Exploring PropTech with Peter Schravemade

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.

Welcome, Peter Shraver, mate.

[00:00:50] Peter Schravemade: Thank you for having me. It’s an honour to have you here. Is that because I’m the second Pete that you’ve invited? Is there two Petes in the room at the moment? Well,

[00:01:01] Peter Fletcher: I’ve had another Peter Brewer.

[00:01:03] Peter Schravemade: He’s been in here too.

[00:01:05] Peter Fletcher: Well, he, I interviewed him. On Zoom.

[00:01:08] Peter Schravemade: Oh, right. Okay, so you didn’t have the pleasure of actually doing it in person.

I just had the wild shirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, didn’t wear one.

[00:01:16] Peter Fletcher: No, I’m very disappointed. I thought all Queenslanders had wore crazy shirts.

[00:01:21] Peter Schravemade: Sometimes they do.

[00:01:23] Peter Fletcher: You’ve kind of gone all Melbourne on us with the black t shirt.

[00:01:25] Peter Schravemade: It looks a bit that way, doesn’t it?

[00:01:27] Peter Fletcher: Now, Pete, for those of who don’t know you, the three people in my audience who don’t know you, you are the managing partner of…

[00:01:37] Peter Schravemade: Reach. It’s called Reach Asia Pacific actually, but I run the Reach Australia New Zealand program. That’s part of what I do, but my actual, what I’m charged with is to grow the program, the REACH program through Asia Pacific.

[00:01:52] Peter Fletcher: Tell me the REACH program, what is that?

[00:01:55] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, well, let’s, let’s go with the three things it does first so people understand exactly what it’s about.

The three things that the REACH program does is the identification of new forms of property technology, investment in those new forms of technology where pertinent. We do that through an application process. And then the third part is we run an accelerator program which bolsters the investment we’ve made in the In the property technology, so that the three things we do where it started is over in the US with a group of realtors called the National Association of Realtors and what they’re about, they’re like an ethical peak body, but maybe on steroids compared to.

You know, we’ve got the REIWA over here and we’ve got REIQ in Queensland, where I come from, these guys are just a little bit bigger and yeah, they’re pretty big. And a few years ago 25 to be exact, they decided that rather than being moved out of the way by technology, they made a conscious decision to begin investing in technology.

And so the first company they ever invested in was a company called DocuSign. DocuSign. And we all know how that went and since then they’ve run, not necessarily, the Ridge program didn’t start back then, it started at a later date where they realized that it wasn’t enough to throw money to prop tech companies, but also to run an accelerator program was really important because you gave a greater chance of success.
And the other thing that the Accelerator Program does is helps those forms of technology work in tandem with the industry, rather than against the industry.

So that was 25 years ago, DocuSign being one of the early, early do they still have that investment in DocuSign?

Actually I don’t know. That’s a very good question.

It may be, there may be a percentage realized and there may be still a percentage in it, but it definitely was a big kicker in, in setting up the war chest, if you want to call it that, for the investment in further PropTech.

[00:03:51] Peter Fletcher: As someone who’s spending over a grand a month on DocuSign I, I know.

[00:03:57] Peter Schravemade: Maybe you’re not, maybe, maybe you’re not happy about it. I don’t know, this could go one of two ways.

[00:04:03] Peter Fletcher: I know that they know how to make money. So kudos to you guys for for helping them to get there.

[00:04:09] Peter Schravemade: Well, they’re an animal, you know, of an organization these days that obviously listed and all of the, the private investment that they have thrown at them.

So, you know, that’s next level as far as that’s concerned.

[00:04:22] Peter Fletcher: What sort of things are you looking for when you’re looking for tech? What’s the kind of guiding light for you?

[00:04:30] Peter Schravemade: I don’t have one. There’s a couple of things I really do like to see. I like to see forms of property technology that don’t exist just in one vertical.

So. There are lots of forms of prop tech that exist just in the area of real estate, but then there are so many forms of prop tech that incorporate an element of financial, so it could be fintech the company that I worked with for so long, Box Brownie, was a marketing tech company with a slanted property.

So, you know, and I know, some of the companies I’ve invested in, in, involve legal tech. This year we invested in a fashion tech company and I know nothing about fashion tech, but this fashion tech has a play at property. So I’ve been enjoying seeing ones that have two verticals because generally what I’ve found happens, especially to startup and scale ups is that when one aspect is failing or the market isn’t right for it, they are able to sustain good growth and future survival by focusing on something else.

So a great example for that is the company Box Brownie, who edit the images for the houses, Blue Sky, Green Grass, Virtual Staging and all of that, they also edit photos for automotive, they edit photos for fashion and retail as well, like the clipping that they do to cut out things that go on Amazon and whatever else, so there’s so many other plays that they have and the ability to scale that up alongside the already existing Vertical, which is Property technology.

