Rob Turnbull: Hello, and welcome to the Property Edge podcast where we investigate all things real estate, data, tech, AI integrations, and more. My name is Rob Turnbull. I’m the marketing manager here at Land Services SA, and I’m on a quest to learn more about the PropTech and real estate sectors’ technology needs. I’m delighted today to be joined by someone who probably has more knowledge of the Australian PropTech scene than anyone else. That is, of course, PropTech Association CEO, Kylie Davis. Welcome Kylie.

Kylie Davis: Hey, Rob, great to be here. Thank you.

Rob Turnbull: Thank you very much for joining us. Now, if you could give the listeners a bit of an overview of who you are, where you came from, and what the PropTech Association is.

Kylie Davis: Sure. I’m Kylie Davis, the president of the PropTech Association, and I’m also a marketing consultant that specializes in PropTech marketing and getting PropTechs to market with new products. My background is 25 years in media. I worked for the big media companies, News Corp and Fairfax. My last role in newspapers was as national real estate editor at News Corp, working with Tom Panos across the whole country and all of the real estate publications. As part of that, I introduced RP Data to the journalists and we taught them how to cover real estate market data and trained them on data research.

It’s my fault that everyone now reads so much about individual property markets, even right down to a suburb level every single week. I apologise to everyone for that, but as part of that, I got to know the RP Data CoreLogic team really well, had five years with CoreLogic, and my role there was basically meeting all of these new emerging companies that were doing cool things with CoreLogic’s data. That is how I got into the PropTech space.

Rob Turnbull: Impressive. And so the PropTech Association has been going now for what? Four or five years. Is that about right?

Kylie Davis: 2020, yeah. We launched the week before COVID hit.

Rob Turnbull: Oh, brilliant timing. It’s interesting. When you look at the broader PropTech world, there are so many new categories within PropTech. From energy efficiency through to consumer PropTech through to housing supply and all these different areas. And of course, at the moment, they don’t really affect real estate agencies and agents that much. I’m sure they will down the track. We can chat about that. What are you seeing, though, as a broad theme that’s happening in the more real estate agency technology relevant areas?

Kylie Davis: In the broad church that is PropTech and PropTech adoption, residential real estate is actually one of the first and earliest adopters of PropTech. We were cutting edge when it came to realestate.com and RP data, and even properties back in the rockend days. These are old, legacy companies in the PropTech space and residential real estate has been almost like a proving ground of the value and the capability of PropTech that we haven’t seen to that degree in commercial real estate. And we certainly haven’t seen that to that degree in any way, shape or form in construction.

Construction is way, way behind. But all of these things need to come together if we’re going to solve the really big chewy problems that exist in housing supply and getting housing to market and all of those things. But in residential real estate, the market’s quite mature in that there are a lot of established players. And we’re seeing right at the moment, the gap has been, that’s been one silo, that’s been another silo. And now we’re starting to see technology coming up in that middle space to join things together so that there is seamless flow between the different parts of the organization.

We’re moving the data from one’s part to the next so that you don’t literally have to have 59 tabs open on your computer. But you’ve got one kind of major piece of software that’s starting to pull everything in and including or opening the technology that you need. And that’s where we see some of the AI and automation-based tech playing out. They’re identifying the data that you’re working on, pulling it out of the records so that you don’t have to retype it, identifying the task that needs to be done next, automating that task where possible and starting to, you know, your job as a human is not to make the data move from step to step. Your job as a human is to understand, “Hey, where are we up to with that client? Oh, okay. This is what I now need to go and do and talk to that client about,” or that prospect about, and kind of really speeding up that process of getting people into market, or getting their property managed, getting ahead of the curve of managing their property as opposed to always being behind what needs to be done.

Rob Turnbull: It’s funny you say that. In a couple of the previous podcasts that we’ve done, one of the key things was integrations and how everything does sit as a silo. And the issue is for a lot of real estate agencies or agencies is they have all these different technology platforms that don’t really talk to each other. And they have all these subscriptions that they pay for. And so they need SMEs, they need specialists material experts on each one of these things to be able to make them work. And yet, the effort and the power is bringing them together, like you said, and I guess here we have what we’re seeing and maybe you can comment on this is the larger agency and agency groups are helping put this together because they have the scale to actually tie things together. Whereas the smaller agents and agencies, the maybe 1 to 5, 1 to 7 agents in an agency have not got the capacity to actually bring all that tech together. How do you see them winning in this game?

