- This is a momentum media production. The REB Business Empowerment Showcase, shining a spotlight on the most innovative businesses that are helping principals, agents, and property managers get ahead in their marketplace. - Well, good day, V once, Liam Garmin, he editor of Real Estate Business back today with another episode of the REB Podcast. And I'm joined by a very special guest here in this studio, Jordan Kagan Gashite, executive director of detector inspector, mate, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. - Get, Liam, thank you very much. I'm honored to be here today. - No, thank you, and at some always good chance to pick the experts, brains, and see what's going on. And in particular, the theme of the podcast today, we're gonna be talking around some innovations and how you're supporting in particular, minimum standards for rentals right across the country. You've had some recent expansion, which will be unpacking later. But to get us into the podcast to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about detector inspector's story where the business began? - Absolutely, of course. So I'm co-founder and executive director and our journey started 20 years ago. But really, it began long before that. My business partner, Jason, his parents and my parents were friends. We were born four months apart. We went to play group together. We went to school together. - Oh, no way. - And then we started a business together. - Yeah. - And in all my life, he's like another brother to me. And we've been living in each other's backpockets for the last 20 years running detector and inspected together. - Does it make it better or worse? - It makes it better. Like he's like a soft comforter. And just, you know, you always got somebody to lean on. Somebody that you can trust and support, which is amazing. - So where did you both come up with the concept of the business? - Yeah, so the story goes a little something like this. Jason's dad was in real estate. And one night, he comes home from work with an article that was published in the REIV, real estate institute of Victoria Newsletter. That outline that there was a tenant who was injured in a house fire and they sued their landlord, claiming that there was non-operational smoke alarms in the property. And in the final paragraph of this article, that was written by the solicitor of the REIV. His name was Peter Lowenstein, I think, 20 years ago now. And he wrote there to be prudent for real estate agencies to hire contractors, to serve as smoke alarms, to limit their liability in the event of an incident. - Yeah. - So, Jason, faxes me that article. - Facts. - Facts. - Facts is a thing. 20 years ago. - Yeah, that's right. - I ripped the facts off the fact machine. I have a raid and I pick up the phone. I call him back and I'm like, dude, how hard can it be to install smoke alarms? And literally the next weekend, him and I went out, bought two ladders, two drills, a bunch of batteries, a bunch of smoke alarms, and we spent the next six months building a business plan to provide safety and compliance services to real estate agencies. - Right. - So, that's like the beginning of the story. We are, you know, we, in the formative years, in those, in those first few years, we really did it as a thing on the side. So, we didn't need a borrow money off my mom and dad while we were studying. I did a batch of business, Jason did a business management course. And I, you know, when I think back, I really remember the times where I was running my, our business from the bathrooms at lunchtime and after hours in the car park when I was working for L'Oreal as the marketing intern. And what we wanted to do is we really wanted to grow our business at that time. And we knew that to do safety and compliance services for real estate agencies, we were going to need to do many tens of thousands of them if we wanted to be a successful company. And essentially, we realized that to do that, we needed systems and processes. So, after running our business as a bit of a, you know, a backyard operation for a couple of years and growing our business, you know, through word of mouth, the business started to become quite well known. And we had lots and lots of customers wanting our services. But with that came a whole range of new problems. And essentially building technology was our solution to solving those problems. And that was like the advent of detector inspectors, technology of its business. And so today we call ourselves a tech-enabled, safety and compliance business that provides, you know, safer homes, for renters and simplifies compliance for property managers and landlords. - I can imagine over the last 20 years that the compliance, the regulation spaces, has probably changed quite a bit, especially. And we will touch on this a little bit later about the new minimum standards. But so that's the genesis of the business. - Yeah. - Give us a broad overview of what you're doing now and some of the unique problems that you're solving in the real estate sector. - Yeah, sure. So when you think about, you know, safety and compliance, you think about tradespeople going into homes and doing services 20 years ago. That wasn't like compliance services for real estate agencies, wasn't really a thing. You had property managers going into home sometimes with sticks and holding sticks and pressing their buttons on smoke alarms to test them to see if they are working. - It's like a broom, we start leaving like a broom or not doing anything at all. And so this idea that there was risk on a real estate agency and risk on a property manager and they could be sued for negligence was something that they really wanted to kind of shift onto a third party. And that's really where our services became quite valuable to them. You