So that’s one thing I look for. I’ve got to say in the history of me looking at property technology or any kind of technology, leadership and management gives a company a huge boost for success. And that’s not to say it’s the be all and end all, but to give you more specifics.

I have seen companies with very poor products do very, very well because of the people who are leading. And the culture that they instill in their ability to build relationships. And I’ve seen some companies with the best ideas fail because the leadership team is not wholesome or succinct or able to move forward.

So, you know, sometimes it’s not actually about the best products. It’s also about the people to drive that product forward. So that, that too, I would look at, obviously there are things like, is the concept unique? Is it something that’s been done before? Are we going to go into competition with other, other people?

But a great example of people sort of leading. We signed up a company in last year’s cohort called Tappy out of New Zealand. We’ve made a conscious decision to look at New Zealand technology. And really pick the best of that and move it forward. TAPI came in against a number one who was incredibly dominant over in this space.

And they have, in the space of a year, really carved out a large amount of market share, larger than they should have done. And I believe that’s on the back of the people and the culture that are there and the way that they’ve driven that company forward. And the fact that they, you know, are giving active support to property managers in that area.

So, a great example of a company who rightfully shouldn’t be dominant is now dominant in the space.

[00:07:41] Peter Fletcher: The Kiwis are quite innovative as a nation from what I can see.

[00:07:47] Peter Schravemade: Yeah. And they’ve come across with a real, they definitely are. They’ve come across with a yearning to work and a really hardworking culture as well.

And you know, never say no kind of attitude. If someone comes to them and says, could your platform do this? I know they look at that seriously every time and go, we probably could. And they’re nimble at this stage. So these are, this is a really good stage to get our property technology company like that.

Yeah. And start working with them because they’re so eager and hungry and they want to know how to make their product best fit for market. So that’s been the hallmarks of their success.

[00:08:20] Peter Fletcher: Are there any software packages, any products out at the moment where you think, wow, that is, that’s good. They’re onto something here.

[00:08:28] Peter Schravemade: Well, our fashion tech, the one that we signed up this year, they have a product on any kind of smartphone that measures your sizing. So you no longer have to go in. Like what, one of the things that smacked me in the head when they were giving me the pitch is that the concept of a tailor hasn’t changed for more than 400 years.

We’ve gone and seen a tailor who’s measured up our suits and then they’ve made this bespoke suit for us and they’ve put it together and that’s our end product. These guys have understood that on our smartphones, we’re carrying better eyes than our tailors these days. So, using the app in the comfort of your living room, this thing will take your measurements to incredibly accurate.

[00:09:08] Peter Fletcher: Really? Yeah.

[00:09:09] Peter Schravemade: And then you can then custom make a suit. To match whatever you want, the colors, the fabric, the inset lapel. Like I’ve just had one done that has my entire cohort names printed on the inset. The logos of those printed on the inset. And then things like your insignia.

[00:09:27] Peter Fletcher: That’s a beautiful thing.

[00:09:28] Peter Schravemade: Yeah. So, or on my sweaty back, I don’t know. Sorry about that. But the reality is they have a huge play at the real estate industry. You know, we’ve got franchises that are giving away seven days worth of suits to people who sign up using that platform because they no longer have to send them to get measured, which was the barrier to doing that.

So amazing. Like that’s a mind blowing one. I haven’t seen that before. SensorGlobal, have you heard of them?

[00:09:56] Peter Fletcher: No, just before we get on to SensorGlobal, the application of the suit, the fashion. To real estate. Oh, I’m imagining that you just point your phone around a room and it just takes the measurements.

[00:10:09] Peter Schravemade: You just naturally just put it on a table or you prop it up straight somewhere. If you’ve got a tripod, that’s great. If you don’t, you just prop it up against a cup or something on the counter so it can see you and it will tell you where to move. And then it’s a bit like the body scan is at the airport.

It asks you to.

[00:10:24] Peter Fletcher: But what about for real estate?

[00:10:27] Peter Schravemade: Oh no, it doesn’t do that. It just clothes the real estate agents. It doesn’t actually have a play in real estate.

[00:10:33] Peter Fletcher: Oh, oh, okay.

[00:10:35] Peter Schravemade: Just takes the measurements of a person’s body and clothes the agent. So no play at selling houses.

[00:10:43] Peter Fletcher: It’s just for real estate agents.

[00:10:44] Peter Schravemade: That’s it.

[00:10:44] Peter Fletcher: Wow.

