Kylie Davis: (00:00)

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 tech and how they can create amazing property experiences. My guest in this episode is Nick Bouris from Managed App, a property management proptech that caused a major stir when they first launched by claiming their technology did away for the need for trust accounts in real estate. But they have quickly become one of the leaders in second generation property management software. Now, you may recognise Nick's last name. It's true, he is the son of Mark Bouris, entrepreneur and former CEO of Yellow Brick Road Mortgages. So in this interview, we talk about the challenges of launching a revolutionary idea in property management, the benefits of a high profile share register and the pros and cons of having a famous dad. So Nick Bouris, welcome to The Proptech Podcast.

Nick Bouris: (00:59)

Thanks for having me, Kylie. Glad to be here-

Kylie Davis: (01:05)

No. Yeah.

Nick Bouris: (01:05)

... or with you in spirit, given we're virtually together today.

Kylie Davis: (01:05)

Oh, it's how we were doing it before COVID, so it hasn't really changed. It hasn't really changed anything for us. But look, hey, Nick, when we start on The Proptech Podcast, we always kick off with the elevator pitch. So what is your short, sharp elevator pitch for Managed?

Nick Bouris: (01:22)

How tall is the building that the elevator's going up? So, I don't know how long to pitch it. But look, I'll give you the short, sharp version and I agree, keeping it short, as short as humanly possible, is certainly the best thing. So look, we're an alternative to trust accounting software. We do everything your trust accounting package does, but I guess our major point of difference in the marketplace is that we also automate and facilitate payments as well.

Nick Bouris: (01:48)

So the benefit in doing that for agencies is obviously the removal of that human overhead. Whether you have a full-time trust accountant or not, there's generally someone, or a bunch of people, across the business that that job is sort of split amongst. Then doing things like daily download, reconciliations, ABA file uploads, payouts on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. As the old saying goes, they're doing it at the end of the month, it's actually titled End of Month because it is such a big job. So automating that side of things has really been our point of difference in the market and that's sort of what's attracted most of the interest in our business to date.

Kylie Davis: (02:32)

Okay. So, cool. So Managed is an alternative to trust accounting. Does it sit together with a new generation property management platform?

Nick Bouris: (02:48)

Absolutely. So look, that's the other goal of our business, is to sort of bring as many... Our tag line is, "The property management platform for growth agencies." So we don't just want your agency to grow, your rent roll to grow, we want it to scale as well. We want your profitability to grow. So I mean, unfortunately, property management to date, has been a very human intensive process. And as far as overheads go, people are the most expensive, salaries. So we want agencies to bring on as many managements to their rent rolls as possible but also not lose that level of service and not bring on the associated overhead that usually comes with growing a rent roll.

Nick Bouris: (03:33)

If you look at sort of the major lenders in the space, people that are lending against rent rolls to purchase other rent rolls, Macquarie, for instance, they're looking less at annualised management fees and they're starting to look at further to the bottom line of the P&L and trying to figure out profitability of these businesses, the viability of these businesses. I think with margins getting squeezed on management fees and just your general net margins getting lower and lower, the big lenders out there in the space are starting to get a bit worried about the quality of these assets. So it really is our goal in this industry to not only help agencies grow their top line but also grow their bottom line as well.

Kylie Davis: (04:24)

Cool. So how did Managed start? What gave you guys the original idea?

Nick Bouris: (04:24)

So look, my business partner and co-founder, Tom Richards, he's been in real estate for over a decade. He had his own agency, bought a number of rent rolls and consolidated them under his brand. His business partner at the time was more of the sales engine in the business and Tom, being the detailed guy he is, sort of more on the property management side of things and figuring out how to sort of put the right systems and infrastructure in place so he could grow a really good quality asset, being rent roll.

