Kylie Davis: 00:02 Welcome to The ‎PropTech Podcast. It's Kylie Davis here, and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide. I passionately believe we need to create and grow a sense of community between the innovators and real estate agents, and sharing our stories is a great way to do that. The aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and to explore the issues and challenges raised by the technology, and how they can create amazing property experiences.

Kylie Davis: 00:34 So my guest in this episode is David Stewart from Market Buy, one of the growing number of innovative Australian businesses making private treaty negotiations faster and easier, by managing that communication process around all the offers. Now, Market Buy allows real estate agents to manage the level of transparency they show their sellers and buyers, and it captures and creates a trail of all the offers, and puts all the communication in one place. It's not an auction system, but it does seem to offer a lot of the advantages of an auction process, in that both sellers and buyers receive fast updates on offers, and are really clear on where they stand.

Kylie Davis: 01:15 So let's do it. Welcome to the show.

David Stewart: 01:19 Thank you, Kylie. Great to be here.

Kylie Davis: 01:22 Yeah. Great. So give us the elevator pitch for Market Buy.

David Stewart: 01:25 Look, Market Buy, in its really essential form, is just a communication device that just allows agents to deliver information really quickly, really officially and succinctly to everyone involved in the sales process. I think in a lot of cases, people are worried that they're not going to be notified of stuff that's happening, and what we wanted to do is just make that whole process simpler, and just introduce a level of transparency to the offer process, and in a nutshell, that's what we are. We talk a lot about being a really effective communication platform, and I think that's what we do best.

Kylie Davis: 01:58 Cool. So what are the trends that have led to Market Buy coming into being? What are you into?

David Stewart: 02:06 We're born from a single sale, actually. I had a really good friend of mine, a guy that I went to primary school with, went to high school with, went on to play football with. So I'd known him for about 35 years, and he walked into my office one day about this time, it was a bit later, late December, and asked me to sell his property, and then dumped on me that he bought another property unconditionally, and his broker told him unless he sold his own property really quickly, he wasn't going to be in a position to purchase. So we dumped it on the market, and we put it on at a really competitive price, and over the Christmas period, we had about 15 people that wanted to buy this house, and out of that, about 10 people came in to put offers in.

David Stewart: 02:48 And because we had an auction, because being the Christmas period, I went through a really laborious process of dragging all the buyers in, spending a lot of time with them, making sure they knew that they had to put in their very best offer, that there wasn't going to be a second opportunity, that they had to go as high as they would fare to go, and if they didn't, they ran the risk of losing the property. And I was really quite careful with every buyer. This was a good personal friend of mine, so I wanted to make sure that they got the very best price I could generate. We sold it, it took me two days to write up those offers and as I came back to the office, I started to ring through the buyers that weren't successful, to explain to them that they'd missed out.

David Stewart: 03:26 And I started to get the old stuff that I'm sure agents out there are so used to, "I didn't believe you had so many offers. Can I make another offer?" Is it too late?" And I just said, "Look, it's done. The contracts are signed," and it was really quite a crushing feeling, because out of all of those buyers, had they been given a level of transparency, I'm sure there would've been a number of them that would've paid more, but buyers tend to hold a little bit back in reserve, because no one wants to be that person that pays too much, and when you're not giving them information as to where they need to aim at and what they need to pay, they do keep a little bit in reserve. So I'm in a bit of a huff, I went home to my wife and said, "Look, the next time I do this, I'm just going to eBay it. Stuff it, this is ridiculous."

David Stewart: 04:13 A little tip for people out there, don't eBay property. It's not a good idea, don't do it. And so, I got together with some people I knew and just said, "Look, we need to find a solution for this. I need to..." Not so much affect or change the auction process, because I think the auction process works quite well as it is, but "We need to take, particularly around multiple offers, and we need to create a tool that just makes life easier," and that was the birth of Market Buy.

Kylie Davis: 04:42 Cool. So who's involved in Market Buy? Who are your partners?

