You can view the video recording of this webinar here.

Courtney: Thank you so much for your time today. We’re really excited to have you here. My name is Courtney and I’m your host for today. I am the head of growth here at Reapit ANZ, and joining us is the wonderful Michael Williams, who is our senior real estate technology specialist. I know that’s quite a mouthful. Good morning, Michael. How are you doing today?

Michael: Hi, Courtney. Good, thanks. Thanks for having me. Hi everybody.

Courtney: Hello. Thank you so much for joining us all today, everybody. I know you’re incredibly busy, so we want to make sure that we’re packing as much as we can into today’s session. And the three key things that we’re going to touch on today is just a little bit of a recap on market conditions at the moment based on what we’re seeing here at Reapit, how Console and Agentbox work together to help you achieve long-term success and setting you up for the future. And then the question that is on everybody’s lips, what is the future of PropTech, particularly at Reapit, and how can you get involved?

Michael, could you give us a little bit of a recap on some of the key things that you are seeing in talking to customers at the moment?

Michael: Yeah, with regards to the sales side of things, the two words on everyone’s lips are interest rates, inflation. It’s causing a little bit of pushback, I guess you could say, from buyers entering the market. Banks are making it a little bit harder for people to borrow the money that they want. So it’s making it, a little bit harder to extract some offers from people or to get that commitment to move forward. And then on the other side of the table, you’ve got the vendors who might be concerned about what their next move looks like. So I guess it’s harder to list properties, it’s harder to sell properties, so they’re the challenges that we need to help our clients adapt and overcome.

Courtney: Yeah, absolutely. And then I guess just touching on the PM space, we have seen particularly at Console Cloud, a considerable number of rent roll sales, consolidation and movement within the industry, particularly across our customers, as well as a lot of new entrants coming into the market, which has been really interesting to see over the past, really eight to 10 months. Across Agentbox and Console, we represent over 50% of agencies across Australia. So we’re really fortunate to be in this position to understand that whilst you as an agency might be feeling the pinch or the pressure as time is moving on, particularly where we are now, you aren’t alone because we’re seeing this really across the board.

And then finally just touching on the state of play in the cloud. I know that most of us or nearly all of us have moved to cloud-based software during COVID or in the past couple of years, but really now is a great time to be looking at your cloud-based software across your full speed of apps really, and making sure that you’ve got the best option in place for your agency.

Michael, did you have anything you wanted to touch on there?

Michael: Yeah, to me, cloud-based systems equals mobility, and that’s so important. Back when I was an agent my old boss used to say, “You’re not making money if you’re sitting at your desk.” So being able to be out there knocking on doors, meeting people, being face to face and building these relationships and building rapport with people is important, but you still need to be productive and accessing your information while you’re out on the road. So, whether that’s through our mobile app, giving you a kind of water down experience of the whole Agentbox system is important, but you can still access the Agentbox CRM, the desktop version anywhere. As long as you’ve got Internet connection, you can access it on your phone, on your tablet, meaning you can jump straight into your Agentbox system and continue that productivity.

Courtney: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the same as true for Console Cloud. We’re working hard to improve our functionality within our mobile app, which is Console Go. And if you have the inspect module added on, there’s even more functionality within the platform. So you can really take things on the go and access Console Cloud really from wherever you are. So we as Reapit are moving forward with mobile first and making sure that you’ve got accessibility from wherever you are.

In today’s session, we are going to look at four key themes based on how you can put in place some strategies to look at, setting yourself up for long-term success, and then how Console Cloud and Agentbox working together helps you to achieve those goals really. So without further ado, first things first. And this is the most crucial one, and I’m sure everybody here on the webinar today fully understands this, but I really can’t stress the importance of this enough.

When we ran the Console Awards last year, really across all finalists, this was something that stood out to us. Based on the growth that they’ve seen in their agency and I guess the performance of their rent roll, it really came down to how they were managing their relationships and using that as their unique differentiator. It was really wonderful to see when we were reading all the submissions, and I really just wanted to call it out. Relationships is key here as we all know, but how can we be looking at using our tech to facilitate relationships, I guess rather than replace?