know, we, in the formative years, we purely did smoke alarm maintenance. Like that was the thing and providing safer homes for rental properties. Through that time, we encountered quite a few problems. So you know, we would get phone calls regularly from property managers saying, "Hey Jordan, or Jase, we've just got a call from a tenant." And the tenant said that your technician was in a property for 20 seconds, change a battery and left. And we would go, "Nah, nah, nah, that's not true. They needed to follow this prescribed workflow." And you know, we'd put them through all this training and they're of good character. And you know, that was really like a, he said, she said sort of scenario. And we realized that that wasn't gonna fly if we wanted to do this properly. And we turned to technology and we looked on the market and we found trade services software, you know, between 2008 and 2010. And what we realized that it didn't have was a digital audit trail that allowed us to kind of really show the prescribed workflows that our technicians were doing and making sure that they were checked off one-by-one based on the regulations that were in play at the time in each of the different states and territories in Australia. And so, you know, we solved that problem by building our own software and we started to develop an IT development team alongside our services-based team. So we would pair our technology with our services to provide like a full stack solution for property managers and real estate agencies. And let me tell you, like real estate agents, property managers, they hate compliance. Typically speaking, they do routine inspections, they take care of maintenance, they love leasing. But one thing that they don't like is compliance, too much red tape. And so having to deal with a company like us back between 2005 and 2010 when we didn't have technology assisting our business was dealing with a niggling tradesperson every day of the week for these property managers. And what we realize is if we could solve that problem for them, if we could be like a light hum in the backgrounds when it came to organizing these services with the use of automated processes and integration with real estate software and things like that, you know, we would be highly wanted by the state agencies in our business would grow. And that's essentially what happened. We were the first to market with an integration which allowed us to suck data down from the likes of the old console and RP data back in the day. And this is not like a modern day integration where you've got cloud technology and you've got a proper integration with API keys. This is an old school integration where we literally walked around with programs on USBs and installed them on people's servers in their offices all those years ago. And in doing that, that just allowed us to suck all the data down into our platform which was highly secured and allowed us to do our job without hassling out the real estate agent. Alongside that, we provide compliance portal like that sounds like everyone's got one of those today but back 10, 15 years ago, that was new. Having a technician going into a home with a mobile app with a workflow that is highly prescribed to make sure that they don't forget any step of the servicing requirements is something that they didn't have back then. And taking photos of every single one of those steps along the way in video evidence. - That's your audit trail, right? - That's the digital audit trail. They didn't have that stuff back in the day and we developed that, we'll first to market with that. Alongside with the integration as a result of that, our business grew a lot between sort of like 2013 all the way to 2019. Detector and Inspector, we expanded from Victoria to our home state into Tasmania in 2013 to New South Wales, 2014, South Australia, 2016, and then Queensland in 2019. And more recently, this year between February and April, we actually expand as a WA as well. So, we would say other than the Northern Territory, we're a national company and we're growing and it's an exciting place to be. - So I'd like to get a little bit of insight 'cause you raised a good point earlier, which was, you know, that compliance for real estate agents for property managers. It can be a little bit of an afterthought. It doesn't necessarily factor into their thinking. And you see it now, especially with new anti-money laundering reforms that are coming in from next year. - And I have the conversation with agents and principles. - Literally multiple times a week. And you know, we have so many events at RAB and I'll be speaking to an agent or a principal. So I was like, how are you going along with this? And yeah, it's not uncommon that I get the question of like, oh, you know, what's AMLCTF or what are these new regulations and compliance requirements coming in? And I think to myself like, well, you are in for a major headache if you're that behind the ball. And I can imagine that there are a lot of people that maybe not the individual assisting to this podcast because they're going out, they're trying to learn, they're trying to make sure there aren't any blind spots in their businesses. But I can imagine for a lot of agencies out there where compliance is that afterthought that there would be some absolute horror stories and absolute shockers, could you shine a little bit of a spotlight maybe from what you've seen throughout your career of agents of property managers that don't do compliance well in some of the, I don't know, legal, reputational financial risks of that. - Yeah, sure. I think the thing to note for all the listeners out there, compliance is complex and it differs from each state and territory around Australia. And it's more stringent in some and more liberal in others. And so we can