Nick Bouris: (04:57)

So he obviously used a lot of the incumbent property management applications and trust accounting packages. He used desktop packages, cloud packages, all the third party peripheral applications that sort of sit around your trust accounting software. If you know the industry, your trust accounting package is generally the big piece of technology in your rent roll business and then you probably have some third party applications sitting around it to do all the peripheral things like inspections and forms and that kind of thing.

Nick Bouris: (05:30)

So Tom had used a whole lot of these different pieces of technology and became very frustrated with the tools that were available and what he was paying for it as a business. He subsequently left the industry and then after his non-compete finished, decided he wanted to get back into it, but wanted to do it with a different set of tools and technology that he designed. So that's where him and I met up. At first, the goal was to build a technology powered rent roll. We actually had our own rent roll for a little while when we first started.

Nick Bouris: (06:07)

And look, my intention was always to sort of build a SaaS business, that's sort of my background. And as great as an asset as rent rolls are, it sort of really didn't interest me too much, just sort of building a large real estate agency in the inner city of Sydney. But what it did serve us with, Kylie, is a great testing ground. So we had this captive audience of customers that were sort of forced to use our technology because we had managing agency agreements with each of them, right? We were managing their properties. So it was a good place to get market feedback and to iterate and improve on the product, which we did for almost 12 months. Then we made the move into a SaaS business to sell the software far and wide to other agencies. Obviously, wanting to avoid conflicts, we sold the rent roll that we had built up.

Nick Bouris: (07:07)

So that's sort of how the business came to be, the genesis for the business. Since that time, we've had a number of great strategic partners come on board with the business, move into media. Obviously, being a large influential presence in the real estate industry, not just for agencies but for landlords as well via their Smart Property Investment platform. So it really gave us a big megaphone to talk to all the customers that are now on the platform. Then last year, another strategic investment from REA Group, who's a 16 billion dollar ASX listed company, has a large presence in Australia, but also in countries like the US, India, China, the UK, Singapore, New Zealand, yeah, and a whole bunch of other places, but I can't remember off the top of my head. And obviously not just a presence in sales but a presence in the rental market as well via a whole bunch of complimentary products like OneForm. They've also got some great data tracking tools now. They're now starting to sort of really crunch down on all the raw data via the Hometrack acquisition that they made a number of years ago.

Nick Bouris: (08:28)

So really saw an opportunity to not just sort of bring on a capital partner but a strategic partner in those two businesses as well. That's really our corporate story to date in a nutshell. And yeah, really enjoying, not withstanding everything that's going on out there, still enjoying servicing this industry. Look, I think when we first got into it, my big attraction to the industry was how badly serviced I think it has been by technology in the past. I think over the last few years we've really seen all of that change, not just from our own activity but a number of other... You're following it a little more closely than anyone, Kylie. We're really seeing software providers and technology providers step up to the plate and revolutionise what is typically been quite an antiquated business model, not just in sales but in the rental market as well.

Kylie Davis: (09:30)

Yeah. I mean, there has been an explosion in technology available for property management, just even over the last three years that's come onto the market, so that space is now pretty competitive. What differentiates Managed from the other new property management solutions that are coming out there, like the OurProperty and the VaultRE have got a property management solution coming out. There's Console Cloud and Property Tree and all of the other ones out there. What's Managed's differentiation?

Nick Bouris: (10:09)

Yeah. So look, I think, and I know a little bit about all of these competitors or peers, probably a softer term, but it's definitely end to end payments with Managed app. I've seen similar business models try to sort of replicate what we're doing and sort of they're doing that in some funny ways that I don't want to get too deep into but probably not the most compliant ways, sort of running big trust accounts and that kind of thing. Our model is definitely, we have a number of banking relationships in the background. How that works is, essentially, users are transacting amongst themselves. So there are payment gateways there that every time a user is created in our system, they're also created in the system of our payment gateways and they're contracting individually with these payment gateways.

