Rob: Hello and welcome to another Property Edge podcast where we discuss the tools, the tech, the AI, the platforms and the data that are powering today’s industry leaders. And I’m delighted today to be joined by a regional industry leader. Rav Prakash is with Kemp Real Estate in Port Lincoln on the Eyre Peninsula. 

Welcome, Rav. 

Rav: Thanks for having me, Rob. Good to be here. 

Rob: Well, it’s great to have you here and I will say first up, congratulations on your recent win because only a couple of weeks ago, you were awarded property manager, commercial, industrial of the year. Well done at the REISA Awards. 

Rav: Thank you very much. Could not have done it without the support of an amazing team that we work with here. 

Rob: Could you give our listeners a bit of an overview, your journey and the size and the style of the Kemp agency? 

Rav: Of course. So, for me personally, I’ve been with Kemp Real Estate now for coming up to five years. The business itself has existed in the Lower Eyre Peninsula for coming up to 45 years. Over that time, there’s been a few changes. There’s been several cracks at different offices. We’ve had a central Port Lincoln office, which has been consistent. We’ve had a go at Ceduna, Coffin Bay, Tumby Bay. We’re back to just the one centralized office with a couple of team members who do work remotely. 

Rob: And the Kemp agency, despite being in a really farming area, you’re predominantly resi, commercial and property management, is that right? 

Rav: That’s right. We’ve only recently got into the rural or farming side of things over the last couple of months through the acquisition of another business here on the Lower Eyre Peninsula, but very much a focus on residential and commercial sales and property management. 

Rob: Well, there’s one thing I was going to ask you, because we don’t see much consolidation here on the Eyre Peninsula compared to the larger cities, particularly Adelaide. What’s the purpose behind that? Can you give us a bit of the strategy there? 

Rav: The motivation is to continue growing and organic growth is always a goal and something we try to do. But when the opportunity came up to buy another terrific business on the Lower Eyre Peninsula with similar values – being a community focused family sort of business, very much focused on people – we thought we’d have a go at the opportunity. We’re two months into it now and it’s been a great experience. 

Rob: I didn’t realize that you were going into that sort of phase of the journey, but could you just give everyone a bit of an overview of Kemp’s approach to tech? Where do you see yourselves? Are you cutting edge? Are you always looking to be a first mover? Are you following a bit further back? 

Because I will mention this and by the time listeners might listen to that, you might’ve changed the website, but the website does say, and I’m quoting, “you could say we are high tech. We use technology to maximize results while continuing to offer excellent customer service.” How are you high tech? 

Rav: Well, I’ll start from the top. Our philosophy on whether it’s sales or property management is very much service focused, personalized approach. We’re really fortunate to have a network that we can work within right around Australia, a combination of city based and regional based real estate businesses who we can bounce our ideas off. 

And so our approach to any sort of technology that’s new or anything new we’re going to implement is to stress test amongst our peers and see what their key learnings have been. And if they haven’t, we try to share what we’ve learned to help each other out. 

Rob: That’s interesting. So that’s just over the course of the years, relationships have been built locally as well as interstate and there’s your sounding board for tech ideas. 

Rav: Absolutely. Being a boutique business not part of a franchise group, we’ve got to try and leverage whatever networks we can be part of. And we’re really lucky that over time we’ve been fortunate to be part of like-minded private businesses. The information that we’ve been able to bounce off others has been invaluable. 

Rob: Fair enough. And so what does your current tech stack look like? How have you built it up? How is it connected? And how happy are you with it? 

Rav: We keep our PM tech and our sales tech fairly separate. We use Agentbox as our sales CRM and then there’s a few different platforms around that we’ve utilized to help with presentations for appraisals to help with our prospecting. 

From a PM point of view, we’re Property Tree and again, you’d love to have just the one PM software that did everything. Unfortunately, we’re yet to find it. And I know there’s others that are trying to build it, but we utilize a combination of Property Tree, Reapit’s InspectRealEstate and Agentbox as well.And there’s Inspection Express and MRI’s Inspect that fall in for our routine and condition reports. 

When it comes to our tech stack, we’re really cautious of bringing more into it, because at the moment, we’ve got a workflow within the business that works for us, and it works for our clients. Keeping in mind that all of our tenants are local. We recognize the differences in market demands from a tech point of view. Some people just prefer a phone call or a face to face or “I’ll come in and see you in your office” as opposed to auto-generated text messages or emails. So we’re conscious of that. But we still want to keep moving forward. 

Rob: Interestingly, now that you’re branching out into non resi and non commercial areas, more farming, are you going to have to bolt some bits onto your tech stack? To give you the information you need, because I know from a lot of regional agents, they complain that existing platforms aren’t really fit for purpose in many ways. 