So your rent roll might be coming under attack as we’ve seen a lot of market movements happening over the past eight to 12 months. And moving forward particularly into the future, we’ve broken it down into two key themes. Your landlords might be looking at wanting to save money, or they might be looking at actually getting out altogether and selling. So when they are looking at maximizing their investment returns during lease renewals or looking at their management agreements, how are they looking at maximizing that? How can we be increasing rent or reducing management costs? We all know that there’s agencies out there that are managing rent rolls where they’re really looking at cutting those management fees. And relationships are probably the key aspect here into making sure that you are able to retain those landlords and prove your value essentially.

Michael, did you want to touch on just the sales aspect?

Michael: Yeah, relationships are so important with your landlords. If you have a bad relationship or a failing relationship with your landlord and then knock in a position to keep that property under management, you’ll have 10 other agents knocking at the door wanting to win that sales listing from you. So you want to make sure that your business, your company is set up as a first port of call when it does come time to sell that property. So obviously relationship building is one thing, but another point that we’ll cover off on a little bit is communication. And that is so important not only to your clients, but also within your own business across both departments. We’re aiming to fill that gap there.

Courtney: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Just as we were touching on some of the practical ways that you can look at understanding what’s happening with your owners, as well as providing that additional value to them, and you’re going to hear that word from me a lot today. But within Console Cloud as well as Agentbox, we have so much data that is represented and available at your fingertips. Michael, you can touch on within Agentbox in a second, but within Console Cloud, I’m very excited to say that Insights is getting a facelift, and will be Analytics+coming soon. But really what it aims to do is provide you with actionable insights at the click of a button, at your fingertips, so that you can be having those meaningful conversations with your landlords. If your landlords are looking to sell, look at the managements that are coming up for renewal, whether that be within your rent roll or within prospective properties.

Michael, did you just want to touch on how that works in Agentbox?

Michael: Yeah, sure. Identifying an opportunity is one thing, but staying in touch with that person and keeping yourself accountable is a whole other kettle of fish. So identifying the opportunity, setting a sequence of tasks to prompt you to stay in touch with that person is super important and super easy inside our system. All of your tasks will be hitting you from all angles, so there’s no excuse to be missing these. But also, staying proactive, trying to keep the bucket topped up when there’s leaks in it is important. So we’ve got some great tools in Agentbox, specifically referencing our Prospector module, which integrates with RP data to allow you to search for and find and communicate to these future opportunities. And a bit of a sneak peek. We are working on a refresh new update for Prospector as well, which will speed up even more the ability to find and communicate to these potential vendors and landlords.

Courtney: So long story short, lots of fun and exciting things on the way.

Next up, and this ties in very closely with relationships, hence why it’s second, is becoming a better communicator. We know that communicating is tied to relationships. I know it sounds really simple when you say it out loud, but it’s really something that takes practice and is it really important to embed within the culture of your whole agency? And key things that we’re going to touch on here is… Some of the key variables that contribute most to consumer loyalty, particularly in the service sector that we all live in, is our service quality. So when you’re bringing somebody on, does your service actually align with the experience that they do have when they are engaging with you? How satisfied are they? So this is, connecting to that service quality and understanding how happy your customers are.

And then finally, looking at your value. How can you look at your relationships? Or what makes you special by using the technology at your fingertips, using all of the experience within your agency to consistently communicate value and even over communicating value to your landlords and your tenants as well as your prospects too? Some of the key ways that we can do this across Agentbox as well as Console Cloud, first things first is looking at service quality. Michael, do you just want to touch on owners looking to sell?

Michael: Sure. Communicating is one thing and communicating the information that they need to hear is very important, but also the speed in which you communicate that is super relevant. So within Agentbox, after you’ve carried out and you’re open for inspections, you’ve had an excellent week of viewing that property, you need to relay that to the owner. A click of a button in Agentbox is all you need to do in order to create this activity report. We’ve referenced their vendor reports, but you’ll use Agentbox to advertise your properties for sale or for lease. Both sides need communicating. So your activity report is essential to convey how the campaign is tracked to date, inquiries, inspections, notes, who’s made offers, who are you retargeting, how is the campaign tracking?