Kylie Davis: So there are two parts of it. What we’re seeing too, from the big portals. So for Domain and realestate.com is that they are now, they have been on a very aggressive campaign of acquisition. And so as MRI, you know, very aggressive acquisition campaigns, to make sure that they are not just one thing in market.

So realestate.com and domain.com no longer wish to be seen as just a portal where consumers go and they sell real estate advertising. They are looking at ways that they can deepen their relationship with their agent clients and also with their consumers by offering additional products and services. And in the agency space, especially, or in the agent space, they’re really trying to have the products that integrate and then all start to work together. Now, even buying products, buying companies and putting them into your mix still needs dev time to get them to do all of that. So not everybody’s got everything perfect yet.

One of the reasons where it’s so hard at the moment is because we are in this state of transition from going to what we know what we’re told it should be able to do and what we believe it can do. But we’re still stuck in what we’ve always used to do because there’s a piece of hard work in the middle of getting it to work.

This ties back to one of the big trends that we’re seeing in the residential real estate industry at the moment that there is a lot more pressure on smaller offices. If you are a smaller office, it is probably easier in terms of bandwidth and investment for you to stick with a bigger supplier that can offer, you know, choose the red or the green team, whichever one you want to be with and or MRI or a bigger provider that can basically provide the full stack to you.

But we are also seeing bigger agencies are growing bigger and they’re doing that by absorbing the smaller ones. And we’re seeing a change in the business model in real estate because it is becoming a lot more expensive to manage both the tech stack, the HR stack, all of the things that you need to do now to be compliant as a business. The barrier to entry of real estate is actually rising not because it’s hard to get a real estate license, but because of the obligation you have as an employer of other people in the space.

Rob Turnbull: Yeah, absolutely. And, the tech divide is certainly growing. We’re seeing that, I mean, locally here and you’d be seeing at a national level as well. If we look at the PropTech awards that recently happened, Property Edge, everyone was in the mix, but unfortunately didn’t win anything. But we did see MRI did really, really well across the board with a lot of different platforms. What’s the secret to their success?

Kylie Davis: So, MRI, if everyone remembers, bought the PropTech group, about 18 months ago, and have now basically integrated all of that technology into their MRI ecosystem. And I think what David Bowie and Mark Cohen and Steve Grubb might have done in that space is really clever. They have let those products that they bought in the PropTech group. So that included Vault, it included Investor, it included Eagle software, they got a whole bunch of brands that if they tried to build all that tech from scratch, it would have cost them more than what they paid.

So I think David Bowie did some very good shopping at that event with them. But what they have done is instead of merging and homogenizing it into one big monstrous platform, they’ve kept the identities and the business cases for each of those products. And they are basically working them all to their strength.

Rob Turnbull: And that last bit there, the talk to each other bit, the connection bits, the really important one, isn’t it? Speaking of connections, taking it to a different style though. One of the key themes that the podcast so far has heard from our guests is that real estate is a people business. People buy from people. People want real estate agents in there for their expertise. Are there any PropTechs that you’re seeing, achieving a balancing act, of both helping, improve efficiencies and improve knowledge transfer whilst also improving the relationship between agent and vendor or buyer.

Kylie Davis: The goal is that you want to be introducing PropTech that you can clearly see frees you up as an agent because we all want to be people businesses, but being a people business does not mean that people do all the things. What we want to get out of our technology is that the things that are keeping us busy, that are making us feel frantic, that we are struggling to juggle, that we are struggling to tick to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on that make our days very, very stressful. That is the stuff that needs to be organized and sorted and handled by the PropTech so that we can then have better quality conversations because we’ve got the information we need at our fingertips and we’ve got the time booked in to have the relationships and to build the relationships with our clients.