talk about Victoria and it's really highly regulated compliance regime. And then there are others that with less stringent regulations. The compliance landscape in Victoria has been a massive change on property management that I've seen since the reforms of the new residential Tennessee Act in 2021. I mean, that was an amazing time for detector inspector, I just have to add. We were the biggest provider of safety compliance services in Victoria at the time. We had like a 50% take up rate of our smoke alarm services in about 40% of real estate agencies in Victoria. - What does that, what do those numbers mean? - So like, let's say you had got 1,000 properties on your rent role and there would be 50% of owners or landlords that were safety conscious and would wanna take up our smoke alarm maintenance service. The other 50% like to save the 100 bucks it was gonna cost them and said that they'd do it themselves or some would not do it at all and just hope that nothing bad was gonna happen. And then along comes these new regulations, the new residential Tennessee Act in Victoria and all of a sudden it mandates smoke alarm maintenance every 12 months and gas and electrical safety checks every 24 months. And that's a whole new ball game for property managers have to worry about. - So it has to be done. - It has to be done, it's mandatory. Alongside that, there's also this minimum standards regime that's every property in the state needs to meet minimum standards and then there's 14 minimum standards and that's to improve the livability of properties in Victoria. And eventually like under that minimum standards regime you can see livability, safety and energy efficiency sort of come into that regime. Now, if you can imagine that at the time there was like 650,000 rental properties in Victoria, some of those properties had smoke alarm maintenance services been done before. We would say 50% of our portfolio that was something that we would need to get that 50%, up to 100% because every single one of those properties needed to be completed. With gas and electrical safety checks and never been done before, they required highly qualified technicians with that were had a specialty in doing their trade. So a type A certified gas fitter or an A great electrician and those highly prescribed services which are defined under the residential tendency act needed to be delivered by companies like us to all of our customers. And we had a promise to make sure that we could deliver all those services to all those agencies and if you could imagine what happens, you've got these regulations that drive compliance, there's a pot of gold, there's pot of gold, money there for tradespeople to come in and try and make money out of these services. And with that, you sometimes get a situation where quality diminishes as a result of that. And so one way we like combated that is through our technology. And if you just remember back to me giving you an example of our formative years when we're building our systems, well, the idea of having a digital audit trail and having a mobile app that controls the way in which technicians do their services was really helpful for us to be able to provide a high quality service in Victoria. - So did you see a lot of that? - Not obviously from the detector inspector side but just from your view of the industry, did you see that by almost strengthening the compliance side of things that there were more corners actually being cut at the end of the day? - Well, I think it's a spectrum. There are circumstances where when you've got a situation where people can take advantage of the regulations and there isn't regulatory oversight to make sure that the tradespeople are doing the right thing. That's something that's inevitably happens. What we noticed was that there is a variance between companies that charge different prices in the market. So we would say that if you've got a highly qualified tradesperson doing the prescribed safety checks as defined under the RTA, it's going to take them a specific amount of time to complete those jobs. So we would say somewhere between an hour and hour to an hour and a half for a gas safety check, similarly about 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes for an electrical safety check and obviously depending on the size of the house that can be shorter or longer. When you think about those suppliers in the market that are charging a fraction of what we charge, we say it's almost impossible if they're using qualified tradespeople and doing the prescribed work that they end up going and doing the services correctly and corners are cut as a result of them being able to provide or charge those prices that they can charge. - Yeah, for sure, which I can only imagine for property managers, for agents alike, for even the investors themselves who only these buildings it's opening up just a raft of financial regulatory compliance issues that at the end of the day, even if you are trying to save yourself what, $50 to $100, it's just not simply worth it, which is why you should be partnering with the experts like yourselves. - Yeah, look, I think quality always plays out and I think regulations will tighten in our space. Like I think there'll be greater regulatory oversight on suppliers in our industry. I think it's important that even the idea of an accreditation body that oversees safety checks in Victoria is a really great idea. It's something that we've pitched to governments and I think we're hoping that government can really press. I've got three young children, seven, five and two, one day inevitably they're gonna move out of home and they're gonna rent a property with their friends and what I'd hate is that in the future that they've rented a property where you've got a tradesperson who's gone in and