David Stewart: 04:47 So it started off with just me and my lead developer, Joel. So Joel and I, I have known Joel for a number of years and we got together, and being an agent, I'm certainly not a coder, and I'm not someone who can put software together, I can certainly dream up these crazy things, but I've got no chance of creating them myself. And we sat down over a cup of coffee one day, and he decided it was a good idea and it was in his wheelhouse to be able to put something like this together, so we embarked on our little journey.

David Stewart: 05:17 As we have gone along, we've added people to it. So Chris Gilmore, who runs All Properties Group in Southeast Queensland, I met him at a conference a couple of years back. He thought it was a fantastic idea, so he became involved. And just recently, in the early part of this year, a guy by the name of John Heloby, some people might know, runs Check My House Price, we've been speaking for a number of years and we'd been bouncing ideas off each other in regards to our respective businesses. He often expressed the desire to get involved, so he's our most recent addition to the Market Buy family, and now takes care of all of our digital strategy and long-term strategic plans for the company. So there's four of us, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention my wife. My wife runs all the accounts in the back end of it, so that's who's involved.

Kylie Davis: 06:11 That sounds fantastic. So tell me about what's the experience like? So if I'm a buyer, what's it like for me to be working with an agent who's using Market Buy?

David Stewart: 06:23 Look, I think as I said, it just really simplifies that communication process, so it's really quite easy for an agent to create an account for a buyer. They can either send them a link with it where the buyer fills out their own email address and phone number, and creates an account for them, while the agent can just add them in straight away. We're really clear about what we do. We're not a portal, so there's no marketing on our sites. We're very much an invitation only site, so the security and the confidentiality of all that information is retained to the people who are approved to view the sale.

David Stewart: 06:58 That also gives agents some confidence, but one of the really cool things that we've been very keen to do since the outset, is to ensure that the interface or the user experience from both a buyer's point of view and an agent's point of view, is kept as simple as possible. I think one of the things that technology often fails to do, is to understand that the people who are building it may have a reasonable understanding around tech, but the people that are using it often don't. So while our software is extraordinarily sophisticated in the back end and in its architecture, the user experience is really quite easy, so provided they can remember their phone number and their email address, that's pretty much all they need to be able to do to be able to register for a Market Buy sale.

Kylie Davis: 07:46 Right. And so, what happens once a property's listed with Market Buy? What does the buyer then get told?

David Stewart: 07:52 So we're not a method of sale, we're just a method of helping agents to manage the offer process. So agents can set these up in any number of ways. They can have fixed date sales, they can run it as a standard private treaty or private sale type arrangement, and they don't really tell buyers a lot. Again, we are very much, from our point of view, it allows buyers to compete or to negotiate on a property, or to have that information forwarded to an agent and an owner, once they're interested. But a standard sort of line, or a standard sort of dialogue that an agent will use, a buyer might go through on a private inspection, they might ask what the process is to putting an offer in, and the agent just simply says, "Look, we manage our offers online," and he ensures that the owner knows exactly what's going on, and ensures that we can get back to you very quickly, "All I need is a name and an email address, and I'll be able to forward an invitation to the sale for you very quickly."

David Stewart: 08:48 And then agents also use it for provision of contracts. There's the ability to upload Section 32 vendor statements in Victoria, comparable sale documents, building test reports, strata reports, DA reports, all sorts of different types of reports can be uploaded as a downloadable PDF. So even if a buyer just request further information or documentation, they can log them in as a potential buyer, and they can download that information directly from the site.

Kylie Davis: 09:20 Great. So if I'm a buyer, do I see other people's bids or what they've offered, or their [inaudible 00:09:26]?