And then the question is, so what technology have we already bought that maybe we don’t quite understand what it’s capable of yet? What little projects could we do in that space to understand what’s available better? And those are like your easy wins. Let’s introduce one or two of those things into the mix and see how that goes. And then what can’t we do because we just don’t have the tech? And then how can we go and find that tech to make it work for us or make it easy for us to deliver this amazing experience that we want to give our clients. And/or remove this stress from our team because this is crazy.

Rob Turnbull: There’s one thing I’ve seen in country South Australia, a lot of the agents that I speak to, I live in the country, and a lot of them are older, essentially. They’ve been running their territory for a long time. They’ve got the relationships. They’ve got their processes they like to go through. They’ve quite light touch on tech. I’m speaking to them now, and some are concerned because they’re going to get left behind. What do you say to the generational divide that’s starting to creep into real estate based on tech savviness?

Kylie Davis: I know this stuff is hard. I know that it’s hard to get your brain around and I know that it’s hard to know often who you can trust, if you’re looking for guidance or help with it. But it is absolutely essential that you find a tech partner or you bring someone into your business who is younger, who gets it, who you can then entrust to drive it.

And think about how we use our mobile phones. Like, I couldn’t tell you what my husband’s mobile phone number is. We’ve been married for 30 years. He’s had the same number probably for the last 15, but I still couldn’t tell you what it is. I can tell you what my phone number is when I was seven years old and living in Glen Waverley. But I have not ever bothered to remember because I just say, “Hey Google, phone husband” and husband is on end of phone. My brain doesn’t need to remember it.

What we’re doing as a society is that we are basically delegating parts of our brain and parts of our memory and the need to think about things into the technology. And as a business owner, the stuff in your head is your IP, getting it out of your head and into the processes and practices of your business is what makes your business saleable.

So, okay, you don’t get the tech understood completely, but you have an operating system and an operating process, which is deeply personal and probably very connected with your community. So you need to map that. And then find someone who can help you match the steps or the structure into the tech so that you have a saleable business as part of it, because otherwise you’ve just had a job for the last X number of years and you’re basically going to sell your rent roll for face value.

Rob Turnbull: I know a lot of people are going to get value from that. Because on the flip side, I speak to younger agents and they’re loving tech, they’re gobbling it up, they’re eating it, they’re absolutely killing it. But, potentially and a couple of our previous guests have talked about it, they also haven’t had the mentoring to understand the other side of it, the relationship building side, the people side of things. And that’s where that experience does come in. So for each agency it would be a real delicate balancing act that we need to go through.

Now, Kylie, you run the very long term and very popular PropTech podcast. Do you want to tell our listeners about that?

Kylie Davis: Oh, look, so the podcast is, at the moment, a bit occasional, but we try to regularly interview new tech out in the market or understand what’s going on in older tech and what their plans are as they buy or adopt new technology. And it’s just really a great way to find out what’s happening in the market and who people are and what they do.

Rob Turnbull: We’ve also got PropTech conference coming up in November in Sydney. Do you want to tell the folks about that?

Kylie Davis: So the PropTech Forum is happening on the 14th of November, Thursday, the 14th of November in Sydney at the New South Wales Teachers Federation. The forum is very proudly by the geeks for the geeks. So if you are a PropTech yourself, or you’re just really passionate about the space, come along.

If you’re a real estate agent and you’d like to hear about what’s going to hit you in the next three to five years, this is a fantastic place to get sort of ahead of the curve, but the goal of the day is to bring PropTechs together to support this culture of collaboration and integration, and integration will be a very big ticket on the agenda as well. And looking at what we need to be doing as a sector to make it easier for our clients to do business with us.

Rob Turnbull: Kylie, you’re on LinkedIn. If anyone wants to follow you and your association, find Kylie on LinkedIn, thank you for your words of wisdom today, a lot to take home. I think, as we look at Property Edge, I know our dev team will be listening to this podcast and learning a few different ideas about things I need to think about in the roadmap as we build that product out, but thank you for your time today.

Kylie Davis: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Rob Turnbull: And everyone, thanks for listening. Once again, the Property Edge podcast is available on all your streaming services, and please do subscribe to our newsletter. If you’d like this sort of content and want to hear from us more until the next episode, bye bye.