[00:10:45] Peter Schravemade: That’s it. And they’re going great guns.

[00:10:46] Peter Fletcher: Are they charging 35, 000 a suit?

[00:10:49] Peter Schravemade: No, they’re not. They are not. No. Well, I’ve bought one and I don’t have that money. I’ve bought three actually now. I have now got three.

[00:10:56] Peter Fletcher: Clearly it’s not going to be on an episode of of Lux Listing Sydney.

[00:10:59] Peter Schravemade: Well, they already have.

[00:11:00] Peter Fletcher: How is that?

[00:11:01] Peter Schravemade: They were in Forbes Magazine last week and they’re headed over to New York Fashion Week. So what’s this app called? New Theodore Pocket Taylor.

[00:11:08] Peter Fletcher: Oh my God. I’ve been ignoring their ads for ages.

[00:11:10] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, I know. They’re very good at that too.

[00:11:13] Peter Fletcher: I honestly have.

[00:11:14] Peter Schravemade: Theodore Pocket Taylor.

[00:11:15] Peter Fletcher: Really?

[00:11:16] Peter Schravemade: Yep. And

[00:11:17] Peter Fletcher: I think they were at ARIC, weren’t they?

[00:11:18] Peter Schravemade: They definitely were. Yep.

[00:11:20] Peter Fletcher: And I’ve been ignoring them.

[00:11:21] Peter Schravemade: It doesn’t matter.

[00:11:21] Peter Fletcher: What an asshole.

[00:11:22] Peter Schravemade: Well, it’s a waste of time.

[00:11:25] Peter Fletcher: And the quality is good?

[00:11:26] Peter Schravemade: Yeah. I will. Actually, I realized that I had never had a good suit when it arrived, because the fabric was so different to the stuff that I’ve been, you know, I’ll just buy off Amazon. I can enter my measurements into Amazon and go, I’ll get a suit, 300 bucks later, it turns up and I go, that’ll do, that’ll do me.

But then when this turned up, I was like, wow, I didn’t know what cashmere was. Now I do.

[00:11:51] Peter Fletcher: You didn’t know what cashmere was, but you knew what, tarot cash, is not where you want to be.

[00:11:58] Peter Schravemade: That’s it. Well, I’m learning these things. As I told you, I know nothing about fashion or anything to do with that.

[00:12:03] Peter Fletcher: Wow.

[00:12:04] Peter Schravemade: Yeah.

[00:12:05] Peter Fletcher: So just on the real estate thing and on the measurement thing, I was I went to a property the other day, I was showing a client through and they said, Oh, can you just take the measurements of the kitchen? And I went, hang on, I knew that I had a measuring device on my phone, but I didn’t trust it.

So I went to the car and I got a measuring tape because I knew that I could trust that. Are you saying that I could probably trust my phone more than,

[00:12:37] Peter Schravemade: I’ve done home renovations with my phone.

[00:12:40] Peter Fletcher: Really?

[00:12:41] Peter Schravemade: Yes, I have. Yep. Now the builders will come out and second guess that measurement, but it’s only ever out by millimeters.

It really depends on how you use it though. The measuring app that comes on an iPhone, which is what you’ve got, what I’ve got. You need to hold yourself still at the time and you need to plot the, you can stuff it up. Like give yourself an extra meter. If you walk five steps and go, I’ll just plant it over there.

There’s an element of education that goes in before you start using it as well.

[00:13:10] Peter Fletcher: Yes, yes, yes. So stay, stay still, folks.

[00:13:15] Peter Schravemade: Did you know, you know, most 360s like Matterport and the others that are on the market, they actually have the measurements built in as well, because any kind of phone that’s capturing anything has a LiDAR scanner.

And that’s how those people are capturing, that’s how Theodore captures your measurement. These phones have LIDAR scanners on them that are really, really good. That’s the same technology that goes on a Tesla to help you drive. So,

[00:13:38] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, right. Yeah. Okay.

[00:13:40] Peter Schravemade: So a lot of technology in the iPhone these days and the Android, sorry guys out there that I’ve ignored, but yes, and the Google and the rest of them.

[00:13:48] Peter Fletcher: Yeah, wow. That is amazing isn’t it, how far we’ve come. When you think back to the days of the original iPhone, which wasn’t all that long ago.

[00:13:59] Peter Schravemade: No, well it started out as a, it started out as a music device. It was an iPod first.

[00:14:06] Peter Fletcher: Oh, the iPhone?

[00:14:06] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, it was an iPod, and then they said, we can put a phone into this.

[00:14:10] Peter Fletcher: Yes, yes.

[00:14:11] Peter Schravemade: So it actually began as that.