And then we get to the time to contact. It’s not just about servicing your vendors, you need to be selling this property to somebody. And sometimes time is of the essence. So if somebody sends you an inquiry, your response time could sometimes be the difference between them looking at your property or making a move on something else. So we introduced an autoresponder that will immediately get back to your clients, give them the information that they need. At least hold them at bay before you can give them a call the next morning.

Courtney: Yeah, absolutely. And then looking in rent roll performance. So within Console Cloud, how you can take a look at some of the key, key elements to service quality is your lost versus gained. This is a really great measure to understand how many properties within your rent roll did you lose that weren’t actually sold by your agency. And this is something that I think is core to Reapit and within Agentbox and Console, and something that we really like to focus on. If a property is lost that isn’t within your rent roll and you didn’t sell it, that’s a loss for your agency and something that we’d really like to be able to help you by plugging the hole in and bridging the gap.

Looking as well at your most profitable properties. We’ll touch on customer satisfaction in a second, but if your most profitable properties also contribute to your owners that are the most happy as well as your tenants that stay the longest, that is a really key indicator that you’re giving a fantastic service experience. But if you do find that the unprofitable properties are the unhappy landlords and there’s a lot of turnover in your tenants, you might want to take a look at reevaluating the relationship that you do have with that landlord, whether that’s actually providing value to you as an agency.

And then finally looking at these automating repetitive processes. So this goes across all of Reapit products, really, is something core to our ethos. Helping to streamline processes that help you to focus on relationships. It’s not so much about replacing, it’s about supporting. And really something that we’ll touch on in a little bit more detail, but personally, as you can tell, I’m quite passionate about.

Secondly, looking at customer satisfaction, which is our yardstick tool within Console Cloud. So yardstick within Console is really a measure of customer satisfaction using something called a net promoter score. It’s quite simple, it’s just a one to 10, rating from a one-question survey. And this can tie into both your rent roll performance as well as understanding your service experience to see where your happiest, your middle of the road customers, and then your unhappy customers are so that you can be managing by exception and focusing on where you can be creating value for those customers that might be sitting in the middle of the road. They’re neither happy nor sad, but how can you get them up from there? And then your customers that aren’t feeling the love, what can you be doing to try and communicate your value? And I think this ties into the next point quite nicely, which is how you can communicate your value.

Michael, do you just want to touch on some of the communications features within Agentbox and how that can relate to both prospecting and nurturing pipelines, but also communicating with your owners?

Michael: Sure. There’s more products within our Reapit products than just what’s on offer in Agentbox, which I’ll touch on in a second. But in terms of keeping a vendor or a landlord happy when you’re advertising a property for sale or for lease, we want to automate those alerts. So it’s getting your or that person’s property out to as many relevant and qualified people as possible, as automated as possible as well. Our automated property alerts will match up new listings to relevant people based on their requirements. It all goes out behind the scenes. You’ve got your vendor reports that we touched on as well, actually translating that into value to a future customer. A vendor report can be used as a great case study moving forward as well. A click of a button will showcase how you’ve gone with a very successful campaign. Is just a great way to convey what you’re like and how you work.

The next is we’ve got a product which we’ll touch on a little bit later called ProposalPoint. The automation from or the integration from Agentbox is seamless. It’s a click of a button. You can demonstrate to your potential client the values of your company, your points of difference, why you are going to make a difference to their property sale or property lease. And then finally, another product that we’ll touch on later is MyAgency platform, which is a new product there to again, strengthen the relationship between you and your clients to help them stay a little bit stickier to your business. It is essentially a client-facing mobile app that’s all white labeled and will allow you to be accessible from the palm of their hands, whether they’re a seller of a property wanting to access a vendor report immediately, or they’re a buyer or a tenant wanting to apply for tenancy or submit an offer. So seamless, so straightforward and so easy.

