Building a special culture

Transcript

Peter Fletcher

[00:00:00] Peter Fletcher: Welcome to the WA Property Q& A, the podcast where I explore the ins and outs of buying property in Western Australia. I’m your host Peter Fletcher and each week I interview local property experts to help you to develop a deep understanding of the nuances of buying property in WA. From market trends to legal considerations, no topic is off limits.

But before we dive in, a friendly reminder, while we provide valuable information, it’s important to note that nothing discussed in this podcast should be construed as personal investment advice. Always remember to seek the appropriate professional advice for your specific circumstances. Now, let’s get started and unlock the secrets to successful property buying in WA.

Well, welcome. Michelle Rigg.

[00:00:51] Michelle Rigg: Hi Peter.

[00:00:52] Peter Fletcher: I’ve been waiting for months to get you on the podcast.

[00:00:54] Michelle Rigg: Oh, I didn’t know I was so booked out and so popular. You

[00:00:57] Peter Fletcher: know that. Oh my God. And so, for those who’ve, who don’t know, Michelle is the General Manager, is that right? That’s right. Yeah. Of RentWest. RentWest manage about 1, 800?

2, 000. We’ve just

[00:01:15] Michelle Rigg: kicked over now.

[00:01:16] Peter Fletcher: Oh, congratulations. Yeah. That is a big milestone.

[00:01:19] Michelle Rigg: It is. No, we’re really happy with that.

[00:01:21] Peter Fletcher: 2000 managements.

[00:01:22] Michelle Rigg: Jumped over, yep.

[00:01:23] Peter Fletcher: Wow, that is awesome. Did you have a party for your 2000th property?

[00:01:28] Michelle Rigg: Well, no, we’ve just kicked over, but we’ve had a bit happening. We’ve changed programs and on boarded some new team members and everything.

So, but I think we’re, next couple of weeks we’ll be doing some celebrating.

[00:01:37] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, fair enough. Now I just wanted to get the Michelle Riggs story.

[00:01:43] Michelle Rigg: Ooh.

[00:01:43] Peter Fletcher: Where did real estate start, property management start?

[00:01:46] Michelle Rigg: 1987, straight out of Secretarial College. 1987. I know. I worked for a small agency in Inglewood, a Mount Lawley, Russell Realty.

And then I moved over to JJ Burns. So some people would remember Jim Burns. Jim Burns, yes. Yes. I worked there and progressed my career up through. I’ve been a business owner, been a partnership of multiple offices, so one, at one time and then, so where was

[00:02:10] Peter Fletcher: that?

[00:02:11] Michelle Rigg: We had offices, we had Century offices in Bayswater Allenbrook, Ballsbrook, North Perth.

[00:02:17] Peter Fletcher: Did you say Century 21?

[00:02:18] Michelle Rigg: Yeah.

[00:02:19] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, okay.

[00:02:20] Michelle Rigg: Yeah, myself and John Van was my partner. So it’s been a journey and then I did a great time up with the Harcourts Alliance team up there with Ben Bernacchini, Ben Bernacchi and his team and then parted ways with them and my final journeys then ended me with Suzanne Brown at RentWest Solution and I’m absolutely loving it back together.

Can you tick over my 10 years come the end of this year?

[00:02:41] Peter Fletcher: Long service, Leigh.

[00:02:43] Michelle Rigg: Oh, that’s holidays, isn’t it? Yeah, I’ve got planning a big holiday next year.

[00:02:47] Peter Fletcher: Does

[00:02:47] Michelle Rigg: Sue

[00:02:47] Peter Fletcher: know about it yet?

[00:02:48] Michelle Rigg: She does. Well, we were supposed to go this year, but unfortunately, Fee, my partner, broke her ankle, so we postponed it. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yep.

[00:02:56] Peter Fletcher: So, you spent some time with Ben Bernanke and Harcourt’s Alliance, they are a pretty slick operation.

[00:03:04] Michelle Rigg: They are, and Sam Raleigh’s been doing a great job up there with their property management team and they’ve grown exponentially since I’ve been with them, so no, they’re doing great.

[00:03:13] Peter Fletcher: And you’ve always specialized in property management?

[00:03:15] Michelle Rigg: Property management is me. I’ve never sold a place in my life. And it’s not for me. I love property management, but really actually I love working with the people in property management, empowering them and looking at procedures in different ways, efficiencies and just different ways that we can do property management really to make it easier for the property managers and the owners, tenants, everybody that we deal with.

That’s what I love about it.

[00:03:39] Peter Fletcher: You guys have. I’ve long, since the start of Rent West, I’ve looked at you guys and I’ve thought, you’ve just got something special going on at Rent West, like it’s a special culture. How do you describe it and how do you get there?

[00:03:53] Michelle Rigg: Well, we don’t, we have expectations.

I hate the word KPIs. We have expectations of, your entries and all that stuff. But really our key point that we gauge how our team’s performing, performing it on is the experiences that we create. So our whole philosophy is about creating great experiences. For ourselves everybody that we touch, people looking for houses, new owners, what, looking at investment properties, our owners, our tenants, just, it is focused around giving a great experience.

And you can actually give a great experience even when you’re evicting somebody, because they’ve been a bit of a knobhead. And we’ve actually had great responses back from people like that, who have appreciative of being treated respectfully and as a human. Rather than some of the other, template emails.

And that can be very direct and inhuman, and so our focus is all around that human side, the feelings and everything. But it is about when you can give great experiences, then you get those, good thoughts and feelings back yourself. And that’s what our whole philosophy is about.