Rav: We’re definitely finding that. So we’re still in the early stages of incorporating that rural part of the business into our existing tech stack. But this is a brand new area for us. I think bouncing ideas off other businesses that are in that rural sales sector, seeing what they use, how they utilize it – that’s definitely part of our next 12 months. 

Rob: As a shameless plug, but also just our lived experience with Property Edge is that we over index in regional areas because using the map based search, you can just click on things, then you can find the information out very easily. Which, particularly with rural properties and farms is often quite hard because, lot 421 down First Street could be 20 Ks up a dirt road and it’s very hard to distinguish. 

Rav: Very much so. We’re just experiencing that at the moment as we’re trying to incorporate that farming stuff in. 

Rob: Help us understand your staff onboarding, enabling of staff to get the most out of your tech stack through set workflows, because speaking to Luke from OC recently in the last podcast we did, he mentioned they have a different approach, whereas they tailor their tech needs to every staff’s workflow or try and show them how they can use their own workflows. Whereas most businesses tend to have a set workflow they expect staff to go through. How do you get the most out of your tech stack by upskilling your staff? 

Rav: Great question. Through this recent acquisition we’ve had to onboard more people in one hit than we’ve ever had to. So it’s been a great learning experience and I’m definitely not going to sit here and say that our onboarding is five star, a hundred percent. We’re still seeing what works best for us. 

We feel really confident that with our current tech stack, our workflow is good. Bringing in a half a dozen new team members and trying to work through that workflow and keep it consistent and offer consistent service to our clients and make sure internally we’re using the term “pass the baton on to the next person in a nice way” has been a challenge and definitely something we’ve had to refine on the fly. 

We had a plan of this is how we do it, this is how we’re going to onboard. But such is the nature of real estate, even the best laid plans change. So, to answer your question, we always try to refine our workflow and use our existing tech stack and make sure we’re using it to the best of our ability. The onboarding of it has been a challenge, but we’re getting there. 

Rob: It’s not something you’ve had to do or get used to. Some of these larger agencies in Adelaide now they have onboarding teams that they send out because they’re getting so used to acquiring other businesses and bringing them in. 

Rav: As a bit of perspective, Rob, we’ve gone from about 19 team members with maybe one or two that were on parental leave to overnight bumping up to about 27 with two on their way in. That’s been a pretty quick growth for our little business. 

In the cities, I completely understand when they’ve got hundreds of team members, what we’re talking about is small fry. But from a regional point of view, to bring on 33 percent more within your workforce as a small business is significant and comes with challenges. But it’s something we’re really proud of. 

Rob: You could probably help validate a theory that I have that one of the key differences about rural or regional real estate is that you have a very defined market. Your market’s bounded by the beach. Whereas in more metro areas, you might say you’ve got a defined suburb, but everything seems to overlap. 

And so marketing to locals is easier because you can find them at the footy ground, you can find them at the local RSL or wherever you happen to do your community work, but you can also find them in Google ads really easily or Facebook ads. 

So my question to you in a roundabout way is from a marketing perspective and a marketing tech perspective – you would use these tools already, but do you think you’ve got an unfair advantage there given the defined nature of your market? 

Rav: Yes, it’s definitely a benefit of being where we are. Like you said, there’s one road in. If you’re coming over from Adelaide, you generally go the same way through. So it probably is an unfair advantage in that sense. 

If we’re trying to be strategic with our marketing or if we’re focused with what we’re trying to do and who we’re trying to attract from a sales and a property management point of view, we do have an upper hand on our Metro counterparts. But of course there’s other challenges that you face as well. If you go to that same well all the time, sometimes things aren’t going that well, you don’t get the results and that’s the downside.  

So we’re not just purely focused on traditional marketing – we’ve had to look at other ways to broaden what we’re doing. 

Rob: My next question involves support, support when it comes to data, data hygiene, but also IT support in building your platforms up and keeping them humming. Because if there’s one thing that can add value to an agency, if God forbid one day you wanted to sell the thing, it’s having a really clean and large prospect list and customer list that’s well maintained. Have you had much support in that area? 

Rav: Yes, from an IT point of view, we do have some managed assistance from an Adelaide based firm with just general day to day IT. We were trying to handle all that internally, on top of trying to make sure our database is clean and we’re entering data in properly. 

So we decided that we wanted to sort of control our database. AgentBox is our CRM. A lot of the information that goes into there is great if it’s captured and entered in properly. But when we’re trying to manage that with general day to day support and improvements, we thought maybe we’ll centralize the AgentBox and the data inputs. 

We’ve got certain team members, and some checks within our workflow to make sure that if the information isn’t captured correctly, we follow up and get it back and input it. A lot of the AI that we’re using from a prospecting point of view relies heavily on that CRM data being as clean as possible. Is our CRM perfectly clean? Absolutely not. But we just figure if we can try and control what we’re doing right now and continue to look back at what’s in there and fix when we can, for us and the way we’re structured that’s our best bet. 