[00:14:13] Peter Fletcher: How did you make the move, Pete? Now, I want to come back to that, that other technology that you mentioned. How did you make the move from property to tech? Well, is there a simple story here?

[00:14:25] Peter Schravemade: No, I think the easiest way of explaining it is technology was always in my blood.

So, since very young, and that’s not just in prop tech. I actually have a degree in music and I majored in music technology and it was a double degree in jazz and pop performance. So technology was part of that. I entered real estate at the same time I was doing music because I realized that, you know, it was a dual income and more chances of paying the bills when one wasn’t performing or the other was.

And technology just started finding me. So, my, probably the, the, when I first started noticing it was I was in investment property sales and I wrote a CRM very basic one for these days. Yeah. But it would track the life cycle of the person all the way through from cold lead through to we’ve done a transaction and now we’ve referred it on to a rental.

I left that company and joined a hotel franchise and that hotel franchise had a construction arm so they would find green or brown fill sites and that we would then propose a dwelling on there. We construct it, whether that was, you know, high rise or townhouses or just single family homes, and then we would look at all of that construction process that would be tracked.

I then built the CRM that went from greenfield site to, we’re in construction. All the marketing material then go in to give it to the sales persons who then sell it. We had rental assurance plans and then we had a massive rental department in both short term letting and in the hotel franchise.

And so, I wrote a piece of technology for my company that went the whole way through. And you’ll find by and large in the area of property development that, that is, that, that is still happening today. I spoke to a guy who was writing that exact software for his boutique family company now, so it was from there, it was while I was there that somebody introduced the concept of BoxBrownie to me, which is I thought it was a fantastic idea and I resigned at the hotel franchise funnily enough, because I wasn’t spending enough time at home, I resigned that job, and then, I think it was two days later, Box Brownie advertised for a personal assistant, And I had a pretty good resume by then, like licensed in every state and territory.

So I sent my full resume in and they’re like, what are you doing? And I said, well, I think you’ve got a product that’s saleable. And then the rest is history. Box Brownie were due to close in six months and now they’re the biggest in the world of what they do. They’re in 120 countries in yeah, 14 currencies.

Remarkable success story for Australia in general. And then one of the things that happened during that process is we joined the REACH program. Box Brownie was part of the USA REACH program. So when I left Box Brownie, then it became natural that the, you know, the guys I was Good mates with, because that helped accelerate Box Brownie in the US and especially in Canada as well.

And they said, how about you come and run the Asia Pacific division? And I thought it was a great idea. I love this gig. I love doing what I do.

[00:17:41] Peter Fletcher: You mentioned another platform that you liked along with SensorGlobal.

[00:17:47] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, not actually a platform. It’s more of a hardware. So one of the biggest issues, what we try and invest in is we try and invest in concepts or ideas that are going to solve problems online.

For real estate agents or property managers in a real way. And one of the huge pain points two years ago was, well, property managers were leaving the industry in droves. They were burnt out. They really didn’t want to do the gig anymore. And so when this concept hit my desk of a, it’s a smoke alarm effectively, or it’s a sensor that has IOT built into it.

So it phones home and is able to tell anyone who has access to the dashboard as to whether is the smoke alarm functioning? Has it been checked? Is the battery pulled out of the smoke alarm? All of these things, it now checks itself. And I knew from having a rent role in the past that the cost of not only the cost of just putting the smoke alarms in, but the cost of Sending an electrician out every six months to have a look and see whether it’s compliant or up to date.

Okay, so it kind of self monitors. These things do it themselves, so it saves you that ongoing cost. There is a managed subscription fee, but it’s nowhere near sending a sparky out to check smoke alarms. Mm hmm. That part never really made sense to me. Why? Why would we do that when there is technology that’s able to check that?

So that’s that was a concept that we invested in. Those guys have gone great guns. They are now in, well, they have contracts for most of the social housing. They’re doing really well in retirement villages. Almost anything that’s public housing, you can imagine the desire to have this kind of smoke alarm in because of the massive costs of, Actually checking them and keeping them compliant.

[00:19:40] Peter Fletcher: That is interesting. It’ll be interesting to see what other IOT things will come along in that rental space.

[00:19:48] Peter Schravemade: Well, even in the sales space, I would suggest that real estate agents aren’t giving enough enough attention to smart devices and IOT in the house. I’ll give you a great example of this.

A real estate agent I was with on an appraisal went out they got their form signed, we call it a Form 6 in Queensland, obviously something different over here, but their appointment act was signed, and then they started giving advice on here are the things that I would do to get your house ready, and some of them were simple things like staging or, you know, maybe do this to your lawn, But there were, there are some that were paint, paint the front of your house, like, like a fair cost, or I would remove that tree or, and, we’re talking a couple of thousand dollars, but the thing that I just couldn’t understand is to turn most houses into smart homes, Is a cost of about 500 bucks and we have statistics that tell us that smart homes get about 20 percent more like, yeah, they do.