[00:04:51] Peter Fletcher: Why don’t you like KPIs?

[00:04:53] Michelle Rigg: Look, I don’t like KPIs because they’re very focused only on the figure, but when you’re dealing with property management, there are so many things that that we can’t control. So having a KPI around arrears is fine, but we can’t control, we can’t force the tenant to pay.

It’s what we do to minimize and the actions we take. And so long as we’re doing those, we actually can’t make the humans pay the money. So to, to track somebody and say, you’re not performing well because your tenants are not paying their rent on time when there’s so many different demographics as well.

And we manage properties all over this 150 Ks a purse, and there are different dynamics in. Demographics and everything in all those areas. And we even stopped sort of doing, we used to have competitions in the team. We we essentially operate North, South and Central. But even that really wasn’t fair because what was happening South and North and South pretty much balance each other out and what’s happening because of, the outer suburbs and.

Areas there to our central team. It actually wasn’t a fair competition, so they are important. It’s absolutely important for us that our team go by our processes. You can go a little bit outside the line, but you can’t go all the way out the line. And that’s because when they do that, they break our communications and our experiences, and they also break it down the line for the other really important people that are involved in all those workflows as well.

So those things are really important for us. We consider, but so we do have expectations, but we don’t penalize somebody for the other human not doing what they’re supposed to do.

[00:06:20] Peter Fletcher: Does

[00:06:20] Michelle Rigg: that make sense?

[00:06:21] Peter Fletcher: When you say processes, so you’ve, your processes are pretty well structured, are they?

[00:06:27] Michelle Rigg: Yes. Yes, we do.

We do have we use Airtable for our workflow. Processors, which is great, it gives us automations and everything like that. But it is really important that they flow through, because we have a fantastic team in the Philippines that do most of the backend admin work for us, so it’s really important that everything flows through and people get the triggers at the right time that they need them to do their jobs.

[00:06:47] Peter Fletcher: So you use Airtable and you use your trust accounting software at the, concurrently?

[00:06:54] Michelle Rigg: Yes we do. So I’ve just done a journey of looking at all the software programs and they’re all working on checklists and workflows. Probably that’s one of my little frustrations with the software companies that none of them have got there yet.

None of them have got there to the point where, you know, the Airtable platform that we’re using gives us flags and triggers that just tells the property managers, this is what I have to work on today. So I, we, if we focus on working in a brain friendly way and when the humans have to remember to change settings or, filter things and all that, when their minds are really busy, it just doesn’t work.

And then they just looking at this overwhelming list of tasks, the half of them may not necessarily need their attention right there and then.

[00:07:33] Peter Fletcher: So

[00:07:34] Michelle Rigg: the Airtable platform gives us those things saying five vacates that need your action today. There might be 10 vacates on there, These five are the only ones that need your action, and it does it in a way with

some automation and just some simple things, whereas the workflows on the other programs need more work.

[00:07:50] Peter Fletcher: And

[00:07:51] Michelle Rigg: look, we’ve just transitioned to Colmio and Colmio has its requests and everything. And so now we’re going through that process of saying, what do we bring back to just requests? What do we bring to Airtable? But without that automation, we will still progress with Airtable.

[00:08:05] Peter Fletcher: So how does, so, so your property managers the day-to-Day property managers, assistant property managers, are they are they in Airtable and in Callo, like at the same time?

Or do you have one team in Airtable and another team in Callo? Or how does it work?

[00:08:22] Michelle Rigg: So we

[00:08:23] Peter Fletcher: and I, the reason I ask this, Michelle, is a bit of background. We had in our, the settlement agency side of our business. We were running something similar to Airtable, which was teamwork, and we were running SETS Plus, and my team found it incredibly difficult to run the two side by side.

They were ah, just let’s do it in one spot.

[00:08:45] Michelle Rigg: Yeah, so the way we’ve set up Airtable is that the property managers don’t actually need to go to the property management platform to do things. Only if they were going to email from that platform, but we still use Outlook as our core platform.

So the way we set it up, they can do a whole vacate workflow and just sit in that air table card. They might have to go to Commio just to look at, to pick up a rent paid to date or something like that. But essentially it’s all there. And the information they put in there gets triggered across and our wonderful admin team then fill in the blanks over on the other platform.

So we’re very much. Trying to reduce the platforms we’re on, but we can’t do that until they’re doing what we need them to do. So we, then we try to streamline our work so that you’re not switching in and switching out a lot.

[00:09:30] Peter Fletcher: It must be, must’ve been, you spent a lot of time building those systems, I imagine.

[00:09:36] Michelle Rigg: Well, we didn’t build it, but we’re paying a lot of subscriptions. So that’s another reason, the, and I think that’s a challenge for businesses at the moment is the number of subscriptions, to work effectively and in, in a nice smooth way is challenging, especially in property management.

You’ve got your specialists in inspections, you’ve got your pro core property management programs. You’ve got your programs that handle your applications and your home opens, and then you might have your workflow program on the other side. And, your outlook. So there’s still too many applications, but I don’t want the prop, the property management programs trying to be everything either.

Cause that’s a big ask. And then only things get done half. There’s some great inspection companies, The application companies that are doing it, so let’s just get the property management workflow working really well.

[00:10:22] Peter Fletcher: The the only time I think it’s the only time I ever got close to being in court, pre trial conference I got to, And the, we were using REST at the time, so all of our risk management was done in REST.

So we’d have all the notes and the communications and all that sort of stuff inside of REST and it saved our bacon, so that was great. Where do you do all your risk management?