David Stewart: 09:27 So, there's a level of transparency. They can certainly see the price, but what they can't see is other information such as terms, conditions, settlement dates, they all form part of an offer that a buyer puts in, but they can certainly see the price itself. But as we always say to buyers, and as agents say to buyers, a owner of a property will not always determine the most appropriate offer based purely on price. Terms and conditions, and particularly settlement dates, often have a large impact, and we see time and time again, where agents on behalf of their owners, have accepted an offer that is lower than the highest offer currently listed, simply because the terms or conditions are superior.

Kylie Davis: 10:09 Right. Fantastic. So what's changed in the market, do you think, that means that people are looking for solutions like this now?

David Stewart: 10:17 Yeah. Look, I think it's very much consumer-led. I think the transactional experience for people purchasing real estate really hasn't changed over the last 40 or 50 years, and we now live in a society where people have an expectation that they will be able to conduct transactions of all types online, and they want access to that information when they're ready, not when the agent's ready to give it to them, not when the agent's ready to meet them, not when it suits the real estate agent, but when it suits the consumer. Owners themselves also have an expectation that they're going to be able to log into central portals or they're going to be notified of activity on their property as and when it happens.

David Stewart: 11:02 So I think just the almost shift right across the board to online transactions and speed of access to information is affecting all industries, not just real estate, and I think real estate has been one of the last ones to really grasp this and take it on board, but I think across the board, through all industries, it's inevitable and it's absolutely inevitable within real estate. We've just finalised our first sale in the States in Minnesota. So we've had sales in almost every state in Australia, we've had sales in New Zealand, we've now got sales happening in the States, we've got a couple more running in Minnesota and a couple to be uploaded early next week in Texas. So I think from a consumer's point of view, that transactional expectation of being able to access information online is consistent in any market, and as we're finding out, in any country.

Kylie Davis: 12:01 Yeah. Well, how big is the market in Australia, do you think?

David Stewart: 12:07 Look, we currently have 1,020 odd accounts. We look at the available agents, and that accounts for about 2.6%, I think the last figures we looked at of the total agents in Australia. So we are very much an emerging part of the real estate market. I don't think across the platforms that are out there at the moment that there's any one platform that has a massive take of the real estate market. I think we've been around now, well, we started building this in late 2015, we launched it within our office in 2016, and we took on our first agents in June of 2017. So, we're two and a half years into this where we're about 1,500 sales or 1,600 sales now that have been uploaded, and I just think it's just that gradual shift. So, it is very much an emerging part of the real estate landscape, and certainly, I think we're o-

David Stewart: 13:03 ... emerging part of the real estate landscape and certainly I think we're a little way off before any of us can claim to be mainstream at this point in time, but it is growing and it's growing rapidly. Like to go to over a thousand users within two and a half years just shows the speed of uptake and the pace of change that's happening within real estate at the moment. I think real estate is an industry that is in flux. There is a lot of change taking place. There's a lot of people and a lot of companies that have vision for where they see the real estate industry going and we're just part of that.

Kylie: 13:34 So it will. Congratulations. That's a great number. Let's just take a short break and now a word from our sponsors. (Beepo ad)

Kylie: 14:35 There's a few other players in this space who are trying to make negotiating more transparent. What differentiates Market Buy?

David Stewart: 14:46 So we're very different. A lot of them are auction. There's one in Sydney, they were Auction Works Online, I think they've rebranded just recently to Sold Online, I think they are now. And they were actually the first. So there's Rezo and Open Negotiation and Ask, but Sold Online and were around six or seven years before any of us thought of this. And I think that were absolutely the pioneers of this type of sale. And I think that were probably a good 10 years ahead of the market. I think they were absolutely well ahead of their time.

David Stewart: 15:19 A lot of them type very much an auction view of it. We don't, We're very much centred around the private sale process or the private treaty process. We have a very unique platform that allows us to be very specific in the information that we deliver. So, a buyer sees very different information to what an agent sees and an agent sees very different information to what an owner sees, and a viewer sees very different information again. So, we work on a halo of web pages that all talk to our server over a 30 second period and allows that server to determine where they are in the sales process and allows them to deliver, or allows the server to deliver that information back to the participants, depending on where they are. And allows us to have massive amount of flexibility and means that we can set up sales in any number of ways. So, I think it's our agility and our flexibility that really sets us apart.