simply taking a photo of a gas appliance and a photo of electrical switch on the bottom, walked out of the property in five or 10 minutes because they're being pressed to do 15 jobs a day. What you really want is you want the regulations as defined under the RTA to really lift the safety of rental properties in the state and to do that, you wanna make sure that the services actually being conducted properly. And so regulatory oversight would be amazing, having an accreditation body would be smart and I think you can kind of like link that to other industries as well. Like solar has an accreditation body that oversees the quality of work. I think inevitably that's where the safety check kind of industry and service providers like detector inspector will be playing in the future. - Absolutely. Before you highlighted a recent expansion into WA, what's the state of play at the moment for the detector inspector? What's the market in WA looking like? - Well, it's been amazing for us actually. It's been really refreshing. The people are amazing. The people are friendly. Are you saying what I'm like, big tour? - I'm just saying there's less rat race. Like Melbourne and Sydney. Like Melbourne and Sydney, everyone's got somewhere to be and somewhere to go and things to do. It's like it's stressful in Melbourne. In Perth, it was, you get there. It's very laser fair and the sun's out, it's shining. I mean, I did go there between Feb and April to expand the business there. But and it saw it was really nice weather back then. But yeah, like it is a more relaxed environment. The businesses there seem to be doing really well. Like the real estate business, the property management business seems to be doing really well. And what we noticed was that that was sort of like 10 to 15 years behind Melbourne and Sydney in terms of compliance. And it was like back in the old days. You know, there were only a handful of really great suppliers in the market doing safety and compliance services. But a lot of them didn't have or bring to the table the sort of technology that detector inspector was bringing to Perth. And that seemed to be a real point of difference. You know, those customers in WA were looking for efficiencies, economies of scale. They want to make their property management businesses more profitable. And having to deal with smoke alarm maintenance and what they consider their electrical safety check testing the switchboards of rental properties is something that they either didn't have organized within their businesses. And the ones that did were doing it inefficiently. And so the technology that we brought to the state, our compliance platform, the integration with software, with real estate software, was something that they hadn't really seen in our industry before. And that was something that got really excited by. - You touched on the profitability of property managers. And I think that's an incredibly important point of view because when you're kind of struggling to really beneficial tasks here, one of which is the compliance, but the other one is the efficiency. And I think it's the, you know, we've done a few podcasts on it but I think that there are what 4,000, 5,000 job ads for property managers across Australia. It's a, it's a hard slog of a job because you're overseeing potentially in the low hundreds of properties under management. You've got landlords, you've got tenants calling you, ringing you every day. And it is an industry where unless you're on the board, unless you're organized, unless you've got the efficiency and the platform and the tech to support you, that again, you can cut corners and you can have problems. - I'd like to unpack about the profitability side, how your tech, which backs up the kind of core business, how that's making the life of a property manager easier. - Yeah, when you think about that and you think about the changing regulations, and again, I mentioned Victoria has the strictest regulations and when they essentially really commenced the new residential tendency act, it was also during COVID, which was, you know, challenging time, but despite that, we saw lots and lots of property managers leave the industry. It made their job really hard. It was, you know, detector inspector, as a company went through a period where we actually brought our customers into our office warehouse, indeed, warehouse tours to kind of help train property managers and understand what was required within safety checks and why we charge what we charge and what we're actually looking for when it comes to searching for negative pressure or electrocution or limiting house fires. And so there was a huge educational program that was in place at the time, but the technology itself was something that became really important to agencies. It's one thing to have a safety and compliance company or a local tradesperson that works closely with an agency doing the services that we do. But to have them complete a job, email our service report, send an invoice, is already a huge amount of administrative burden for the agency. If you've got problems that they discover while doing the services, that means, and you're sending your service reports or property manager, they need to go and read each one of those reports to make sure that they are compliance or non-compliance or they're, you know, to decipher what the issue might be and then go and find three quotes to provide the repairs to the owner and all of those processes when done manually can bog down a real estate agent. When it bogs you down, you need more staff in your office to run your property management business. That eats into the profitability. And so where we play is, again, trying to automate and streamline as much of the safety and compliance data as possible. We have our compliance management