[00:10:49] Michelle Rigg: Well, they’re either on the Airtable workflow, so they’re all in that card, or if we’re doing a request in Colmio, they’re all there.

So it’s actually quite, they’re in the area where they need to be. And we, because we operate out of essentially three mile accounts, North, South and Central, we don’t delete it. We’ve set it up so that it goes to the archive delete, but nothing ever gets deleted. So we can actually suck out emails pretty quickly.

Wherever a day. So I’m comfortable with that. We control, we know where all our communications are and that we can access the information that we need.

[00:11:21] Peter Fletcher: How does your emails work?

[00:11:23] Michelle Rigg: How we must?

[00:11:24] Peter Fletcher: Yeah.

[00:11:25] Michelle Rigg: With the team email accounts?

[00:11:26] Peter Fletcher: Yeah.

[00:11:26] Michelle Rigg: Yeah. So each team operates. So if

[00:11:29] Peter Fletcher: I ask a question that you don’t want to public, just.

[00:11:32] Michelle Rigg: Oh no we’re. We’re actually happy for anybody to come into our office and see the way that we work. We don’t have any worries about that. So each of our team have an Office 365 account because that’s pretty critical in subscriptions and everything like that. So they use, and some of the programs, obviously you can’t just have one.

Sign in, but as far as our clients go and our software program is set up like this so that the email that goes out to our clients is South, North or Central. So all the client emails come in there. If

[00:11:59] Peter Fletcher: I send an email from Peter at Resi, it would come from South at Resi. Is that right?

[00:12:08] Michelle Rigg: Yep.

[00:12:09] Peter Fletcher: Or, yeah, one of those three email addresses.

[00:12:11] Michelle Rigg: Yeah.

[00:12:12] Peter Fletcher: Why do you do that?

[00:12:13] Michelle Rigg: It we changed back in 2016 actually we had a conference over, over East it was oh, I can’t remember the name of the conference now, it was one of Ben White’s conferences. But they were talking about the bigger team. And so we changed and we had big teams probably about six in each team managing large portfolios.

That didn’t work because there was a lack of accountability. Nobody wanted to take ownership because, it was that challenge of people were already property managers and nobody was wanting to remove, move their statuses as people. Humans don’t like to do that, but from that, it came out, the the team came to us and we knew that wasn’t working, but they said they wanted their accountability of their own portfolio, but they loved the collaboration of the team email accounts.

So we kept, we went back to portfolio management, so now we have a combination of property managers who manage their own portfolios, property managers who have large portfolios with assistants, but they’re operating out of those team email accounts where it’s really beneficial. Thank you. Is the collaboration and support.

So everybody can see what’s coming in. So they drag it into their folders and they work out of that. But if somebody is out on inspections all day, if they’re on holidays, if they’re sick, then everybody has access to the email accounts

[00:13:21] Peter Fletcher: and

[00:13:21] Michelle Rigg: on an overarching way, if Sue and I need to jump in and look at anything or help out, it’s very easy for us to jump in to three email accounts than it is to, 15 or 16 email accounts.

But that’s support. So, and it happens all the time. So property managers are out or, sick, which you can’t predict. It’s very easy for people to jump on, give them support they need and help them. You’re not having to forward emails, and we have people leave us, they go on their own journeys, no email change for the clients.

It’s just a smooth transition. Just keep doing what you’re doing. It works very well. The main reason is that collaboration and that experience from the clients.

[00:13:59] Peter Fletcher: So an email comes in to South at Rent West. How does the team members know who’s that, who does that belong to?

[00:14:07] Michelle Rigg: They manage in pretty much in areas.

We’ve got a bit of cross now with our growth and everything, but people are familiar with the areas that people manage and if one gets popped into somebody’s box by mistake, it just goes back into the other box. So there’s not really an issue with that. So that, and usually whoever’s on first just sorts the emails out and then during the day they.

Sort them out as they come in. So that hasn’t been a problem. If they don’t know where it is, they just leave it and whoever it is, we’ll pick it up. So that’s not a problem. So we our property managers work from home except for Mondays and Thursdays because, 150 Ks of Perth, they can’t come to our office in Applecross all the time.

So they live around the areas where they work.

[00:14:44] Peter Fletcher: That sounds like a I’ve long. I knew about that email system and I think it’s there’s something in that. So could somebody give their email address? Like if I had a Peter at Rentwest, I could say, you just email me direct?

[00:14:58] Michelle Rigg: Yes, they can. And we have had that and we’ve had that, it takes some time for new people to learn.

But when we pick up on that it’s a training thing. And we, once they understand the benefits of that and the reasons, then they’re okay. If it continues, then that’s a different conversation.

[00:15:12] Peter Fletcher: Okay. Yeah. So yeah, and

[00:15:13] Michelle Rigg: generally people then start emailing the person and the team email account, because there’s a reason why that’s happening.

[00:15:21] Peter Fletcher: Yep. Yep. And when the email is sent, it gets sent as south at rentwest. com. au.

[00:15:28] Michelle Rigg: Yes. Yes. We would love it to be able to say, Michelle at South, Michelle Rigg in that, but there’s challenges with that, with the Microsoft that we can’t personalize it.

So we’ve had to just settle with it going out with South.

[00:15:40] Peter Fletcher: They will have

[00:15:41] Michelle Rigg: their own email signatures on there.

[00:15:42] Peter Fletcher: Oh, do they? Yes. Okay.

[00:15:44] Michelle Rigg: Individual email signatures with the team email account.

[00:15:47] Peter Fletcher: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, that works.

[00:15:49] Michelle Rigg: Yeah.

