Proptech

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Australian proptech startup :Different has appointed real estate veteran, Kasey McDonald as its first Head of Leasing.
McDonald, who has spent two decades in the real estate industry, will be tasked with bringing the operations team and departments together to provide positive experiences for property owners and renters.
Founded in 2017, the proptech firm now manages over $1 billion worth of properties across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
The full-service property management startup automates the everyday tasks of a property manager.
It allows property owners to pay a fixed fee of $100 per month instead of a percentage based on the rental price of the property.
McDonald's appointment follows a strong period of growth for :Different, who closed its third funding round earlier this year.
It raised $7.1 million to support its growth plans to expand to Perth, Canberra and beyond.
“I bought my first property at 18, and started as a property manager two decades ago, so I’ve had the experience of being on both sides of the fence”, McDonald said.
She hopes that this will help her in streamlining the way :Different’s property managers work.
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:Different appoints its first head of leasing

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COVID-19 has created major challenges for building owners and landlords, with remote working suddenly ubiquitous.
Good use of innovative PropTech can help get people back into commercial buildings, by making them great places to work, making them safer and reducing costs for owners and operators. Attendees at the <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/http://go.questevents.com.au/e/447962/2020-08-27/3v6zhh/3402105112?h=J6cvkLiw4pWNenBE-IMSTtDQwPE8CpEjA3rCIz448Io" target="_blank">PropTech Summit 2020</a> will hear the brightest minds discussing how to solve today’s most pressing business challenges, with COVID-19 featuring heavily as a driver for change.
Keep up to date and ensure your business practice is relevant to today’s conditions by hearing how:
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<li>Dexus are adapting to the way office space will be consumed in a post COVID world (Mark Hansen, Chief Information Officer, Dexus)</li>
<li>Operational data supports improves the safety, comfort of Scentre Group’s shopping centres (Varun Nair, Head of Facilities Management, and Phillip Yang, Head of Centre Technology, Scentre Group)</li>
<li>Smart building technology investments pay for themselves by delivering energy savings, maintenance efficiencies and increased tenant experiences (Sven Sylvester, Corporate Innovation Lead | Investment Director, Taronga Group)</li>
<li>Implementing PropTech impacts the bottom line (Suzette Lamont, Regional Director, Client Solutions, CBRE Asia Pacific and Leah Ong, Director of Real Estate, Volvo)</li>
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 Some of these changes will be specific to the current crisis, but others are here to stay. Tomorrow’s clients are going to demand more than ever from the spaces they live, work and shop in. Technology has moved from a nice value-add to an essential. 
The full speaker list is available <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/http://go.questevents.com.au/e/447962/speakers/3v6zhm/3402105112?h=J6cvkLiw4pWNenBE-IMSTtDQwPE8CpEjA3rCIz448Io">here</a>. To see the agenda, click <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/http://go.questevents.com.au/e/447962/agenda-day-one/3v6zhk/3402105112?h=J6cvkLiw4pWNenBE-IMSTtDQwPE8CpEjA3rCIz448Io" target="_blank">here</a>.
To book online, click <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/http://go.questevents.com.au/e/447962/registration/3v6zhp/3402105112?h=J6cvkLiw4pWNenBE-IMSTtDQwPE8CpEjA3rCIz448Io" target="_blank">here</a>, or email, click <a href="mailto:info@questevents.com.au?subject=Register%20me%20for%20PropTech%20Summit%202020" target="_blank">here</a>. 
 
 
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What does COVID-19 mean for PropTech?