platform that integrates with majority of the real estate software out in the market. It pushes data directly into that property management software. It updates service dates within the software. Our compliance platform itself flags, compliance issues or access issues 'cause that's a big part of our job is trying to get into the property. It's a really hard thing if you can imagine doing, you know, we work with about 350,000 properties today, doing about 500 to 600,000 services every year, getting access into those properties is a huge part of what we specialize in. And being able to provide property managers with really handy wizards within our compliance platform to solve those problems without having to worry about all the other properties that just go through really nicely and are compliant and go into their platform very easily is the way that we want to think about it. Reduce the hassles, reduce the administrative burden, and make sure that we can only flag problems when they arise. And then we deal with those problems through technology to help them solve it really easily and efficiently. - Which will come at the, I can only assume there are a lot of property managers here that are reporting that because it does make their life easier and it means you cut less corners. And it's too confirmed, you know, I was going through the detector inspector website and I saw that you launched properly which is the solution built around Victoria's RTA regulations. - Yeah. - Is that what you're describing or is properly an additional? - No, it's been a properly is an addition. It's actually our solution, detector inspectors, innovative solutions to the new reforms that are coming in Victoria. - So it's like purpose built, is purpose built? - Yeah. - Purpose built for Vic. Well, it could be expanded to other states, right? So in Victoria, there is a minimum standards regime that falls under the residential Tennessee Act, which again is to help improve the livability of property, to help improve the safety of property and the energy efficiency of property to keep the cost of living down for renters. So all these things are really great things that the government's brought in to make renting easier for renters or tenants. The data point that I was looking up recently, we've gone in the last sort of 10 years, we've gone from about 27% of people in Australia renting to about 31%. So we've got an increasing number of people renting in Australia. And so that's why the government's trying to strengthen those renting laws. They've brought those regimes into New South Wales. There's one in Queensland as well. I know WA is going through at their second phase of their reforms. And the reforms in all the different states sort of differ from state to state, but they have this platform to be able to bring in these ideas in the future. Victoria is the first state to bring in these ideas of safety, energy efficiency, and really kind of enforce minimum standards. So 2021, the regs change in Vic and every property needs to meet minimum standards. In 2024, the government has their renting task force that can go and into property and try and if you know, if a tenant complains that the property does meet minimum standards, that task force can help adjudicate that situation. I'm looking at cab, they seem to be using the task force pretty easily or a loss. Finds for renting out a property today that don't meet minimum standards are in excess of $12,000 for an individual or $60,000 for a company. - So who bears that, the landlord? - Both landlord and real estate agent. So it's the real estate agent knowingly listed something. - That's right, that's right. So you're in this situation where there's these huge fines, calves out there, the renting task force out there, trying to find properties and there's a new reform coming in on the 25th of November this year. So in a few weeks time, that suggests that or requires that an agency, real estate agent or property manager, needs to have a reasonable belief that the property meets minimum standards before they advertise. This idea of before you advertise is hugely important because now consumer affairs can go into an open for inspection with their task force and audit property while they're there. If they don't see that the property meets the 14 minimum standards, they can find the owner and the real estate agent in turn. They've been seen to be scouring the platform. So RIA and Domain, looking at listings, rental listings and looking at photos and listings and saying, "Does that property have a two-star or more "energy efficiency heater in the main living area? "Does that window have a window covering? "Does that cord blind affix to the window?" And so they are looking for these things and they are really trying to, we will soon see on the 25th of November whether or not they're gonna start laying down many more fines as a result of properties not meet minimum standards. You know, you listed quite a few things which I didn't even know about. - Yeah, like the cord of the blind. And I'm thinking about my blinds at home where there's like a little widget to the wall and then it loops through, I guess. - The plate, yeah. Is that the plate? Is that the 15th or 10th? - Yeah, nice. - The plate. So it's pleated to the wall. But I suppose the old school dangle was dangling. Like that's not cooling. - So it's dangerous, I mean. So that is the 15th minimum standard that's gonna come in at the beginning of December in Victoria. But that's come about because there were children who got strangled on corded blinds. And so they wanna prevent that from happening in rental properties. - So this is, if you've got a rental property, I can imagine knowing how many people listening to this right now that are buying in the Melbourne Victoria market. - For