[00:15:50] Peter Fletcher: Yeah.

[00:15:51] Michelle Rigg: And we’ve been able to mimic that through Colmio as well so that the emails are going out through those South, North and Central email accounts because that, that can always be a challenge that software programs may not cater for that.

So we’ve been really lucky in there, the software programs that we’ve been using.

[00:16:05] Peter Fletcher: Sounds like there’s an Office 365 integration there with Colmio.

[00:16:09] Michelle Rigg: Not quite an integration, but they were able to set up those emails for us. I’m not sure that back end IT side, but it’s it’s working.

[00:16:16] Peter Fletcher: Now you did something unique in the real estate industry.

And I would argue in business generally, you went to a four day work week for a while. Tell me, how did that start and how did it go? And where is it at right now?

[00:16:34] Michelle Rigg: Well, to start with is pause right now, because when we’re going through software, major things like software transitions and everything, everybody needs to be on board.

We’re about to start that conversation again. It started because Suzanne’s always, think that’s a leader in the industry of how respectful she is of her team and how acknowledging she is of the work that they do. And the fact is I always,

[00:16:55] Peter Fletcher: sorry, I’m just going to interrupt there. I always feel like Suzanne is a real nurturer.

[00:17:00] Michelle Rigg: Yes.

[00:17:01] Peter Fletcher: Just, I have a coffee or a catch up with her and I just feel like she’s, she just wants to take care of you. Yeah, we

[00:17:09] Michelle Rigg: balance out each other really well.

[00:17:14] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, whatever, Michelle.

[00:17:19] Michelle Rigg: I will say, so we are different personalities, which works really well. But we did do one of the EOS surveys probably about a couple of years ago and we were, and we were only two points apart. So we’re very aligned in, in how the team is to work and the cohesiveness and where the business is going.

[00:17:34] Peter Fletcher: EOS survey?

[00:17:35] Michelle Rigg: Yeah, the traction, the Traction, the book Traction?

[00:17:39] Peter Fletcher: No, that’s something I

[00:17:40] Michelle Rigg: need to explore. Yes. But Suzanne is, she is very conscious of the team and especially as we are at, or women, we do have one gentleman in the Philippines working for us and that’s, it’s not, we’ve welcomed the gentleman.

It’s just the way that things have gone. I’ve

[00:17:54] Peter Fletcher: been dropping hints for the last 10 years. You’re in a job. You guys just ignore me. I

[00:18:01] Michelle Rigg: haven’t seen a resume. I think I’ve, I think I’ve put you in the,

[00:18:03] Peter Fletcher: the block, do not employ. God damn it. The only job I ever wanted in Perth and you guys won’t even talk to me.

Well, that’s how it’s going to go.

[00:18:15] Michelle Rigg: So Sue heard about the four day work week and, we’re clever. We tried it in 2019. We thought we’ll have two staff members to give it a go. Just do this, right? It’ll work. It didn’t work, funnily enough. So we parked it and then Then along

[00:18:30] Peter Fletcher: come COVID and forced it on you.

[00:18:32] Michelle Rigg: Well, we then came the global trial of the four day work week. And so we actually paid for the world trial for the global trial. And that, and I think what I learned in that is that in anything that you do, you actually need to take the time to find out how it’s going to work and learn about the things that you need to do to make, to set it up for success.

So the three months prior to us, well, it was probably six months prior to us going on the trial, we did webinars, we did workshops with the people from the four day workweek trial, and we found tips of efficiencies. And it’s like, ah. It’s those aha moments saying, Oh, that’s what we should have done.

Not just off you go, just fine tune your work, change your calendar. You’ll be fine. It was about how do we structure our days? How do we look at our chronotype? So when is the best time for our team to work? So it really comes down to all those things.

[00:19:19] Peter Fletcher: Chronotype. I know. This is getting high tech.

[00:19:22] Michelle Rigg: I know. And it’s it, and look, we are flexible. We do, we’ve always had a flexible mindset. We were always working from home, even before COVID. And it cracks me out. Cause as soon as COVID hit, I’d get these phone calls. How do we know they’re going to be working? I said, how do you know they’re working from their desks?

I don’t, I can’t even see over my monitors. So, that was something that was very big for us. We went down the journey and it was a success. We had a couple of bumps on the way where we did some resets and it has been a success. We sort of lost a bit of focus and this is another lesson that you can’t, it’s never set and forget.

You’ve always got to be like checking in, tweaking, reviewing, because things change as we go. So, and we’ve had a, we’ve, our team has grown, like we’re now 40 people in our office. So that’s just grown, over the last six months, it’s just really jumped up. So a lot of change in the people who are working with us and we’ve got a fantastic team overall, but that changes a few things.

So we paused it with our software change and we’re about to start the conversations again. But these conversations will be a bit different. Different in, because we also want to give people career opportunities as well. So some people might be, do you know what? I’d rather manage a larger portfolio, earn more money concept sort of thing, rather than, it’s working 80 percent of the time for a hundred percent of the job for a hundred percent pay and getting that four day work week, cause then you set that limit.

So, and for some other people, it might not be the four days. It might be they need a different structure because of their family. So we will be taking a different approach, but we will offer the four day work week. We will offer the ability for somebody to perhaps take a different approach with their career.

We’ll have it. We’ll also talk about different other flexibilities.

[00:21:06] Peter Fletcher: How do you manage? Conversations that go, well, she’s doing that many properties, we’re working four days and I’m doing this many properties. Why aren’t I in, like.

[00:21:18] Michelle Rigg: Well, each conversation is a individual conversation with the people, but we are very open.

