it. What’s it called? Hubble.

Rob Turnbull: Hubble. Yes.

Phil Harris: Yeah. So I get that. That takes your Foxtel subscription, your Stan subscription, your Netflix subscription, your Apple. And like it puts it all on one. I think that’s where real estate is going to have to get to that because everybody’s going to keep innovating, bringing out a new app for that and new product for that and new tech for that. We need a Hubble for a real estate agent. It goes, that’s your screen. Just focus on those six like modules. Makes sense.

Rob Turnbull: Yeah. Absolutely. Is there any state in the country that you reckon doing it better? I mean, SA, you’d be up there with your agencies, obviously up there as number one, but when it comes from tech perspective, cause you’ve got the scale and the know how interstate, is there a state that stands out or particular company that stands out that you go, geez, these guys are doing it good?

Phil Harris: No, I think, all of us are fumbling around trying to figure out how to bring it all together. It’s hard work, you know? As I said, tech’s going like that. Ability to implement is going like that across the industry. So you gotta, if you want that to work, you gotta figure out this, that, that’s very, very hard to absorb all of this tech. Which, by the way, the techies have got, like, I did a session a while ago with a competitor. I won’t mention their name. I said, we’ve got all these great products. It’s like, yeah, but like, they’re great products, but they can’t be rolled out.

Rob Turnbull: Yeah. Well, that’s one thing is very good to have brilliant products, but if people aren’t using them properly, there’s no point.

Phil Harris: Great products, it’s the engagement.

Rob Turnbull: So how do you have anything like a monthly meeting or some way of upskilling your teams in the tech side of things, as opposed to the sale side of things? Cause they’re different skills altogether.

Phil Harris: Well, I think that’s what’s different about us is we have the scale. So we have two full time people in IT at Harris who are constantly assessing tech, what’s on the list to investigate further, what’s on the scrap pile. We don’t want to know about it. And what’s on the radar for maybe two or three years time that we should be keeping an eye on. So first and foremost, we’ve kind of got an innovation team who are constantly looking, right? But then we’ve got a sizable enough management team where we can have, we’ve got a captain, that person, they are solely responsible for CRM. That person is solely responsible for proposal and pitching software. That person is solely responsible for workflow tech. So we’ve got area experts and their job is to manage that portfolio, train people, coach people, create online courses on how to engage, and actually rolling those products out, among the team. If you haven’t got scale, I don’t know how you do that inside of seven man organisation. I don’t.

Rob Turnbull: And that’s what it comes down to, right? Scale and using that know how. So if we might end it there, listen, the things that I’ve taken away from that is definitely is connectability. This needs to be able to plug in this need to make it usable and valued to your team and also for it to be relevant, right? Otherwise they’re not going to use it. So thank you so much for joining me today. Really appreciate your time, Phil.

Phil Harris: Pleasure, Rob. Have a good one. Thank you.

Rob Turnbull: You too. Take care of yourself. Bye bye.

Phil Harris: Cheers. Bye.

Rob Turnbull: Thanks again to Phil Harris for putting up with our tech issues at the beginning of this episode. And if you enjoyed it, please do hit the subscribe button. And if you want any more information about the podcast, about Property Edge, the research platform, or even signing up to our monthly email newsletter, you can do so at www.propertyedge.app. Thanks and see you in the next episode.