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Australian real estate businesses are benefiting from a wave of new technology that can greatly increase efficiencies across their workloads – but there’s a catch.
The problem is that these new platforms and programs don’t necessarily work with each other.
During a recent episode of PropTech Pulse, Domain’s chief revenue officer John Foong and the firm’s head of industry and Realbase co-founder Frank Greeff shared some insight into the ways in which tech can fall short if it fails to cut down on time for customers.
Mr Foong recalled a recent conversation with a group of principals operating out of Sydney, in which they revealed how some of the tech platforms they use are stalling their day-to-day operations.
“Their biggest complaint was: ‘We’ve got all this great technology and it all kind of works together, like 50 per cent to 80 per cent. Some of them work together and some of them you have to do double entry, and some of them I can only use on the web and some have to log into a phone,’” Mr Foong shared of the conversation.
In part, the problem has sprung up because Australia has proven to be such a prosperous place to pursue proptech.
Mr Foong described Australia as the “Champions League of the world in real estate” due to how much the country spends on property per capita. These conditions, he said, provide “a lot of fertile ground for some amazing proptech companies. There’s I think 400, 500 out there right now, and I think all of them have that similar mission, which is to return time to folks”.
But while they may deliver time-saving benefits on individual tasks, that fails if the time is spent duplicating the info to use in another program.
That’s why, as the duo explained, the firm is linking up with competitors in the proptech space to ensure that the products they bring to the market work for consumers by integrating to the best of their ability.
“We want to interoperate with everyone, even products that we compete with, so that it’s as easy as possible,” Mr Foong said, but he shared that they, as well as others in the industry, are a long way from seamless cooperation.
Mr Greeff agreed, sharing insight into the size of the task at hand.
“We used to have a saying in our business when we first started, because you look at this absolute mountain, and it’s like, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time – just step by step by step. [Full interoperability] is utopia. But there’s many steps along the way that create big advantages for our clients. There are many individual products that we can bring together,” Mr Greeff explained.
And while Domain has affirmed its commitment to pursuing interoperability, the task almost grows larger every day.
As Mr Foong explained: “In some ways, having technology move faster actually makes the problem bigger because you have more companies, more logins and more innovation.”
For Domain, that means dedicating time and resources to working with them all.
“We know that in order to make those incremental provinces Frank is talking about, we need to be very partnership-minded. So we’ve recently launched a partnership team whose job is literally to just go out and talk to our competitors, our club, and say, ‘Hey, how do we build our products in a way that can make sure they play well together?’” Mr Foong said.
Though it might sound like an unusual business strategy to be supporting the competition, the duo agreed that the winner will be the one that makes things as easy as possible for the property professionals they serve.
“We’re not there yet. We’re not there yet where we could have a single sign on across multiple different products, where we could have data transfer through APIs. The companies that can figure that out and make it easy – you enter it once and it’s all downstream throughout the buying and selling process – that’s where the returns will be and that’s where we want to play. But that’s what utopia looks like, and we’re certainly not there yet in our profession,” Mr Foong concluded.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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