And that’s an Australian statistic. So, for the sake of walking around, putting a Google home in an Igloo lock box that opens the door or an Igloo smart lock, a changing the lights to smart lights so that you can talk to them and turn them on. For the cost of doing that, because there’s no real definition in the industry as to what makes a smart home smart or one dumb, but most people are wowed when they turn up to an open house and you have smart home facilities that do this.

So it stunned me that residential real estates and property managers aren’t in that space going, you know what, I’m going to own this. I had an office now, I’d have a fleet of this stuff sitting backstage and going, right, there’s a new house. Offer them the package. We’ve bought them at Amazon Black Friday sales.

Offer them the package and let’s put it in. Let’s get it installed. Let’s turn the house into smart, especially units, even cheaper. Again,

[00:21:37] Peter Fletcher: Who would have thought?

[00:21:38] Peter Schravemade: I don’t know,

[00:21:39] Peter Fletcher: I wonder, I wonder whether anyone will actually in talking to real estate agency or anyone listening to this and going, You know what, I’m going to do that.

[00:21:47] Peter Schravemade: I spoke about this at a conference in North Queensland only two days ago. And there was one lady who put her hand up and said she had been doing this because she had recognized that her purchasers wanted it. And she said it wasn’t particularly her forte, but she had learned how to do this.

It’s quite easy when you get into it. And this is where, like you asked me before, how did you get into tech? Mate, you, I know you, you’ve met my wife and you can speak to her about this, but she will just shake her head the amount of smart devices, like I have a smart window cleaner. I’ve got a robot window cleaner at home.

I have mul.

[00:22:22] Peter Fletcher: I didn’t even know such a thing existed.

[00:22:24] Peter Schravemade: It does. I have multiple vacuum cleaners. My dishwasher is smart, my oven is smart. My washing machine and dryer are smart. I have smart access to my house. All of the lights are rigged up. All of the power points in the house are smart power points that, you know, you can talk to them and you can say that, you know, things like turn the fridge off as my brother did stupidly one night.

Oh my God. Yeah, like I, I have gone next level on this and I probably understand it fairly well. I’ve also road tested quite a lot of them, but it’s not that expensive to do. And it’s actually changes your lifestyle, so, I’m not a smart home salesperson, so.

Hey, you must get hundreds of. People are weak, contact you saying, Oh, I’ve got this great idea.

Like, do you, you know, they, they just see you as a pot of money and you’re at their exit out of a shit idea.

Is that the case? There’s a big difference between cold approaches and warm approaches. So, I get a lot of cold approaches on LinkedIn, but I actually believe a lot of us do. A lot of us will have people targeting us on LinkedIn, whether it’s for, would you like more leads or especially if you’re real estate, all of that rubbish.

So I do, I get a lot of people messaging me on LinkedIn or finding my email address and sending things through cold. And generally what I will say is we’ve got an excellent funnel for actually deciding on whether. The technology, before I have to look at it in person, and I look at a lot, before I get in front of a person, we run it through a bunch of filters to go, look, are you even in the ball game?

Because there are parameters that I can’t invest in, or things that I would send elsewhere. So, for example, most of the prop tech that gets thrown at me has no impact on Australia or New Zealand. That’s a, I’m running a accelerator program here. I’m charged with finding new tech for this region first. If it does another region, happy days, but primarily it has to be for the region that’s here.

So, you know, you can imagine the amount of products out of Asia Pacific that sort of come across and go, We’ve got this whiz bang product that works really well in Kuala Lumpur, but I’m not there yet. So, but then we have others that say, I work really well in Mexico and we have a Latin American program, so I can flip them over to them.

The other thing that we can’t invest in, and this is a really interesting one because I don’t think people realize this is we. We will not and cannot invest in anything that removes an agent from a transaction. So, the disintermediation of the agent is a big no no, and as far as I know, we’re the only venture capital company in the world owned by property agents.

So, it would make no sense for us to invest in something that destroyed their careers wholesale. So, I do get a lot of that. People who are going to destroy the real estate industry, you know, come hell or high water, huh? And we’ve had a few here in Australia, like the company Different comes to mind, they were going to completely rev revolutionize the way property management was done and rule out the property manager.

And invariably I’ve seen them come and fail, but they still are coming out of the ground because, you know, as long as there’s commission involved in the transaction, that will always be viewed as a palatable source of money for any kind of techie developer. Yes. Yeah. I do get a lot. I look at a lot of.
Especially now, I’ve noticed since Generative AI started out, I’m looking at more software, more technology. Mm hmm, mm hmm.