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Proptech company Instarent is described as the first fully integrated online solution for property owners to manage their own investment properties.
Launched only a year ago, the <a href="http://www.instarent.com.au" target="_blank">Instarent</a> platform hosts over 500 properties and is adding 100 new properties every month. 
The Australian property management market is currently worth $5.5 billion dollars and Instarent founder, AJ Chand, would like to capture up to twenty percent of it. To assist with this ambitious expansion plan, Instarent is embarking on an equity crowdfunding raise with Birchal.
An end-to-end solution for property management, Instarent manages and facilitates the entire property management ecosystem by automating the process for tenants, agents, landlords and tradespeople.
It launched with a freemium model, charging for add-on services such as background checks on tenants, photography packages for properties and end of year financial support.
The platform includes live notifications as well as integration with multiple strategic partners including Realestate and Domain.
Chand said, "intelligent algorithms do most of the work for you, and we have property management experts available 24/7, 365 days a year. Our business model has been developed so that we can rapidly expand to ensure we have the critical mass available to satisfy our fast-growing marketplace."
“Timing is everything, and Instarent has launched at the optimal time to capture not just the changed markets of today’s property management ecosystem, but future markets as the progression of technological know-how propels our technology into the hands of landlords and tenants wanting to cut out the middle person once and for all," he concluded.
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Proptech startup Instarent launches crowdfunding campaign

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Australia’s residential property developer, AVJennings, has signed a five-year deal with TechnologyOne.
The move – which forms part of the developer’s digital transformation strategy – will see a knock-down-rebuild of almost all of AVJennings’ major enterprise applications.
It’s all aimed at providing a simpler, unified and modern technology foundation for the organisation and its highly mobile, geographically diverse workforce spread throughout New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand.
The residential property leader is a new customer for TechnologyOne. 
AVJennings Chief Financial Officer, Larry Mahaffy, was seeking an integrated and efficient solution that promised better visibility of the multi-million dollar projects its manages. 
“We understand better than most how complex big projects with multiple stakeholders can be. We don’t want that complexity in our technology systems, we want simplicity,” Mr Mahaffy said. 
AV Jennings will replace a series of legacy software applications across financials, document management, asset and capital management, and human resources including payroll with TechnologyOne’s whole-of-business solution.
Ed Chung, TechnologyOne’s Chief Executive Officer said implementation is expected in October 2020.
“We heavily invest in research and development to bring pre-configured industry solutions to market. This delivers real value to our customers through implementations that are faster, lower in cost and with reduced risk,” said Mr Chung.
”To have AVJennings select our solution is a testament to our enterprise vision that spans across several vertical markets.” he said.
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AV Jennings signs with TechnologyOne to build its digital transformation

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PropertyGuru, one of south east Asia’s leading property technology companies, has lodged a prospectus with ASIC to list on the ASX.
Assuming the final price is midway of the indicative price range of A$3.70 to A$4.50, the offer will raise approximately A$363 million. 
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The business was founded in Singapore in 2007 by Steve Melhuish and Jani Rautiainen having sensed a dynamic real estate market with no online platform.
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Recently Credit Suisse analysts have suggested the Asian online real estate listings business could be the next ASX-listed unicorn, a potential $1 billion-plus listing on the Australian Securities Exchange.
PropertyGuru operates digital property classifieds marketplaces in five countries across Southeast Asia – Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.
It claims its market share of the online real estate marketplace as:
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◼  72% in Singapore 
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◼  69% in Vietnam
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◼  42% in Malaysia
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◼  45% in Thailand
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◼  49% in Indonesia7
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It is the destination of over 23 million property seekers to find their home every month.
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 The group has 60 percent consumer market share across its core markets, which is reportedly significantly greater than its nearest competitor.
Over the past twelve years, the Group has grown from a single-market start-up to a diversified PropTech company.
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It has previously raised over S$400 million in funding to date including new capital and shareholder selldown over four funding stages involving large institutional investors, including TPG, KKR, Emtek and Square Peg Capital with over 130 staff dedicated to R&amp;D,
With over 45,000 active agents, the real estate portal has a revenue model that is predominantly subscription-based, where agents currently pay upfront fees for an annual subscription that provides them with a number of discretionary credits.
It recently appointed Olivier Lim as independent chairman as well as Jenny MacDonald and Melanie Wilson as independent non-executive directors to its board in preparation of the ASX listing.
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The appointments of Mr Lim, Ms Macdonald and Ms Wilson are part of a broader exercise to evolve the property technology company’s corporate governance in tandem with its growth trajectory and the increasing scale of its business, PropertyGuru said.
“The new directors bring even greater diversity, breadth and depth to the board,” the company added.
The team is headed by our Chief Executive Officer, Hari V Krishnan, who has two decades of senior executive experience in leading technology firms in Asia and the United States.”
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PropertyGuru is the ASX's next unicorn: Credit Suisse