Courtney: Touching on seamless, easy, in the palm of your hand is the owner portal. We know that everybody wants everything at the touch of a button or at their fingertips. And our customers that have the highest NPS/yardstick/owner feedback scores, we generally know are using our suite of products for both the tenants using the tenant app, but also the owner portal as well. And the owner portal is a really great way for your owners to understand what’s going on with their investment as they log in from whatever device they’d like and see everything really at their fingertips. Having all this information there in front of them helps you, communicate your value and using technology to do so, but also to have some more meaningful conversations with your landlords rather than them just calling up asking to get that said report or to get that said insight. They’re able to take it a little bit of a step further and dive into how can we be maximsing value and how can we be delivering more value to our customers.

Point three is playing the long game. As we do move into a downturn in the market, it’s really essential that we look at some long-term strategies that help set you up for success in the long term. as we’ve touched on in points one and two today, is looking at those relationships, looking at how we can communicate value. And we’ll touch on that in a little bit, in a second. So all of this distills down into three key areas. Essentially and probably most important is your KPIs. So is what your team is focused on actually aligned to your business outcomes more generally? This combines PM as well as sales together to ensure that we’re all working together to make sure that we’re staying competitive into the future and setting yourself up for success. We have so much data at our fingertips and we don’t want to fall into analysis paralysis, so to speak. So focusing on what delivers value the most can help you to keep things simple and keep a laser focus on what’s going to deliver the most amount of value.

Secondly to that is reviewing your processes. Once we understand what we want to define as success or what success looks like for you, because it’s different for everybody. Understanding what the processes that you have in place actually contribute to your KPIs, and then how your systems tie into your processes as well as your KPIs. So do your systems that you have in place actually support the processes that you define that helps you deliver on unique value proposition essentially? And is it creating more work for your team or is it actually helping to streamline processes and focus on relationships essentially?

Simplifying this, it’s just three key, recommendations just around here on understanding your workflows and processes, narrowing down those metrics, and then reviewing your systems and your data to ensure that what you have is helping you run, not walk essentially.

Michael: On the topic of KPIs, it’s super aligned with what we try and do for our clients in Agentbox. First and foremost, on our dashboard, you can set these targets up for each agent inside your business, but actually reviewing… It’s a very visual format in how these KPIs are presented to the agents. It keeps everybody on track, accountable with the amount of calls they’re making, appraisals they’re booked, all the way through to somebody’s sales, commission targets. It keeps everybody in their own lane and moving forward. We know that agents are very, very driven individuals often by money, and if they can see these targets in front of them, it’s only going to motivate and push people to work even harder. Whether they’re in front or behind of their target, it’s right there.

Also, reviewing that information is quite easy as well. So in both of our systems, you can run a bit of a performance analysis to see how you track for a certain period of time, where the shortfalls might be inside your business or your business unit. It’s just as important to see those KPIs as it is to reflect on that data. So we’ve got quite effective ways of monitoring both of those things.

Courtney: And something that Console has always promoted is something called managing by exception. And the way that the system has been designed, and most of our Console customers live and breathe this on a daily basis, is seeing what’s most urgent or most important up and available for everybody on their dashboards to make sure that they are managing by exception or what is actually most important rather than getting bogged down, in the day to day essentially.

The final theme that we’re going to touch on today before we move on is just from insight to action. And really we’ll provide these slides afterwards, but here are some key questions really to ask to understand and gather those insights that really encompass everything that we’ve talked about today. That you can then take to action and understand how are you using your systems, as well as your people to work together to be delivering the most amount of success and maximizing the value within your agency? moving forward, we want to take a look just at Reapit and everything or all of our product suites within Reapit, particularly in ANZ.

Michael: It’s quite the tech stack, isn’t it? So what we’ve got behind the scenes is Reapit. Reapit is the powerhouse behind Agentbox, behind Console, behind ProposalPoint, behind Agentpoint. And Reapit has a global presence as you see here. So we have CRMs in Agentbox in the UK, in Denmark, and what that means for our clients is we’ve got a plethora of experience in different markets in different parts of the globe. We draw on each other’s experience and expertise in order to refine our processes moving forward. So there’s a much bigger play at hand here than just the ANZ market.