people buying now or people out of bought recently, once this comes in in December, did you say? - So reform comes in November and the 15th minimum standard comes in in December. After the 15th minimum standard comes in. - After that point, you have to have it. - You need it. - And there is no. - So gonna gray area. - Well, there is already today, there is no gray area. I think the reform on the 25th of November allows Cav to say, well, you agency, you can't list your property online, you can't advertise it. If it doesn't meet minimum standards. And if you do and we catch you, we will find you. And so that's freaking out the market. Like property managers are freaking out, they're frightened. - What's that saying, like ignorance isn't like it. - Excused, you know? It's not an excuse now. Consumer Affairs really want agencies to take responsibility. - Yeah. - Agencies alongside the owners, the rental providers, to take responsibility for the rental properties that they're putting out in the market. And so we help property managers and agencies solve that problem. And property is our solution to that. And the way that you can sort of defray your risk, if you're an agency, is you can outsource it. - To a third party. - Like you said. - Like us, like us. And typically the common solution in the market is to send in a technician into the property to review all the minimum standards and hand a report or a determination and let the rental provider and the agency know if it means minimum standards. Dei is thinking about it differently. Dei had to take respect that. We're thinking about it differently. We know that timing is a massive, massive issue in terms of being able to put a property on the market for rent. Imagine you've got a situation where you've just sold the property and there's a settlement period getting access into that property is really challenging. If you've got a situation where you're doing a relit, so you've got the same rental property that's already on your list. And you've had the tenant vacate and you've got a new tenant coming and you want to advertise the property for a new tenant. You know, it's really hard getting into that property. Like renters that are leaving, that are vacating, don't really want to let in tradespeople to go and do that. So who are the best people to gain access and who are the most incentivized to gain access to be able to make that determination? Well, it's actually the property managers and the BDMs themselves. And so what we've done is we've built an app purpose, built app. It's been built collaboratively with some of the biggest and best brands in Victoria. We've been working with them over the last six months building what we call properly, compliance done properly. It's our properly app. And essentially it allows the property manager or BDM to go and do a video capture of the property itself. It's got really incredible guided workflows that guide the user on the 14 minimum standards and ask them very relevant questions. So we're taking that, those ideas of what we did with our technicians back in the day, delivering our safety compliance services, where inputting those into our properly app, giving it and putting it into the hands of property managers and BDMs and saying to them, do the video capture, submit the video capture to us and we'll have our highly trained staff review all the footage. We'll use a whole heap of technology in the background to flag problems, problem items in the video capture. And then detector inspector will give you a determination as to whether or not the property meets minimum standards. Not only do we do that, but we also give a guarantee and penalty protection. So we stand behind our highly qualified trades people in the office reviewing this video capture. And we say that if property manager or rental provider cops are fine for the property in not many minimum standards and we've actually reviewed it, then we'll cover your penalty. - This is fantastic. - You know, this is really cool tech. - It's really cool tech and it's really innovative and it speaks to like all the different problems that we can see in the market, the timing issue, third party providers, some other suppliers in the market. They don't really guarantee the work that they do. There's so many disclaimers in that that means that if the property doesn't meet minimum standards and there is a fine, they may not cover it. In our situation, you know, in most circumstances, we will cover those penalties. But really our job is to say, well, we're not gonna, we want to tell you that if the property doesn't meet minimum standards, you shouldn't advertise it. You need to go and fix that problem. So if you need to put a blind on a window to have a window covering, we'll tell you to do that before you advertise it. And so the idea here is, you know, prevention and risk mitigation on the agency and the other really cool thing about how we've tied this into our safety checks is if you're a rental provider, if you're a landlord, and you also take up the detector in respect to safety checks, we extend that penalty protection and guarantee to the rental provider and landlord as well. - See, this is really cool stuff because, you know, I've written quite a lot about the Victorian rental laws spoken out on podcasts. However, despite all that, I was still quite ignorant to some of the details that you've brought up. And I can imagine given how hot the Melbourne Victorian market is for investors right now, there's gonna be a lot of people listening to this from even from Interstate, though, I didn't realize this. And it goes to shows us how challenging the environment will be for property managers. And I mean this because, you know, more than anyone, right, which is you might be a property manager and everything's