[00:25:57] Peter Fletcher: What are the major trends that are shaping tech and innovation at the moment? What are the major trends that should be shaping tech, or what are the major trends that are actually shaping tech?

That are.

[00:26:07] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, yeah, look, and they’re boring. But I’ll tell you what they are. So last year, 220 odd of the 500 property technology companies that we’re tracking across Australia announced an AI chat bot. So everyone’s got one now. Everyone’s saying we’ve got AI in your business. So a massive trend would be AI in general.

Everyone’s talking about having AI in their business. There’s a big differentiator between people who’ve built the AI themselves. And those who are plugging into chat GPT in order to get a, a more defined response is what I’d say to that. I am seeing a trend at the moment towards anti money laundering and cyber security data identity, or let’s group all of those together because it’s a threat to the transaction, the money transaction, and you would know about this quite well.

So, I’m seeing a lot of people jump into that space and we’ll probably see more over the next couple of years. There’s going to really going to be a fight as to who gets ascendancy in that, in that particular area. And we kind of need better, we need technology to solve for a problem there. We need more secure transactions.

I think we all agree on that. I, believe it or not, I have seen a raft of portal technology come at me, especially in this region in the West. I think I’ve seen five portals from West Australia.

[00:27:31] Peter Fletcher: Really?

[00:27:31] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, so, you know, those who are trying to build to go directly head to head with realestate. com. au.

[00:27:38] Peter Fletcher: Game.

[00:27:38] Peter Schravemade: Yeah. It is incredibly brave, brave. Yeah, it’s a micro portals. Well, I, in many instances,

[00:27:46] Peter Fletcher: Like niche spaces.

[00:27:47] Peter Schravemade: No, in many instances, they’re going exactly after the market that REA group are, they’ve just got a different. Slant on how they’re going to get there. And you know, I, I have struggled with a lot of those because you know, REA Group’s a 250 billion company.

It’s very, very hard to imagine the success rate of any of the ones that I’ve seen, but I’ve seen out of this particular region, I’ve seen a surplus of property portals, aggregators. What else have I seen? Yeah, I mentioned the chatbots. I’ve seen hundreds of those in all with different.

[00:28:24] Peter Fletcher: So I take it from that.

You, you have a kind of like a, there’s a bit of cynicism in there, you know, like it, yeah, the chatbots great, but well, picking that up, right?

[00:28:34] Peter Schravemade: Yeah. The reports in the U S are saying that people don’t actually want them. 70 percent of people like there’s a great report out of the U S who’s actually gone and check to see whether People like speaking to AI chatbots.

My belief is they don’t. They’re still preferring a human. And this is sort of two years on from that technology. Now, they’ll get better. Like I’ve been looking at lately emotional artificial intelligence. Yeah. They always said the last bastion.

Artificial emotional intelligence. Yeah,

It’s artificial intelligence that detects emotion and the way they’ve got it.

If you’re listening to this and you want to have a look, go and Google Hume, H U M E and emotional artificial intelligence, and it’ll come up. And you can have a fully fledged chat with this thing and just try getting angry with it and try being happy and cheerful and you watch how it changes its response based on the way that you interact with it.

It’s quite incredible.

[00:29:37] Peter Fletcher: Can you get it to be passive aggressive?

[00:29:39] Peter Schravemade: Yeah, you definitely can. Yes, it is charged with that. So it will respond to you in the way that it feels is most likely to get a, a whatever the objective is out of you. So, you know, there’s some scary tech like that coming forward, but I, I haven’t seen that.

That’s not in the surplus area. That’s in the general interest. In the surplus area here in Australia, we’ve got document signing platforms are fairly, we’ve got a lot of those coming in. I think that’s in frustration actually to DocuSign.

[00:30:07] Peter Fletcher: At the 1, 000 a month. I think it is. Yeah, I can kind of understand it.

[00:30:11] Peter Schravemade: I think there are some, I think, you know, people are looking at that industry going, that’s right for disruption. So yeah.

[00:30:19] Peter Fletcher: Yeah. Because I’m just about to sign up for another year at 14K a year. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m thinking to myself, as I’m talking to you if I could get a similar product.

[00:30:32] Peter Schravemade: There are platforms out there.

I, you know, I think the issue is if you were to go with another platform, you’d have to accept that the 25 years of development of DocuSign hasn’t been for naught. And they probably still have the superior product. But the more interesting ones that I’ve seen coming out at the moment, which really do well for the consumer.