Rob: Where do you see AI going in real estate? Because there’s some dystopian versions of where it might go where people never talk to humans anymore. But then there’s some really solid use cases, which is just giving practical and easy information to customers in a quickly accessible way without having to bother a human and to ensure the customer gets the answers when they want them. Where do you see that balance and where do you see it going? 

Rav: AI, when we first saw its capabilities probably coming up to two years ago, was a little bit overwhelming and definitely daunting. For us, our view on AI is not that it’s a replacement tool for real estate professionals. It’s just an enhancement tool. Our view is at some point in time, everyone’s going to be using it anyway, in some shape or form. It’s just a matter of how long it takes to get there. So for us we’re testing it. We’ve got some really good team members that are up to speed with how to use it for work and also in their personal lives. 

ChatGPT is probably the simplest example for us. A few years ago, you would have to pay someone if you didn’t know how to write your own listing. If you can prompt ChatGPT properly, it hasn’t replaced the salesperson, it’s just enhanced their ability and given them more time to do other stuff. 

Our view is it’s an enhancement to the service we offer. I’m sure it’s the same with everyone. The face to face or in-person interactions that you have with people are still really important. If you haven’t got that skillset and the ability to do that, sure you might get some results, but we’ve taken that view that to offer a high service and a good place to work, it’s all about people and how you interact with people. 

Rob: All about people. That was the theme probably for the first three episodes of this podcast. Everyone was making it very clear that tech’s important. At the end of the day, it’s people that make the sales, people that have the relationships. 

From an AI perspective, our lived experience at Land Services is that we’re actually going to be relying on a lot of our partners, the software platforms that we use to expand on the AI capability that they have built in, and then we’ll get the benefit. Rather than us trying to cobble something together for our own use. We’ll be doing a bit of that for some specific niche areas, but I can imagine in the real estate world, you’re just essentially waiting for these platforms to come out with some really great stuff that you can then just switch on right away and your team gets benefit from. 

Rav: Absolutely. We’re waiting for them to pull the trigger on a few of these new AI enhancements. And then obviously we want to test them, make sure they work the way we want I’ve been told they’re going to work. I think it’s a really important thing. And then obviously roll it out to our clients if we can. But it’s a bit of a waiting game at the moment. If we can do some stuff in the background just to sort of fill in the blanks, absolutely. We’ve been exploring options. We’re confident that your Reapits and your MRIs of the world are working on the next big thing. 

Rob: And I’d be excited to see what they come up with. Speaking of the next big thing, Christmas is coming up and so on your wishlist for Christmas, what sort of tech tools or data do you wish you had access to, to help your team perform? 

Rav: Really good question. I think some of the data that’s out there that’s been captured by the portals and the way they’ve gone about capturing that has been phenomenal. And the information that they get and derive is really important. I think for us, it’d be great if we had the ability to capture that ourselves and have it within our own CRM, but that’s a difficult thing to do. 

So, the wishlist would be almost as if we had our own portal. We try to navigate and direct towards our website as much as we can. But people are going to look at the portals. So having a system and a website where we could capture that information and be able to share our value with our clients in that sense would be amazing. 

Rob: So just help expand on that. What sort of information, what would you want in the portal? I mean, realestate.com is the big portal that a lot of people go through. I’m assuming that’s what you’re speaking about, right? 

Rav: I think so. I think the model that they’ve got where Rob Turnbull signs up with an account and then when you’re looking for a property you enter in what you’re looking for and that information is stored and you can get alerts. I think in its simplest form, like I said, we use AgentBox. You can do that, but it’s then adding the next layers on top of that, which, hats off to realestate.com. They’ve built this amazing business and system over a long period of time. 

But I think looking at what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and what they’re actually offering as a real estate business, a single office, if we could do something like that, it’d be amazing. That’s my wishlist. Not sure how we get there. 

Rob: REA group, realestate.com’s parent is the most valuable part of News Corp now. So you can see how well they must be doing. 

And on that note, I reckon we might leave it there. Rav thanks so much for sharing your perspective. Some of the key things that I took away were your approach to tech, speaking to other people around the country, getting that vibe from people, understanding how you support your staff with the workflows and the fact that you’re just growing enormously and got some normal growing pains is one that I think a lot of agencies probably will have to start learning about if they’re going to start growing in that similar manner. So anyway, thank you so much for sharing your perspective today. 

Rav: Thanks for having me, Rob. It’s been a pleasure. 

Rob: Listeners, I really hope you have enjoyed today’s episode, talking to a regional industry leader. Thank you for spending the time to listen to this today. If you want any more information about the Property Edge Podcast or the Property Edge platform, head over to propertyedge.app and until the next time, bye bye. 

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.