We are, everything’s open, but we were having these sessions called Our Space where a team would make lunch and Sue and I’d sit there and we’d say, ask us any questions. Nobody asked us questions, so we stopped them. But anyway, but we are but that’s probably because we’re actually, they can ask us questions anytime.

They don’t, it doesn’t have to be a special moment. It, and so we just talk through with the people about their portfolio, what’s happening on that portfolio at the moment with where the new builds are. There’s a lot of work in new builds. So somebody would struggle managing a full portfolio plus dealing with new builds business coming in.

And people have different strengths. So I don’t have any problem with sitting down with somebody and talking through how their portfolio’s been managed, where, how they’re going, and if they want to get to this point, how can we get them? Get them there. But it’s very individual conversations.

[00:22:08] Peter Fletcher: And how do you manage, measure the productivity of a property manager?

[00:22:15] Michelle Rigg: I won’t say we’ve got that down perfectly because there’s so many different areas of communications coming in, it’s very hard to track, phone calls and how many interruptions they’re getting and all that. But for us, those team email accounts are a good indicator as well as our workflows and what’s happening on the property management software programs.

I mean our big trigger in anything, and this was our trigger in the four day work week, if our So every Monday we start with a kickstart and we read out the good comments that everybody gets. And that’s the combination of the comments we get from real satisfied surveys, which are bloody long surveys.

And when people take the time then to write a comment, you’re like going, well, that’s. You must’ve made an impression. We encourage the team to share the, just the ad hoc ones, which are my favorite because it hasn’t even been

prompted. When those things stop or we start to get some phone calls coming in with some grumples, then we say, right, what’s happening?

Because that’s our trigger, our customer experience. We sit down with that person and we talk through it and we just find out what’s going on. Then of course, there’s the other underlying, like, More, I guess, what you’d come under the umbrella of the KPI figures that people monitor. So we do monitor them.

It’s not that we don’t, but our focus is about the experience that we’re giving. And when you’re giving a great experience, you’re communicating with people, all those things sort of fall into place anyway.

[00:23:35] Peter Fletcher: Okay. So that’s from a customer experience point of view. What about from a financial performance perspective?

Do you, would you measure like the income coming in from a portfolio as a sort of unit of

[00:23:47] Michelle Rigg: Well now we will be, because we can get those figures. On our previous software program getting those figures was a bit of a challenge. So, now with the reports coming from Colmeo, we can actually drill it down to, The actual portfolios, we

[00:24:00] Peter Fletcher: Really?

You couldn’t get that before? No. See I think that in a, any sort of business, any sort of software, that’s one of those things that, like I, I need to know how much is Michelle Rigg contributing to this business? Like, and, cause you, you often hear people going, Oh, I’m so busy. I’m snowed under and all that sort of stuff.

And you look at the actual numbers they’re doing and it’s going

[00:24:28] Michelle Rigg: But again a portfolio around Vic Park, East Vic Park will be the same numbers, but very different income, very different fee income portfolio up north. So I think there’s certainly income is a measure that you must do. And Suzanne we have meetings about obviously the finances and things, but Suzanne is the controller and the one who focused on that.

My focus is the team. and the day to day transactions. But we certainly do monitor and keep a tight rein on our income and expenditures. But the previous program, and I can tell you what it is because it’s not going to be operating in property management anymore, it was Vault RE, was lacking in those types of reports for us to get off.

And so that was a frustration for us to be able to drill down to that level. But as I say, it’s important information to know, but I think then you’ve got to also be balanced in knowing the demographics and the areas that may be impacting that level of income as well.

[00:25:17] Peter Fletcher: Yeah. Cause if you had a portfolio in the Western suburbs, it would, you’d argue that it would be more profitable.

[00:25:25] Michelle Rigg: I’d also argue that it would be more challenging

[00:25:28] Peter Fletcher: too.

[00:25:29] Michelle Rigg: So that’s why I’m saying that’s why, it’s just

[00:25:31] Peter Fletcher: one signal.

[00:25:32] Michelle Rigg: Yes. Yeah. And everything matters. And KPIs matter. Income matter. For us our real conscious one is the experiences, but we’re still looking at all of those points. They all matter. It’s, it just focus wise, it probably goes down a tier.

[00:25:47] Peter Fletcher: So when you pause the four day work week, Michelle you’ve got a group of people that are doing like, 100 percent productivity, shall we say, working 80 percent of the time, which is That’s the, like, gold for an employee. And then you say, well, that’s no longer going to happen because we’ve got this software.

Now you’re effectively saying, well, we want you to do 120 percent of productivity. That is 100 percent of what you’re doing, plus do this other stuff, and we’re not going to pay you any more. Is there any kickback there?

[00:26:22] Michelle Rigg: No, absolutely not. Don’t forget the four day workweek. The day off is a gift, gifted day.

It’s not a given. So at any point in time we could have called that in anyway. And we had You were

[00:26:32] Peter Fletcher: very clear about that, are you?

[00:26:34] Michelle Rigg: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s a privilege. It’s not a day off. It is a gifted day.

[00:26:39] Peter Fletcher: And,

[00:26:39] Michelle Rigg: And it goes right through to our receptionist. Now receptionist had to come in because whoever was covering her was sick.

Said, got to come in, got nobody else.

[00:26:47] Peter Fletcher: Yep.

[00:26:47] Michelle Rigg: And when we rolled it out, we said to the property managers, right, Mandy, our receptionist needs to be in this. It can’t just be you guys. So how are we going to cover her day? So they do half a day, once every three months, I think to cover it. And it’s actually good for them to be on receptionist, reception for that time.