Is the flick it over product, which is only around rental applications. Jeez, that’s a good product. And they, again, that’s another one that’s solved for a pain point because I feel in property management, sometimes we don’t care enough about the tenant who, or the renter who is applying to us. And we kind of just go, well, we’re representing, we’re bound by law and we have a fiduciary interest.

Represent the landlord, but you know, these guys have actually gone out and made a portal that makes the consumer happy about the whole application process. And that’s the feedback that they’ve had offer management platforms. We’ve seen a lot of them, so that they were very, they’re an essential tool for agents who are up and about because you are regularly dealing with.

10, 20, 30 offers at a time. You just can’t write all those up in the old way that we used to. No, and they seem to solve for an issue that I had when I was a practicing real estate agent, which is dealing with more than one offer. I think as an industry, We were behind the eight ball in understanding how that played out.

Whereas this seems to be way more transparent, not just with the purchases. So all of the technology in that space that’s come out and that the noise is sort of dying down around that at the moment, but there are some strong players here in Australia in that area.

So. They’re the things that are shaping the tech space.

What about Pete, the false trends, the fads that won’t be with us in two years time. Anything that sort of springs to mind there?

Well, look, I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw. I’m going to throw chatbots under the bus here. Yeah, right. I think they’ll still be there. I think our reliance on them will be far less than what they are at the moment.

Like, I think everyone rushed into putting an AI chatbot on, into their business because they could, and the barrier to entry was, So low, but they didn’t stop to think about whether the consumer actually got, gained a benefit from it. And I think we’re only just starting to see the studies that come out now that are saying they probably don’t and that they’re not going to disappear.

There’ll still be elements of them. Like, so if you’re a real estate agent listening to this. And you have, I put an artificial intelligence on my voicemail the other day that answers the phone when I’m not able to take the call. It will then dictate that to text and send it to me because I hate spending time listening to the voicemails and that’s very, that’s a very clever way of doing it.

And non confrontational, it’s not. I think the AI chatbots that are used to replace a salesperson or in, in, in an area where there should really should be a relationship of trust, that’s where it’ll disappear. And that’s not from all real estate transactional, you know, I still think there’ll be huge in the area of property management, for example, Where you have a tenant call messaging in to go, does this property have three bedrooms and a bathroom?

And are they, is the kitchen tabletops granite? Because I only want to rent that. Or does it have a pool? And the things that, you know, really shouldn’t require a human to answer that, I think people are going to accept that they will come from robots, you know, along the lines of, you know, please, I’ve missed out on 400 applications at the moment, I’m a single mother with one child, I can only afford 480 per week rent, do you have anything on your books that’s going to help me out?

Like that, you’re doing an injustice to that person by throwing them into an AI chatbot. So. I think, I actually think a lot of us are starting to wise up to the fact that there does still need to be a human element in there. And we’ve probably raced into it too fast without considering the ramifications of doing that.

I love there’s a chat bot that I think you would probably, well, you’d know a little bit about but I won’t mention Ruby’s name. I love, I love getting on there and stirring a bit of shit, but it’s funny because After a while, well, you know that you’re talking to a chat bot, but you kind of know that you’re talking to a chat bot and it’s reached the limit of the usefulness of that conversation.

It’s like from this point forward, all you’re doing is trolling someone that’s might actually be reading the transcript of it. Exactly, exactly. You’re making stuff up just for the sake of doing it, which leads to a really good point. In, in, in the last. Three years, two and a half years, the thing that I, when you press upon people is to not use technology to be creative from my perspective.

I want to write music I want to sing I want to paint a picture myself I want to create prose or the best content I can if that’s what I want to do that’s not what technology should be doing for us what technology should be doing is room removing the thousand menial tasks in your life. That you could be spent better doing something else and there’s no place that this message is more important than to real estate agents, anyone in the legal industry, anyone related, even mortgage brokers, because it’s You know, rather than spending thousands of time lodged down in paperwork, they should be spending time at home with their kids or that significant other, who may be a dog for all I care, but, you know, we’ve somehow in the explosion of technology lost the concept that technology should be about improving systems, processes and efficiencies, not necessarily creating for us.

So. You know, I don’t want tech to create for me. I might want it to give me a concept or an idea to kick off, but I don’t want it to create. And that’s why, you know, that’s why I invested in a window cleaner. Do you think I enjoy cleaning the windows? Don’t, you know, it’s the same with mowing the lawn. I haven’t met a person yet that goes, I really enjoy this.

You got a couple of people who live on farms and they’ve got those right on lawn mowers and they’ll put their headphones on and. That’s okay, you know, but yeah, I’d give them a whippersnapper and ask them if they like doing that or a line trimmer.