Kylie: 16:12 Cool. So, tell us about some of the success stories that your clients are reported to you from using Market Buy.

David Stewart: 16:21 Oh yeah, look, so we run two to 300 sales in any given time. So we have a lot of success stories. There was one that was highly publicised a few months back where a buyer went through an Ipswich real estate property. The agent opened up the property just after the open for inspection. The buyer got it and went straight from the open for inspection to the local supermarket to do her weekly grocery shopping. She had a notification as she was shopping that the sale had opened. She made an offer. The agent very quickly made a counter offer, the buyer agreed to that offer and she walked into a supermarket and bought a property before she'd made it to the check [inaudible 00:00:17:02]. That's the stuff that we do.

David Stewart: 17:03 We had had another situation and this one was in Victoria where a buyer had gone through, or a couple had gone through an open for inspection, and as is often the case one buyer really liked it. She really liked it. He was a little bit not too sure. He was not as convinced that this was the right property for them. And as the story goes, and this was related back to the agent later, they went home and proceeded to argue for the next few hours about this property. She obviously won because at about 2:00 in the morning, not being able to sleep because they continue their argument well into the early hours of the morning, she walked up, got up, walked to the kitchen, grabbed his phone, opened up the offer page, made an offer, took it in, showed her he'd made an offer and said, "Now, like shut up and go to sleep."

Kylie: 17:53 Happy wife, happy life.

David Stewart: 17:54 Exactly. So, it's that kind of flexibility and it's that kind of convenience that allows us... And we talk to agents a lot about these where we say, "You know, in traditional sales processes, a buyer makes a decision to buy a property and then they have to jump through a thousand hoops to actually make that offer." They have to contact the agent. We all know agents don't answer phones these days. So, they leave a message, the agent rings back, they leave a message. There's a real time delay between when they've made that decision as to when they actually get together and formalise that offer. Through an online process like ours, when that buying signals or that buying urge strikes, they're able to act on it straight away. Not only are they able to act on it straight away, but it allows the agent and the owner to communicate quicker and to respond quicker.

David Stewart: 18:44 It also creates greater credibility. So from a buyer's point of view, rather than relying on the advice of the agent that there's other offers, if there are other offers, the buyers can see that happen in real time. So, it does create that or promotes that competition and makes it easier for a buyer to do what they want to do and submit their offer and they know that that offer's being submitted directly to the agent and the owner. One of the big questions buyers will always ask an agent is, when are you going to present my offer? Or when is the owner going to know about my offer? And the real concern from a buyer's point of view is that maybe that agent will just hold onto it. Maybe it'll take them two or three days to get to the owner and actually tell them about their offer. The credibility or the security of knowing that the information is being transmitted to everybody involved in the sales process instantaneously certainly alleviates a lot of those concerns.

Kylie: 19:42 We're seeing a lot of tech at the moment and I think market buyers probably well in this space where it is looking to remove the agent from being the bottleneck in the communication. So, any process that relies on two human beings connecting via telephone and then passing messages backwards and forwards seems to be really old school in this day and age.

David Stewart: 20:05 Yeah, I agree. But I think we've got to be careful not to remove the agent from the transaction. We're being very, very careful in the creation of this to keep the agents as the central point. But what we do understand is no one answers their phone anymore. Like you can ring 20 people and you'd be lucky to get through to two of them. The rest of them just go through to voicemail, and I'm the same. When people ring me, I'll look at it and unless it's someone that I really know or someone that I want to talk to, I'll just let it go through to the keeper. No one wants to answer a phone. The preferred method of communication for everyone in this day and age is probably, number one for speed would be text, and then email as a secondary form of communication. And I just think that trend is not going to diminish and it's certainly not going away anytime soon.