But we’re very open with everything that we do. We didn’t have a choice to change software. It wasn’t a thing we’d planned, but it was a journey that we had to go down. So we did. It’s an open conversation. And even during the four day work week, we said to the guys, if you’ve got a problem going on, don’t let it stop you.

Sizzle, just get on the phone, deal with it. It’s going to make it easy for you. So we have that with the with that conversation anyway. And I think that’s the thing with us. We’re open, the team can ask us any question. So long as it’s not exposing anything personal about anybody, we’ll answer it.

[00:27:33] Peter Fletcher: Yeah. So Michelle Sue gave me this book to read once, or told me to read this book called The Speed of Trust.

[00:27:41] Michelle Rigg: Oh, I haven’t read that one.

[00:27:42] Peter Fletcher: Oh,

[00:27:42] Michelle Rigg: wow.

[00:27:43] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, and I got about, I don’t know, 20 percent through it. And I think it was by Stephen Covey’s son. Maybe he’s Stephen Covey the second or something. And I got to about 20 percent through it.

And it was all a bit woo to me. I was just like, Oh, I actually think you guys are onto something. And I think that this mindset of. Radical trust is, I think you’re onto something that I’m missing.

[00:28:12] Michelle Rigg: If look, do we have to have some tough conversations with our team? Do we have to bring some of them in and say, look, we’re just going to work with you a bit closer for now and get you back on track?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. If you can’t trust the people that are working on your team, I don’t know. I don’t know. Are they the right people for you then?

[00:28:30] Peter Fletcher: Like

[00:28:31] Michelle Rigg: if you’re sitting there saying. I have to watch you. You have to come to the office 9 a. m. before you go back out to home and do your inspections and things like that.

Are they the right people on your team?

[00:28:40] Peter Fletcher: It’s, and I’ll

[00:28:41] Michelle Rigg: tell you what, our team are far more efficient working from home than they are in

[00:28:47] Peter Fletcher: the

[00:28:48] Michelle Rigg: office, but those times in the office are also so important because the connection, the team connection and everything. Is really important for our culture and for them as well, we have a rule. Before you sit down, you walk around, you say good morning to everyone. Every, anybody who’s in, and that number one, if you’ve had a shitty drive in, or you just, your mind’s offset, it starts changing because as soon as you start saying good morning out loud, it starts changing your mindset.

And number two, you get to say, speak to people who are not in your team and that you don’t talk with every day. So just those little things that we bring into our daily practices make a big difference. It’s, but. I don’t know, that, that thing, like, how do I know they’re working? Well, I don’t know.

Like, if you really have to ask that question, then that probably poses more questions.

[00:29:34] Peter Fletcher: I like your focus on experience. It’s a good way of putting your finger on the pulse and it probably picks up that, that issue of, well, who can I trust? Well, you can trust the person that is producing good experiences because they don’t come from a vacuum.

And same thing with those. Who are producing bad experiences. Well, they’re the ones you’re going to sit down and, as you said, work a bit closer with.

[00:29:59] Michelle Rigg: And look, it’s not easy coming to an office like ours, even for property managers who’ve been in the industry for a while, because we have such a different mindset towards our clients, our owners and our tenants.

They’re both important to us. Yes, the owner pays us. Without the tenants, it’s yin and yang.

[00:30:14] Peter Fletcher: And

[00:30:16] Michelle Rigg: we’ve got A number of tenants who are now our owners as well. And some owners are now our tenants, which is really interesting. But anyway so, but it is, they’re all important, but they’re all humans.

That’s the thing that frustrates me. Why are we treating tenants? Why are we putting them in this box over here and treating them not like a person and dictating to them, you’ll get more out of it by building, being respectful, even when they’re the ones being the numbnut,

[00:30:43] Peter Fletcher: Is the four day work week, could you do a hybrid of the four day work week?

We can have a, like a a 19 day month or whatever that

[00:30:51] Michelle Rigg: might look like. See, that’s the thing. I think that’s where people were, four days, but it is, the four days isn’t for everybody. Some people just like to have, like to do their job, but like to work at their pace. The four day work week is, you’re focused, you’re doing your stuff, you do, Let’s face it, people are on Facebook, they’re making personal calls, they’re dropping to shops during your normal day, your normal work.

So that’s what this is about. Just focus, get your work done, then you know you’ve got a day to do that stuff on, right? So some people don’t want to work like that. And then that’s why we’re going down and having those conversations. We had one person who did two half days. And that was her family situation.

So I think it is it’s an individual conversation with the person. As I said, there’s some people who say, you know what, I’ve got this goal in life that I want to get to this point. So I’m happy to work, work, work and get there. And then I might

change my mind. There’s people who with us then eventually, they have young kids and family, so their situation changes.

So I think it’s an individual conversation with everybody in your team. Now we’re in office set up. That I could probably say that we can cater for most situations. Our trigger is it has to work for our team. It has to work for our clients and it has to work for the person. So it’s not just a one tick.

It’s got to tick a few boxes before those things go into play. Because it can’t be somebody gets this work structure, but the burden then follows on their rest of their team. So it’s got to be balanced.

[00:32:13] Peter Fletcher: Now you’ve just moved over to Colmeo.

[00:32:16] Michelle Rigg: We have.

[00:32:17] Peter Fletcher: Tell me about Colmeo.

[00:32:19] Michelle Rigg: Colmeo is a property management platform obviously, but it does do things differently.

