Why tech needs to be on every agent’s agenda

Speaking to REB, Propic CEO Jeffery Gray shed light on the current real estate climate and why agents should think of technology as a value-add to their business.

“There’s global research done by Salesforce every year on consumer expectations. Seventy-three per cent in the 2018 research paper said they expected real-time response from business — nearly three-quarters,” Mr Gray said.

“We know that generally as an industry, around 40 per cent of all buyer enquiries are never responded to, ever. The reality is consumers gauge their experience not just based on what this agent does or what that agent does, they’re gauging their experience and the service they’re getting and comparing that to their experience on Amazon, their experience with their bank, their experience with their telecommunications company.

“In terms of an agent, a property manager or a principal, we are still dealing with quite emotional transactions and very substantial transactions. What will happen and what’s already happening is artificial intelligence will work hand in hand with humans to optimise the process and the experience for customers. It will take away a lot of the mundane, repetitive manual work that isn’t adding a lot of value, but if it’s not done well creates a lot of friction.”

By automating such tasks, agents and property managers are freed up to focus on building greater relationships and creating value in a more holistic manner, Mr Gray noted.

“The role of the agent will become quite narrow in terms of their role and responsibilities, but they’re going to be really focused on having more conversations with the right people at the right time and the same for a property manager,” he explained.

“By automating a lot of what a property manager does, they should be able to take that human effort that AI can’t do, which is display empathy and build connections, and be more focused on building relationships with landlords and adding value to the landlord or to the buyer or to the vendor, and AI will be handling the rest.”

The former Domain Group director recently launched Propic as a way to mitigate common obstacles those in the real estate industry have, under the one platform.

“I’ve seen first-hand how technology is being used in the real estate industry, but also have looked at technology trends reshaping every other business-to-consumer vertical in the world,” Mr Gray said.

“Verticals such as banking and finance or even retail are using technology to transform the customer experience. When we looked at what was happening in real estate, there was a real disconnect. The idea behind Propic was to say ‘look, as an industry, there are four key problems we need to start to solve’.”

The first, he said, starts by leveraging technology that every other vertical in the world is using to transform the customer experience.

“[Secondly,] how do we enable incumbent businesses to take on the digital competitors that are moving into the real estate vertical all over the world, whether it’s hirer platforms, digital players in the property management space, etc? How do we help businesses solve that?” Mr Gray said.

“[Thirdly,] there are so many mangled processes in real estate in Australia, whether it’s in the sales process or in property management and the way we’ve tried to approach that in the past is throw people at it, whether it’s people we employ here in Australia or more recently using virtual assistance out of the Philippines or in Asia.

“[Finally,] why isn’t the industry serving customers 24/7 in all the channels they want to be served in? Why do we have businesses that operate nine to five, six days a week? That’s not how consumers buy goods and services.

“So, that was the idea behind Propic — to solve those four problems, and we looked at all of the major technology trends around the world and how different technology was applied and built a platform for these problems to be solved.”

So far, feedback for Propic has been positive, with agents on the eastern seaboard side of Australia particularly interested in leveraging the new technology, according to Mr Gray.

He said: “It was only in May that we started to promote the brand above the line and let the industry know what we’re doing. Since then, fast forwarding 120 days, we’ve acquired customers in Queensland, NSW, ACT and Victoria at this particular point in time, and those businesses are really diverse — from using artificial intelligence down in Victoria with Hodges to serve customers on their website, through to project marketers, developers and the established real estate marketers using different parts of our technology.

“The market response has been fantastic, and what we’ve found is every business has got a different priority or a different pain point whenever we engage them, and the fact that they can choose the services that make the most sense to their business and come on the journey with us [is ideal]. They don’t have to buy all of our technology, they can just focus on one or two key things that are going to make the most difference to their business, and that’s where we start.”