David Stewart: 20:52 So, why don't we capitalise on that? And also if you have a look at the general population, whether it be at the local doctor's office or anywhere else that people have got any sort of amount of spare time, they are glued to their device. Their face is buried in their phone or their iPad or some other sort of device. And it's horrifying when you look at your screen time statistics at the end of every day. You'll often spend five or six hours online on your device. So again, that's a trend that's not going anywhere fast. So why don't we just go, "Well, if that's the way life's going to be, let's capitalise on that and let's make that work to our advantage as opposed to it being a disadvantage."

Kylie: 21:35 Yeah. So, what are some of the objections that agents have given you for not adopting Market Buy?

David Stewart: 21:43 Agents are awesome. Agents love to tell us that we're going to steal their jobs from them. And look, I understand their concern and I think agents at the moment are really suffering from what we've come to class as tech fatigue. They are having so much stuff thrown at them. I find a lot of the tech that's being presented to them is being presented by people that don't really have any live experience in being an agent on the ground. They don't understand the pressures that a real estate agent faces day in and day out managing the emotional states of buyers and owners and expectations of being on call 24 hours a day and all of those type of issues that agents have to face day to day. So, I think one of the objections is just stop already. Stop with the tech. Just let us do our job.

David Stewart: 22:33 But, we find that we have a much more successful cut through when we explain to them that we're there to make their lives more efficient, we're there to allow them to handle this new omnipresent 24 hour, seven day a week world that we all find ourselves in. And to allow them to cut down on a lot of those unnecessary phone calls and to give them more control in the sales process, not less control, and to more effectively position them as the central point within the negotiation, to give them that ability to really be able to control who sees what, who gets what information, who's involved in the sale.

David Stewart: 23:17 And we see it time and time again. I had an agent in Geelong yesterday who is settling on his own house and was there just moving boxes and offers came through any he very simply at 11:00 yesterday declared the property on the market. Declared it on the market at 5:23, the buyers fought it out for another 15 or 20 minutes and ended up selling it at 5:30. But, it was really interesting, the phone call that I had with Mark afterwards was that that would've taken him all day to sort out. What would normally take him all day and rob him of his Sunday he was able to sort out in about 35 minutes. So it's just, it's efficiency of communication.

Kylie: 23:59 How does it work in terms of prices achieved?

David Stewart: 24:03 Yeah, look, that's an unanswerable question. And I think a lot of platforms like to say that, or a lot of tech likes to say the results in better prices. But I've always been pretty pragmatic around that and said, "Well, unless you take exactly the same house and offer it over three different types of sales and in every conceivable, available way to take offers, there's no real way of knowing." I personally think it promotes greater competition. I think it allows people to have less barriers of entry to a sale. But let's be realistic, Kylie, would you expect me to say anything else?

Kylie: 24:43 No, I'm grateful for your honesty Dave, thank you.

David Stewart: 24:46 I can only speak in... We've got a lot of agents use it. Now I'm still an active agent. To be fair, I don't list a lot of properties these days because I've got a thousand agents to deal with, but I still occasionally list properties for family and friends. So, as an agent as opposed to a market... Or as the owner of Market Buy, I find that it makes my life easier. I find it promotes quicker and easier sales. Does it necessarily, would it necessarily get a better price than a traditional auction or a traditional fixed date sale where those offers were kept completely private? I don't know. I'd like to think it would, but I think that's one of those things where there's no way to know that absolutely, other than to say that we just create much greater efficiencies. And we are just tying in to the expectations and the increasing expectations of transparency amongst consumers across all industries.

Kylie: 25:46 Let's just pause there for a moment and hear a quick word from our sponsors. (HomePrezzo ad)

Kylie Davis: 26:59 So what does the future hold for Market Buy? What's on your roadmap?