hunky-dory. The boss goes, buys and you rent roll and there's chaos. - Chaos, right? There's an extra 20 hours you gotta look after that you're completely unfamiliar with. 20 new landlords that you don't know about. And if you don't have that audit trail behind you, you could be walking into this, this minefield, and I mean minefield in that compliance sense of, you know, if you don't have that background, you don't know the houses. It hasn't had the due diligence done in the past. You could be walking into these challenges, or you see it all the time where you do have a very high turnover rate in the industry. People moving to property managers who might not be that good, that having this compliance checklist for a house gives both property manager, landlord, business owner, hand-on-heart trust that they're in line with the rules. - That's right. And I think the key message in that it is chaos and what we've found is those companies that have partnered with a really great safety and compliance company, like detector inspector, who's innovative, who thinks about all the ins and outs of how compliance should be managed within a real estate agency. They often have a better experience than those that try and piecemeal or, you know, different suppliers, different trace people to try and meet the statistics they go. That's right. Those that are planned and prepared and methodical about the way that they do things, those that are strict about compliance within their real estate offers, both to their owners and their property managers, because you want to create a higher standard. I mean, they're the ones that have the best compliance processes and we've helped them design that and we know that every agency is different and we adapt the way that we do things to each of the real estate agencies that we work with. And there are some businesses that we've seen in time. If they're selling a rent role, if they've got a great compliance record, they actually get higher profit for that rent role or higher multiples for that rent role, than those companies that haven't managed compliance. - Oh, I can say that. - If you're compliant and you do things by the book, you scratch your surface, you probably more organized, better administration, better audit trails as we've highlighted, better relationships with landlords and tenants, it's endemic of the whole ecosystem. - For sure. And can you imagine a situation where you have task force and they've got one in New South Wales as well? So this idea is not just a Victorian idea. Victoria has led the way in this. We think that in time, there will be similar legislation and regulations across all states and territories. But in Victoria, you've got this situation where if you get audited and you don't have your compliance data in a platform, easily accessible, it is chaos from that point on and then you cop fines and you can cop multiple fines for non-compliance. So for every property that is non-compliant or you can't provide those records for, that is an additional fine to your agency. - Yeah, 100%. Now looking at that big last six months for you as you've been refined these products, as you've expanded into WA, what's the next 12 months when you're rising looking like? - That's a good question. We've got some really cool innovations that I can't actually speak about. - Oh, that's a waste. - Yeah, no, no, seriously. We've got some really cool stuff coming down the pipeline. But look, we want to grow our markets. We want to introduce better integration with our platform partners. So when you think about your property management software, for us that's a really important thing, trying to streamline, automates for property managers is essential to ensure that we can make their lives easier and better. We pump a lot of resource into technology. And so we think that if we can do more of that, we can take more pressures, more headaches away from property managers, we can make their jobs better and they hopefully go to work every day, loving their jobs, and then we've all done our job. We keep home safer. We make property managers job easier. And we do that through technology and really high quality services. - It's safer for landlords and tenants as well, which at the end of the day, it's just looking after regular Australians. But I think that is all we have time for on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me, having me. - It was awesome, it was awesome. I really enjoyed my time here. - Now, if you do have any questions for Jordan, I'm gonna offer what's the best way getting in contact with you. So I can only imagine that there are a few people listening to this podcast that didn't know necessarily the ins and outs. How can they get in touch? - Well, there are all the common ways of getting in contact with us. We have a telephone number and email address,
[email protected]. We'll take you through to our amazing help team. We call it Help@DI. And that'll help you solve any of your questions. If you have something more specific and you're a property manager, you can contact one of our lovely account managers who I'm sure you're all aware of who they are and they'll be able to help you out as well. - Fantastic, and that is all we have time for today on the REB podcast. But until next week, bye-bye. - The information featured in this podcast is generally nature and does not take into consideration your financial situation or individual needs and should not be relied upon. Before making any investment insurance, tax property or financial planning decision, you should consult a licensed professional who can advise whether your decision is appropriate for you. Guests appearing on this podcast may have a commercial relationship with the companies mentioned.
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