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SPONSORED POST
With new technology solutions changing the landscape in which real estate operates, Savills Australia has revolutionised their property offerings by entering into a proptech alliance with Queensland-based SA1 Property. 
In a move to command greater market share in the industrial and occupier services sectors, SA1 Property has enabled Savills Industrial business to tap into geospatial tools and analytics in order to assist clients in making informed property decisions.
Savills Australia is the only property agency with access to the recently developed NodeMaster site selection, and the newly developed SA1 Pro information platform, entering into a national agreement which will extend over the next four years.
Savills Australia’s National Head of <a href="http://www.savills.com.au/services-and-sectors/industrial.aspx" target="_blank">Industrial and Business Services</a>, Michael Fenton, said the union with SA1 Property has enabled Savills to provide clients with unique insight when making location decisions. 
“By coupling location intelligence with a comprehensive understanding of the property market, this alliance has enabled us to provide our clients with the power to optimise their business position using data which could result in millions of dollars of savings for industrial occupier’s overtime and de-risk the investment thesis for investors and developers in transactions,” Mr Fenton said.
Senior property industry executives, Aaron Bates, a former director of the CBRE and JLL industrial businesses in Queensland, and locational intelligence director Stephen Clark, who has 15 years’ experience applying geospatial technologies to military, mining, infrastructure and property situations, founded the firm last year after they observed a need for better metrics in the proptech market.
“We wanted to develop a platform to help investors and developers identify greater investment value as well as assist occupiers in optimising their supply chain networks using locational intelligence.
“From working alongside Savills, we now have full coverage of the Eastern Seaboard core markets, with Adelaide and Perth to follow shortly,” Mr Bates said.
The NodeMaster technology has allowed Savills to work with occupiers to determine the most efficient property for their specific use across every major industrial market. The technology works to harness real time traffic modelling to simulate movements across every road network at any time of the day. 
Moreover, Savills can simulate their clients’ freight tasks across thousands of points in each city, to determine the most efficient location. They can model their inbound and outbound freight movements using B-double routes to determine the optimum centroid for clients while also measuring the impact each potential location may have on existing staff. 
Real time data can be shared with key decision makes in a digital story map format at any one time, reducing the time required to analyse operations, relate it to the total marketplace and filter large datasets to identify every possible suitable property.
Additionally, Savills is utilising the SA1 Pro platform for property data and analytics, which captures the height, roof area and site coverage of every industrial property across Australia along with live data on land and building availability. 
“We’ve centralised and added value to a massive amount of property and market data, and provided Savills operators with an ability to analyse localised markets with a level of speed and efficiency not previously possible,” Mr Clark said.
The National Industrial &amp; Business Services Team have integrated the platform into their everyday business communications. A recent example of the software at work, has been on a recent land-rich investment transaction at Zillmere which was driven by land availability projections.
The off market transaction for 38 Pineapple Street was brokered by Savills Industrial &amp; Business Services Director, Callum Stenson for $8.751 million on behalf of private investor.
According to Mr Stenson, the Sydney based purchaser was a first time investor into the Brisbane Industrial market. 
“The technology enabled us to demonstrate a tightening of available land in the immediate Northern Brisbane industrial region over the coming years, which highlighted value in the opportunity.
“The real time insights provided our client with the ability to look outside the normal search parameters and the confidence to make a better investment decision,” Mr Stenson said.
SA1 Property is currently investigating how their proptech solutions can be expanded  to provide further insights for additional markets and industry types to further assist Savills clientele in the near future. 
Savills is a leading global real estate service provider offering the full spectrum of services from strategic advice to managing assets and projects and transacting deals. Michael Fenton is National Head of Industrial and Business Services. To learn more about Savills, visit <a href="http://www.savills.com.au/" target="_blank">savills.com.au</a>.
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Proptech alliance launches Savills to the forefront of cutting edge insights