David Stewart: 27:03 So we have a really big plan to go and have a crack at the Americans. I think the American market is even more closed than the Australian market. They have buyer's agents and selling agents, and they're often from different companies and there's a much greater level of frustration around the delivery of information or the hiding of information in a lot of cases. And our few early [inaudible 00:27:31] in the States have suggested to us that we've got a really big role to play in the American styles as far as, again, just taking out a lot of the convoluted procedures that just make selling of a property more difficult and more time consuming than it needs to be.

David Stewart: 27:48 As far as the Australian market goes, well, obviously we'll just double down on what we've done over the last couple of years and continue to increase our market share and our user base, and continue to evolve the process. We're very, very big on making sure that our platform evolves with the agents' needs. So we take a lot of feedback from our users and we are on a never ending and aggressive mission to continue to make it better and to add new features.

David Stewart: 28:21 We also are very keen to further our initial discussions that we've had with CRMs. While we talk about tech fatigue, I think it's really important that we understand that our role in the real estate transaction is never going to be standalone. I think from an agent's perspective, they have to look at all of the tech that's being presented to them, and what they really need and what they really want is an end-to-end process. And from their perspective, it needs to be easy to use and it needs to be seamless. So we are working with a number of different suppliers, from CRMs all the way through to the other end with online conveyancing and [inaudible 00:28:59] related type companies that will allow us to create a single stop shop or a single access point for the agents, and we'll just form part of that overall environment, as opposed to being a standalone piece of tech that we are today.

Kylie Davis: 29:14 Yeah. I guess no one lies in bed at night wishing they could log into another platform, do they?

David Stewart: 29:20 No.

Kylie Davis: 29:20 Certainly not real estate. I think that's what most agents mean when they say they've got tech fatigue. They're just exhausted by trying to remember their passwords.

David Stewart: 29:28 Well, they do. At the moment, they've got to log into an inspection app, they've got to log into a CRM, they've got to log into social media. They've got to log into all these different platforms, and there's no shortage of new ones popping up day to day, and we recognise that's a real challenge. It's a challenge for every tech company out there. And you know, one of the solutions to that is to create a really collaborative environment where we're able to dovetail into existing platforms. We don't want to be all-encompassing, because I just think that's too hard and you can't be everything to everyone.

David Stewart: 30:06 But if we can dovetail in and work collaboratively with other platforms, starting with obviously CRMs, and of course the other end of it, document delivery and document conveyancing and that type of stuff, that we'll find a really strong market position that allows us to make agents' life easier. You know, I didn't create this to sell to the real estate industry. I created this born out of my own personal frustration with the way the offer process was being managed and the frustrations that our consumers had. It was only after I ran a few sales out of my office, and being a real estate agent, never shy of self promotion, I blasted that stuff through social media and all through real estate groups, that we started getting phone calls from agents asking if they could use it.

David Stewart: 30:55 So we very quickly retooled and created the ability for agents to brand it up in their own colours and for agents to have their own identity around it. And then we released it. But we are in the real estate industry, and we are sold to real estate agents by accident, not by design, but now that we're in this position, our overriding ethos is to make agents' life easier and to give them the tools that they need to better manage what is just an unrelenting digital world.

Kylie Davis: 31:29 So how do you see the role of the real estate agent changing in the next sort of three to five years?

David Stewart: 31:37 I think the real estate industry is going to get smaller across the board, whether it's Australia or whether it's other countries. I think there's going to be less agents that do more. I think there's going to be a move away from the traditional high street office or the traditional strip office, and we're going to see more and more stuff concentrated online. And you know, I think we'll start to see more coworking type spaces, as well. But it's going to be the agents that are able to really [inaudible 00:32:06], because as a small, independent office these days, you can reach as many people as a big franchise can. You just need to know your way around social media and have people in your court that can help you promote yourself through those means. Whereas, you know, back when I started in real estate in the late 90s, you needed access to a really large, encompassing infrastructure, like a big office, in order to have any sort of presence.