What this picture is trying to represent is the sheer scalability of Agentbox specifically. So you can see here Belle, McGrath, Stone, all very big networks, all using a single instance of Agentbox. One database, one record of each person inside that database, but with multiple offices. It’s an excellent way to report, this is our branch model. But at the other end of the spectrum, we deal with startup businesses every day. So it’s the type of system that will stay with you and grow with you over your company’s journey. It’s not the type of system that you’ll ever outgrow.

And we look at the Agentbox ecosystem. Agentbox itself, the desktop version, the mobile app as you see here, it integrates with a suite of third-party tech providers. But inside our own little ecosystem, we’ve got Agentbox connecting to your Agentpoint website, feeding information back and forth between the two. We’ve got ProposalPoint linking directly from Agentbox when you do an appraisal. Click a button, generates a beautiful digital engaging proposal for you to share with your clients. And then we’ve got the MyAgency platform that is not a direct replacement of the vendor reporting that you can do inside Agentbox, it’s to compliment it. So it’s to help you, like I said before, stay stickier to your clients, allow them to walk around with your mobile app in their pocket, accessing your data, accessing your listings and whenever they want.

Then we’ve got ProposalPoint. This is the tool that you’ll use to convey your points of difference to your clients when you are trying to pitch and win new business. It is a very effective tool. It looks great. It might be a point of difference from your competitors who could still be doing this on paper or printing something off or not even providing a proposal to a client. The key features of ProposalPoint. One-click integration with Agentbox. Whenever the client opens your proposal, you get an email alert so you know that there’s no denying they’ve started to engage with your proposal.

There is another fantastic tool called a session replay. So before you even pick up the phone to follow up on that proposal, you can actually kick back and watch the replay of the client watching that or viewing that proposal. So if they view it for 10 minutes, you can see their mouse moving around what they’ve clicked on. It’s like Big Brothers watching, but you’ll start to get a bit of an idea as to what their pushbacks might be, where their concerns might lie. So you can go into that and it ensures a proactive conversation.

Another ProposalPoint feature is the autoresponder and the digital property brochure. So the autoresponder on the left can be sent to a client as soon as that inquiry is logged inside Agentbox, just saving you that administration hassle and you just know you can rest assured that that response has been sent out pretty much immediately. And the digital property brochure is something a lot of our clients have taken advantage of to share with people that have made an inquiry or just would like to have a brochure of the property. Get away from paper. People are on their phones, people are on their computers. You can convey a lot of interactive information on these digital property brochures.

And then we get to MyAgency platform, our newest feature in addition into Reapit fold. This is the client-facing mobile app. It allows your clients to access your stock lists. They can access properties for lease, for sale, off-market listings, send through inquiries, request appraisals on their own home. They can submit offers, apply for tenancy. And then for your owners, it’s a perfect complementation of the vendor report where they can see, like we see here, leads that you might be qualifying in, qualifying out. It’s vetted information, it’s not showing them full names, it’s not showing them comments. That’s still reserved for the vendor report that you can do inside Agentbox. This is here to echo what the agents are saying. This is a fantastic picture. We’ve had a downturn in the amount of leads or inquiries that have been coming through. I think we need to be reinvesting in the marketing. They keep looking at this mobile app and that will be driven home.

And this is just a great comment from Jamie Bennett at Stone. And this is something that’s echoed by many of our clients. It’s such a capable system for powering businesses of his size, but a business of any size.

Courtney: With Console Cloud, just as Agentbox, we are a market leader across the industry and we’re trusted by thousands of agencies all across ANZ. And it’s a testament to all of the hard work that the team does here in consistently, investing and delivering on our roadmap promises to make sure that we’re creating a product for the future, essentially. For our customers moving across platforms, it’s really important, and this is something that Michael touched on a little bit earlier just around Agentbox as well. Is data is king, data is key, and it is one of the most important assets within your agency. We know how stressful it can be when you are looking at moving systems. And it is something that we do,, prioritise and focus on in trying to remove the barriers or the stresses that do come with migrations.