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GUEST OBSERVATION 
For 50 years, the Australian property industry has led the world. Australia was the first to create listed property trusts and has proudly blazed the trail for building sustainability. Our industry is world’s best practice. 
Our future—a future of technology-enabled solutions for big problems in the property industry—is less certain. From Singapore to Shenzhen, Dubai to Silicon Valley, proptech is transforming the property industry. 
In Australia, a dangerous air of complacency among our industry's key players threatens to hold us back, despite noticeable 'talk' in recent times. Without that talk converting to bold action, we'll lose our crown as other markets invest in the future. If we do not lead on proptech then we will no longer lead in property. It’s as simple as that. 
Industry challenges
Traditional property businesses, such as construction, development, asset ownership and agency, have been tremendously successful over many decades. However, proptech is new and at least somewhat unknown to the incumbent players. As industry value has started to shift away from a traditional ownership and service layer toward a technology-enabled service layer, it is uncertain how the incumbents intend to retain value.
For example, WeWork provide 'office space as a service' without owning any assets. They’re eight years old and are raising capital right now at a $35 billion valuation. That makes them more valuable than Airbnb or SpaceX. 
The second factor is aversion to risk. Success in real estate is a direct function of risk mitigation. From a feasibility report prior to green-lighting a development through to due diligence when purchasing an asset, every element of risk is considered methodically. A proptech knowledge and capability gap, combined with an inherent aversion to risk, inhibits necessary action. Today, the greatest risk of all is to do nothing. 
Add to that the ultra competitive nature of the property industry. A lack of collaboration among key players holds these organisations back as it restrains new solutions. This ‘anti-collaboration instinct’ within the industry must change, for the benefit of all.
The time for action is now
Great challenges walk hand-in-hand with great opportunities.BlueChilli is Australia's largest tech accelerator, the linchpin between corporates keen to innovate, investors hungry for deal flow and tech startups with bold solutions to big problems. A proptech-themed, corporate-backed accelerator bringing together these three sectors to tackle big juicy problems with breakthrough solutions has a tremendous opportunity to make a difference in this space.
And we’re certainly seeing the industry awaken to the need for and power of collaboration to serve proptech. In conversation with corporates from across the industry, we note there’s a growing hunger to walk the innovation talk as the threats and opportunities of proptech become clearer. 
At a recent proptech lunch we brought together senior executives from real estate heavyweights such as CBRE and Stockland with some of Australia’s most promising proptech startups and other corporates with an interest in proptech including ANZ, which has identified housing affordability as a key strategic pillar. Together, we shared problems, assessed trends and started a dialogue for what action might involve.There are already green shoots of that action among corporates.
The investment piece
In the context of Google’s 70-20-10 innovation model, the business case for proptech is apparent. The model sees 70% of innovation investment devoted to the organisation's core business, such as optimising traditional real estate assets or services for customers; 20% to adjacent areas, for example an online telehealth service for tenants in aged care facilities and; 10% towards R&amp;D for transformation in markets that don’t yet exist, like a technology solution that automates real estate valuations making existing valuation services redundant. 
HBR research has found that companies who follow this 70-20-10 innovation investment model are out performing their peers with P/E premium of 10% - 20%. The same research found that the return ratio is roughly the inverse of the innovation allocation. Adjacent and transformational areas of innovation accounting for roughly 20% and 70% of returns respectively, with 10% coming from innovation in the core.  
The speed of change, and the fact that transformative innovation is by its nature often beyond the capabilities and risk appetite of large organisations, makes this the sweet spot for collaboration with agile, risk-inclined startups that bridge a corporate’s tech knowledge gap.
Neighbourlytics, for example, is a hyperlocal social analytics dashboard that gives real-time data on a neighbourhood. It was born from a realisation that Census data collection once every four years is too infrequent and too shallow a dataset. In addition to businesses in the property industry – for example developers – government agencies and facilities managers find Neighbourlytics data useful for meeting current community needs.
Proptech is the next frontier and the Australian ecosystem is as well placed as any in the world to lead the way.
As an investor in and accelerator of tech startups, we have trained our attention on proptech. We see deep entrepreneurial talent, hunger for corporate innovation and rapidly increasing investment activity. All the ingredients are there, but the question remains: will the Australian property industry step up?
Chris Ball is Head of Partnerships at <a href="https://www.bluechilli.com/" target="_blank">BlueChilli</a>, a company that invests in startups and entrepreneurs. 
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