Nick Bouris: (11:12)

So what that effectively allows them to do, allows the landlord to do, is to handle payments on their own without the need for an agency. That's the major point of difference with us, is that agencies don't want to do that job and that's what our technology's allowing you to do. It's allowing you to step back from that but let the landlord, let the tenant, in the case of management fees, certainly the agency, but not handling any money on anyone's behalf, letting all those users like tradespeople, tenants, and landlords, transact directly with each other. That's definitely the major point of difference from us against anyone else in the market is, if you look at trust accounting or traditional trust accounting or even a typical stack of technologies that's used in a large agency, it will have a desktop or cloud trust accounting package. You'll have a trust bank account, you'll have a full-time trust accountant. You might have a rental collection system like DEFT or SimpleRent, and they're all sort of trying to perform the role that Managed App performs in one, which is streamlining that process.

Nick Bouris: (12:21)

I mean, the reason why systems like DEFT and SimpleRent exists is for reconciliation. If you have just a straight up BSB and account number, you might get a payment from a tenant that isn't quite the right amount and doesn't have a transaction descriptor on it, and the poor property manager or trust accountant's sitting there trying to figure out where the payment came from. So that's why those payment systems exist. Managed App, we're fully automated, programmatic. There's no double entry bookkeeping going on. It's effectively like NetBank for property management.

Nick Bouris: (12:58)

Every user gets a login. Everyone can see their ledgers. A landlord can see all the properties that they own. The tenant can see the property that they're tenanting. They can see their tenant ledgers. The property manager can enter bills on behalf of the landlord. Those bills can be automatically scheduled and paid on the due date. BPAY bills can be paid with biller codes, reference numbers from directly in the system. Bond claims are handled via the system. It's designed to really take all of that heavy lifting off of the property manager, so that they can spend more time being asset managers and not caretakers.

Nick Bouris: (13:38)

I mean, you pay a property manager somewhere between, I don't know, five and a half to 8% in some states to manage what is typically your largest financial asset. Forget your superannuation, your real estate portfolio, even if it's just a portfolio of one, will be the biggest thing that you ever own. I can tell you now that fund managers aren't getting paid 8% and it's far more cerebral the amount of work that goes into managing an asset of equities and bonds and those kinds of things than the thought that goes into managing a property portfolio, which shouldn't be the case. Your property manager should be your financial advisor for your property. They should be ensuring that you get the best possible return from your real estate investment.

Nick Bouris: (14:25)

If they're spending all their time running around organising payments and scheduling maintenance and doing all the sort of nitty gritty mundane monotonous work, there's no time to sit down and actually have a conversation with the landlord around the yield that they're getting out of the property, or whether or not the rental market's any good at the moment, and whether or not they need to have a conversation with the salesman in the sales team. So I mean, that's sort of the goal of Managed App, is to sort of really take all that heavy lifting off their plate, so that they can have more meaningful conversations with their customers, the landlords.

Kylie Davis: (14:56)

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Kylie Davis: (16:06)

I was going to ask you around why Managed doesn't require a trust account. But just to summarise what you've just told us then, it really is because you've set up the accounting between the landlord and the tenant sort of more directly and, what, you guys have got sort of visual rights and ability to-

Nick Bouris: (16:31)

So let me try and diffuse some of the... I saw the-

Kylie Davis: (16:35)

The controversy.

Nick Bouris: (16:35)

I saw the controversy in your email. Let me diffuse that controversy and just tell you, it's not mutually exclusive. You can keep your trust account if you want to, all the property managers out there.

Kylie Davis: (16:46)

Right, okay.

Nick Bouris: (16:46)

We've got a good number of property managers that keep their trust accounts because our system's a digital product. They might have tenants that are paying cash, in which case, how does that exist? That doesn't-

Kylie Davis: (16:57)

Is that even still a thing? God.

Nick Bouris: (17:00)

You'd be surprised, Kylie, at some of the things that are going on out there. Checks. Checks too.

Kylie Davis: (17:06)

Oh.