It’s important as well to be looking at your support. So for our premium customers, you do have phone support when you need it. Our accelerate customers do have access to live chat as well as email support too. So there’s multiple areas where you can be contacting somebody and making sure that your inquiry is getting answered in the fastest time possible.

And then of course, touching on the radical productivity gains. At Console, it’s really essential to us to make sure that your agency is being as productive as possible and managing as many properties under management per PM, which is really essential to the ethos here.

Taking a look at Console under our ecosystem is this concept of the life cycle of property management. So taking our learnings from all the years in business across Gateway, across GD and other systems, we really wanted to, change the way that we looked at property management and break things down into the key property management life cycle and build our suite of products as well as integrations and add-ons around what is most important for a property manager.

And it really stacks up when you take a look at how we compare against others in the market. Console consistently is investing in the product and delivering on our promises when it comes to our future roadmap and our commitment to improvement for our customers. I was actually looking the other day at one of our webinars from 2018, and it was really nice to see how far that we’ve come and it just makes me really proud to be a part of Console and Reapit and know that we’re delivering on our promise, which is really nice feeling to have. And for our customers, making sure that they’ve got access to a consistently evolving suite of tools and features across that full property management life cycle, as well as making sure that when you need to contact somebody and you need support, you can get it when it’s there.

We want to make sure that you can create a consistent message, a transparent message, and create customised journeys for your landlords as well as your tenants as they go through the life cycle of your agency essentially.

Touching on that in a little bit more detail is I guess that better brand representation. So pulling all of this in together and creating customised templates using all the data that’s available via tokens within cloud to deliver consistent, personalised messages at scale, all embedded across each of our workflows that sit across the customer journey. And that helps you to make sure that you’re delivering that consistent voice, providing that value no matter who is being communicated with. So that you are always making sure that your tone is on point, that your brand is being represented in the best way, and that you’re putting your best foot forward from the start.

And then touching on this as well is we do have a suite of portals as well as apps for not only our PMs, but also with the tenants as well as our owners to make sure that we’re streamlining processes, delivering value, and putting your best foot forward.

Now, looking forward to what the future of PropTech looks like within Agentbox as well as Console, we are looking at an integration on the horizon and something that we’re very excited about.

Just recapping on some of the key themes that we looked at today, relationships, communications, plugging holes, as well as playing the long game. What’s important for us at Reapit here is to make sure that we are setting you up for success in the long term and where we want to be taking the products moving forward will be supported and dictated by you, our customers.

If you want to get involved in what the future of PropTech looks like between Agentbox, Console, and Reapit it more broadly, I highly recommend that you come along to our quarterly update. Any Console customers, you guys will know that we do our quarterly webinars quarterly, but we will be looking at introducing a Reapit webinar as well. The next one that we have coming up will be on the 13th of October. Invites will be coming out in the next couple of weeks, so I highly recommend that you take a look in your inbox. we’ll be touching on what the future of a unified solution between Agentbox and Console Cloud will look like moving forward.

Michael: I just wanted to drive home what the future looks like between the two products. It’s crucial that we are plugging those holes between both sides of a business to ensure that communication isn’t missed. We’re going to be doing that in such a way that you are not compromising on the software that you’re using. You’ve got two best-in-class systems working for both sides of your business and ensuring that integration is fulfilling our clients’ needs. So it is very much a collaboration between our clients and ourselves to make sure we get that spot on.

Courtney: And if you do want to become involved in what the future of Reapit looks like, particularly in ANZ, I highly recommend that you start contacting us. Let us know if you’d like to be involved and we can add you to our focus groups, our beta programs, and you can really shape what the future of PropTech looks like in ANZ, which is pretty cool to say.

If you’d like to learn more about how these two software platforms can help your agency grow, you can book a demo with our friendly team below:

Book a demo for Console Cloud

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