David Stewart: 32:35 And that's changing. And I think the agents that embrace change and the agents that evolve with change will be the ones that will use those tools, not to just create a point of difference, but use those tools again to create greater efficiencies and allow them to handle more volume quicker, faster, and more efficiently. And the ones that refuse to move and refuse to change, I think they'll end up finding themselves really struggling in the market, and I think that's going to happen quick. The real estate industry does not evolve quickly. It never has. In my 21 or 22 years in real estate these days, we've seen an evolution. Even realestate.com.au took 10 years to really stamp itself as the priorities today.

David Stewart: 33:23 I remember its early days as property [inaudible 00:33:25], and its evolution from there to now hasn't been a short journey. So for those that say in 12 months time or two years time, real estate is going to be radically different, I think it'll be a much more gradual evolution, but an evolution nonetheless.

Kylie Davis: 33:42 So that's been fantastic, Dave. Thank you so much for your time. It's great to hear about the success of Market Buy, and I'm looking forward to hearing more success stories from the U.S. and as you grow.

David Stewart: 33:55 Yeah, no, we're looking forward to it. It should be fun. You've been to the States. I love dealing with the Americans.

Kylie Davis: 34:01 They're hilarious.

David Stewart: 34:01 They are so enthusiastic about everything. They're just awesome.

Kylie Davis: 34:06 It's really good to go, and I think to go to those conferences and to learn to pitch your products to the Americans, because they do have a completely different approach to the Aussies. They're usually a lot more friendlier. But you do get to hone your pitch, don't you, really well?

David Stewart: 34:21 And they certainly don't, they're not backwards in telling you what they think. They are very, very forthright and they're very straight forward, and I find that refreshing. Australians don't like to hurt anyone's feelings. They're very almost politically correct about the way they deal with stuff. And they can say, "Oh, that looks great. I think that's fantastic." And then you'll never hear from them again.

David Stewart: 34:44 But you need the negativity as much as you need the positivity. You need people to tell you what's wrong with it. You need people to tell you what needs to be improved and what needs to be evolved, and that in itself just speeds up the process of getting the product out that you need to fit the market. And there's no point releasing something that just looks cool. It has to actually work and it has to deliver tangible benefits.

Kylie Davis: 36:43 Cool. Well look, thanks so much for your time, Dave. It's been great to hear about Market Buy.

David Stewart: 36:48 No problems at all. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.

Kylie Davis: 36:51 So that was Dave Stewart from Market Buy, and I think the fact that there's so much innovation happening in this space of improving that transparency around private treaty negotiations is really exciting, and it's really needed in our industry. There's absolutely nothing worse than being left in the dark around any transaction or when you're trying to buy anything. And when you add the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes even millions, in the size of a property purchase, not to mention that extraordinary emotional importance, it's a recipe for real stress, and agents who don't manage it properly are opening themselves to be the centre of that stress.

Kylie Davis: 37:26 So the traditional methods that we use as real estate agents to manage that process, which has always traditionally been phone calls and now more recently, emails and texts, well, that's just no longer fit for purpose. Agents who refuse to embrace these new tools are really guilty of choosing a typewriter instead of a computer. And why would you do that? Now, what I love about Market Buy is that agents can manage the visibility of the information they decide to share and that it's both sellers and buyers and agents who win with this new transparency. I love that the growth in this sector led by Australian proptechs and I love the passion that Dave's got and how he approaches Market Buy. And I wish the guys at Market Buy all the best for their expansion into the U.S. this year.

Kylie Davis: 38:09 So now, if you have enjoyed this episode of the PropTech Podcast, we would love you to tell your friends, or drop me a line via email, LinkedIn, or on our Facebook page. You can follow this podcast on Spotify, on Google Podcasts, and now we're on Apple iTunes. So I'd like to thank my audio support Charlie Hollands and the fabulous Jill Escudero, and our sponsors Beepo, making outsourcing easy, and the fabulous HomePrezzo, turning your data into amazing marketing content. So thanks, everyone, and until next week, keep on propteching.