It does flow money differently. It’s not trustless. It does have a trust account to cater for the bonds and, things that just happened that just need, you To sit over the trust, they can’t flow through the system. Look, I looked at all the software programs. I find that they’re all pretty much on a level.

They’re just a bit of a, one does this good, one does that good. Colmio was the one that ticked our boxes. And yes, we like the fact that it does do the money flow differently. And the team, the people in Colmio fit with our culture and our mindset as well, which is really important for us. Like all onboarding, it has its challenges, but I think we’re now at the back end of that and just moving on and looking at how we can efficiently use the program.

[00:33:03] Peter Fletcher: If there’s no trust account, how do you deal with accounts payable?

[00:33:08] Michelle Rigg: So the money comes in, what invoices are in, gets paid immediately. And then if we need to ask the owner to send funds, then they can send funds to that invoice. I think one thing, and it will be interesting as marketplace change, because the rents at the level they are now pay most of the accounts as the money flows through.

Your fortnightly rent’s pretty high now, so they tick the boxes on most of that thing. We’ve had to ask, and no different than before, because we were always conscious of paying our contractors in a timely manner. So with your big invoices, it’s no different than what we were asking owners to send funds.

That we’re asking them to send funds for now.

[00:33:43] Peter Fletcher: So you ask them to send funds to you?

[00:33:45] Michelle Rigg: To where they, with Commio, they send it to a BPAY that just goes through and pays that invoice straight away.

[00:33:50] Peter Fletcher: Pays the invoice straight away. That’s good.

[00:33:53] Michelle Rigg: So we don’t, so then we don’t touch that money. It just goes there and goes straight out again.

So.

[00:33:57] Peter Fletcher: One of the risks in a trust account, in trust accounting is that someone. changes the bank account details on a supplier’s invoice to their own. How do you protect against that?

[00:34:10] Michelle Rigg: So there’s restrictions on who can change the bank account details.

And there’s also reports that come out and show us all those changes as well.

[00:34:17] Peter Fletcher: Are the, what’s the client experience so far?

[00:34:22] Michelle Rigg: Do you know what? And lessons you learn, the minority are very loud. So, we certainly had, there’s always in, in any changeover. And this was a big changeover because it was a different experience for our team, our owners and our tenants.

The owners were receiving money a different way. Our tenants were paying their rent now by direct debit and different ways. So the big change, three way. When I look at it. And I said, noise is loud, but it was only about 10 to 15 percent that were bit

[00:34:51] Peter Fletcher: grumbly. From owners or tenants?

[00:34:54] Michelle Rigg: Mixture, both.

[00:34:55] Peter Fletcher: Mixture.

[00:34:55] Michelle Rigg: Both. So I think, and that certainly 10

[00:34:58] Peter Fletcher: to 15 percent across a portfolio of 2000, that’s a lot of noise.

[00:35:03] Michelle Rigg: It was a lot of noise. It was, but we were good. We had great team dealing with it. Was it a bit crazy there for a while? Sure. It was. Did we quite know what to expect?

I don’t think you can ever really prepare for that.

[00:35:17] Peter Fletcher: And

[00:35:18] Michelle Rigg: The first end of the month, we were like going, what do we do? Do we send emails out? Do we do that? And I said, you know what? I said, I have no idea what the response is going to be, so let’s not put all these processes in place. And do you know what?

At the end of the month just went and went, okay, all right, great. So I think that’s what we do in life, don’t we? We spend most of our time worrying about things that may or may not happen and generally speaking most of them don’t happen. So we didn’t worry about it. But we did have some challenging times, so I won’t, lie about that, but we’re on the back end of it now and the overall feedback, as I said, from 85, 90 percent of the owners and tenants is good.

[00:35:51] Peter Fletcher: Do you foresee the day where real estate agents will be able to operate without a trust account?

I Or property managers, I should say.

[00:36:00] Michelle Rigg: I do from paying rent and paying owners. The challenges that we have is that you’re dealing with companies like insurance companies to get them to pay to, BPAY accounts or to a specific You know, process that’s not a bank account can be challenging.

Although there’s different ways of thinking now with pay code and things like that. So, and this is one of the pay options from the tenants, actually, they can have a pay code number that’s just for them. So you could almost, as the

program develops, you have a pay code for that property and that’s where that money goes.

But at the moment the trust account’s there to deal with the bonds and like things like insurance claims and that sort of coming in essentially.

[00:36:35] Peter Fletcher: Do you think Colmio will ever go after the private landlord market?

[00:36:39] Michelle Rigg: No idea. I’m not even going to answer that because, who knows with the world.

I mean, it’s a property management software program, so I don’t know how that would work with you, with your sort of one owner, sort of. I think, I mean, if an owner had 20 or so properties, maybe, I don’t know. That’s not one I can answer.

[00:36:57] Peter Fletcher: So what’s the biggest frustration in your business now?

[00:37:02] Michelle Rigg: It’s a I suppose right now for us is just getting up to speed, looking at our processes and really streamlining them and getting those workflows right so that our team can really work in the way that they’re used to working. I wouldn’t, it’s not a frustration as such. I don’t know. I mean, Sue and I had one of our.

Meetings, level 10 meetings out of the Traction Book there, Peter, on Tuesday.

[00:37:26] Peter Fletcher: Got to look at it. Note to self Traction Book.

[00:37:29] Michelle Rigg: Where we went through all our portfolios and everything, and we actually came at the end of it saying, actually we’re pretty good, so sometimes you just need to take that time to, Sit aside and just go through everything because it’s been a pretty, full on last couple of months with everything happening.