You’re talking to one of those people that kind of get a little bit of pleasure out of lines in their lawn.

Well, no, but my robot does that for me. You can get pleasure out of it while you’re having a beer.

Now, Pete, you are a unicorn. You you’ve you’ve played music at a very high level. You Are an international public speaker, you, you’ve you know, like you’re a keynote speaker and you’re the, like the head honcho for a very big organization here in, in Australia.

And yet I’ve seen you in action at RE Barcamp, which is just a real grassroots meat and potato thing. Sharing as you are right now, sharing selflessly what, what is it that motivates you to do that? Like I, I’m, I know that you could have just said No, Pete, I’m, I’m too busy to talk to you. You know, what is it that motivates you to come to Perth and, and attend RE Bar Camp?

Something that’s real grassroots. Yeah, look, that’s an easy answer. RE Bar Camp. The RE Bar Camp that you, you and I attended in Brisbane. I don’t know if you’re part of the conversation because different conversations go on in rooms, but I took away from that about four areas of frustration that property managers and real estate agents were having with property technology.

So, you know, RE Bar Camp’s not just about. Experts being in a room and telling people what to do, like, I would consider myself an expert in technology, yet I got schooled in about four things in Brisbane, you know, pain points that I didn’t know existed and that it was feedback, raw feedback, you know, if you got an ego and you’re going to get hurt, it’s probably not the place for you, but yeah, if you really want to know the state of the industry, what better place to talk about it, these discussions over a pint.

Because the person’s not going to sugarcoat it. They don’t know who, who you are. I, all of the credentials or the experience or the skill set I have doesn’t really matter. And you kind of strip that away and you, you throw these people into a room and you have honest conversations about how are we doing.

I think that side of it is lost at some of the bigger conferences that are going around at the moment where we have, you know, Mr. No Socks who drives a Lamborghini with his spiky hair, takes photos, going hashtag just living, hashtag doing the hustle, all of this stuff. I have yet to meet a real estate operator who acts like that, like a genuine one who’s been in the industry for 10 years, consistently built a really good office.

They just don’t act like that because that’s not, it’s not good for us. It’s not good for our public image. It’s not good for the scene. The people who are telling you you have to get out of bed and run for an hour at 5am and then go into yoga and meditation and then after that jump into an ice bath because that activates you in the morning.

No, no joke, I only heard this story three days ago. I don’t know who has the time to do this, like, I’ve still got three kids, living my best life, yeah, living my best life, yeah, so we have this concept of what being a real estate agent is, that’s just not it, and to draw that back to the RE Bar Camp, which is, by the way, if you haven’t ever heard of it before, it’s real estate done over a bar, concept massive in America, I used to go to these things and really love them there, And it’s good to see them sort of picking up.

There’s another one in Melbourne coming up at the end of the year and we’ve got one tomorrow in Perth, which I’m looking forward to. But the, the concept is for anyone of any war in their real estate, like new sort of been in the industry for a couple of years, are really super experienced. We, you know, we love having those people because they shed a bit more light on market trends and here’s, here’s what happens when you’ve been around for a bit longer.

But, you know, even some of the vendors in the industry come along and give their skilled area of expertise in one, one particular section. But I really like the authenticity that is at these bar camps because I just think we lack it a little bit in some of the, the, the bigger conferences we have, it’s hard for them to be personal.

It’s hard for them to be raw and in your face, but yeah, these Bar Camps do that.

Oh, I think that with Bar Camp, the whiteboard is what’s on the industry’s mind at that point.

Yeah, exactly. You just go, people come in and they just, they’re putting up what’s, what is their burning question? And their burning question turns into these, these topics of conversation.

And that is the, Like that’s the zeitgeist of, of the, of the industry right there.

Yeah. And if you haven’t been to a bar camp before the whiteboard that Pete’s referring to is you get asked two questions on entry you know, what is the struggle that you’re having and what’s something that you feel that you could give advice on, or you feel like you’re in a position of advice.

And then you put all of those concepts on a whiteboard and you see what the industry has to say about itself. And it’s a, you’re right. It’s amazing. It’s a very good snapshot. It’s like an auction day clearance.

Pete, this has just been the best conversation. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for waiting. You guys listening at the other end won’t know that Pete’s been waiting around for two hours to make this because Qantas, my wonderful providers. Decided to drop into Adelaide on the way for a direct flight.

Don’t blame Qantas, it was you getting your nails done. I wish, I wish I could say it was.

I’m actually glad they stopped because there was a technical issue. Rather than stop then something fall out of the sky, you know what I mean? I’m sorry I was late. Pete, thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

And that’s all we’ve got time for.

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 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.