We put on a lot of new build properties and everything, new portfolio. We brought in some wonderful new team members with another portfolio. So a lot happened in the last few months. And so now we’re getting back to our basics, like we’re probably what we’re setting now. One of the frustrations would be is that probably some of our standards, our brand standards have gone a bit wayward.

So we’re just bringing that all into line. We’re now starting to look at the programs because this is another challenge you’ve got different. If you want to use the programs really efficiently, sometimes the way they email is really against our brand, and the feel that we want to give. So that’s one thing, a journey we’re about to embark on.

Thank you. How do we bring those efficiencies in but still keep the feel and the brand intact is really important. So that’s probably a frustration at the moment is that we’ve got things going out in different ways that don’t necessarily align with our brand. That would be, yeah. So that’s the journey we’re about to embark on.

[00:38:33] Peter Fletcher: I notice there’s a lot of very big agencies rolling around in the property management space at the moment. There’s yourselves, there’s XSEED, there’s, Who else is there? There’s some big ones.

[00:38:46] Michelle Rigg: Oh, LJ Hooker’s residential would have to be one of those.

[00:38:49] Peter Fletcher: They’re big. Yeah. Are the days of the suburban real estate office with 250, 300 managements over?

[00:38:59] Michelle Rigg: Do you know, a few years ago, I probably would have said yes, but they’re still holding in there. I mean, Recruitment is a big problem in the industry, in all industries at the moment, and I think that’s where the smaller agencies do struggle in, in, the cost of programs, the cost of subscriptions now to be able to run an effective property management department.

And then staff is the real challenges. So that’s probably where, but unfortunately, probably in some of those businesses, they’re not drilling down into what their property management department’s making. And the sales is sort of subsidizing it a bit. So they don’t actually have that eye over the fact that they’re, that department’s running at a loss.

They’re still holding in there. And of course you’ve got the other scenarios where they’re the one band man, so there’s a few varieties going out in anything, numbers obviously creates. Cost efficiencies, working efficiencies and things like that. So it, I think, but there still is that people who run the who open up their own offices and then they’re giving away their property management and then they think, Oh, well I could do that myself.

And so they start. So there’s still that happening, but it’s I think if those, a lot of those businesses drilled down, they’re probably running their property management at a loss.

[00:40:08] Peter Fletcher: So where’s the industry go from here? What’s on the horizon for property management?

[00:40:14] Michelle Rigg: Look, the big chatter at the moment is AI, obviously, and that’s a journey that we’re going down with our team as well.

I think I think to be in business, you need to take advantage of the AI and that for us, that is being able to bring all our staff, including our fabulous admin team. Up another level and use the AI to do the lower tasks or even making the complex tasks more easier, and then looking at new services.

So we’ve been doing some workshops on that and we’re about to go down that path and bring that into our workflows. I think that’s really important. It’s not about taking people’s jobs. I think people think they’re going to lose their jobs and things like that. That’s not the case. It’s actually allowing people to work at a higher level.

More

[00:40:56] Peter Fletcher: interesting. Pretty much zero people want to do data entry. Mmm. They want to do more creative, fulfilling work. Data entry is just there because someone used to have to do it and now AI comes along and can probably do it for them, so.

[00:41:11] Michelle Rigg: Yeah, I mean, obviously there’s a lot of tick boxes along the way, and I think people think that the AI can just do that, but it’s a learning machine.

It just doesn’t know everything. And if anybody’s used chat, GTP and all those things, you know that, it’s, it will only go so far and it still needs human interaction.

We’ve just embarked on the journey of the AI 360 inspection reports with Inspection XRS. Yep. And, the girls were having a training session there and they’re a game changer.

They’re amazing. Put the camera in the middle of the room and it types all your words for you. Ooh, fabulous. But it’s always a first pass. It still needs the human to read it. And that’s, I think the key thing there. Putting guidelines in

place is really important. And there’s some great people in the industry that are there to help for not a lot of money either.

Sam McLean’s one. She’s always, she’s running some good courses and that there. We’ve just done some workshops with Dawoud Noord, so

[00:42:04] Peter Fletcher: he’s great. Yeah. Yes. Wow.

[00:42:06] Michelle Rigg: Yep. So that’s where we’ve got a little committee of AI leaders going now, and that’s the pathway we’re going down. But it has to tick those, efficiency boxes and, solving a problem box to not breaking our experiences.

[00:42:21] Peter Fletcher: Yeah. Michelle, if someone wants to reach out to you to get your advice to come and work for Rent West, as long as their name’s not Peter Fletcher or get you to manage a property, where would they get a hold of you?

[00:42:35] Michelle Rigg: Ah, they can reach out to us on our website, which is rent west.com au. My email’s [email protected] au.

My mobile 0 4 0 1 4 8 8. 387.

[00:42:45] Peter Fletcher: Wow. There you go. You just got all the contact details for one of the industry leaders. My God, that’s such a gift. Michelle Rigg, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been awesome.

[00:42:58] Michelle Rigg: Thanks, Peter. Loved it.

[00:43:01] Peter Fletcher: And that wraps up another episode of the WA Property Q& A. We hope you found our discussion valuable and gained some valuable insights into the world of property buying in Western Australia.

Remember, while we strive to provide useful information, it’s crucial to consult with the appropriate professionals before making any decisions. Any investment decisions. Don’t forget to tune in next week for another exciting episode where we continue to unravel the mysteries of the WA property market.

If you have any questions or topic suggestions, feel free to reach out to us. Until then, happy property hunting and remember to seek the right advice for your personal circumstances.

Thank you for listening.