Nick Bouris: (17:06)

Then there's subsidised public housing, they sort of require to get paid into trust accounts. So our system can exist alongside a trust account and we've got tools to help you reconcile the things that are going on inside your trust bank account as well. That's totally fine. We're Managed, we're not out there saying, "Get rid of your trust account." Our big value prop to agencies is, "Let us help you with payments. If we can take 99% of all the payments work off you and leave just a small amount of things to reconcile each month in your trust account, then we've done our job. We've done what we've wanted to do."

Nick Bouris: (17:46)

So in terms of whether or not you need to use your trust account, you only need to use your trust account if you're handling money in trust for somebody, and that makes total sense. If you're going to take someone else's money into a bank account that's not your own, that bank account should be a trust bank account because the beneficial owners of that money is not you. You're not the agency, right? If they're your management fees, they go into your business bank account, because you've earned those as revenue for your business, that makes sense. But if your funds are sort of being transacted elsewhere, i.e., between the landlord and the tenant direct, which is what's happening on Managed App, and they don't pass through a trust bank account, then what's your trust bank account doing there?

Nick Bouris: (18:33)

We have some agencies that are really quite staunch, really quite strict, about how they run their businesses. They want to run really lean, scalable businesses. So they don't take cash, they don't take checks. Sometimes they don't take tenants that are receiving government assistance or something like that. I'm not sure if you are or you aren't allowed to do that. But anyway, the point is, all of these things, you can have your trust bank account over there to facilitate them. Or, if you run your business in a certain way, you just say no to those types of customers and you run your business without a trust account. We've got lots of agencies that are set up from us from scratch without a trust bank account and have never used it, and that's fine too. I always advocate, "Hey, I think it's probably a good idea that you have a trust bank account sitting alongside Managed App because you never know when you might need to handle some money on behalf of somebody and you want to do that in a compliant way. So keep your trust bank account there just in case, as a safety blanket."

Kylie Davis: (19:38)

So do you guys use the ubiquitous blockchain? Is that-

Nick Bouris: (19:45)

So blockchain, so did you want me to explain blockchain to you? I saw that-

Kylie Davis: (19:50)

Well, I mean, only if you use it. Are you using the magic of blockchain as part of your process?

Nick Bouris: (19:59)

No. So blockchain is effectively a decentralised network of computers that are running a ledger, right? And if you look at the banking system-

Kylie Davis: (20:14)

Oh, I like that as an explanation, though. That's cool. I've got it.

Nick Bouris: (20:21)

A blockchain is synonymous with currency, right? Cryptocurrency, specifically. The reason why cryptocurrency emerged is because there was a bunch of people out there that were untrusting of typical banking systems and fiat currencies, like paper currency. And the word decentralised basically means that it's not a bank. So a bank will run a ledger, obviously, because they want it to keep track of who has what in their respective bank accounts. And the central bank will run a ledger because all the banks collectively settle with the central bank, right, with the RBA.

Nick Bouris: (21:01)

So, I mean, this decentralised ledger, and you think about bitcoin, for instance, as a cryptocurrency, there's ledgers that exist on thousands and thousands of computers around the world and every time a transaction happens, a block of transactions, those thousands of computers around the world that are all being connected by this blockchain network, all on different nodes and things like that, and it's getting a bit techy, but they're all validating the transactions that are going through, right? They're using the combined computer power to do encryption on those transactions as well. That's where the crypto comes from, right? Encrypted currency.

Nick Bouris: (21:45)

Our transactions, we don't offer bitcoin. Who out there amongst the Australian landlords and tenants typically uses cryptocurrency to transact, uses crypto to pay their rent? Hardly anybody, if anyone at all. Our agencies would look at us with a bit of a funny look if we suggested that as a payment method or an alternative for them to use. So, no, we transact in very traditional ways. We offer a direct debit, we offer a MasterCard, Visa, BPAY. We're offering Amex soon. And really, in terms of blockchain as a technology, immutable append-only ledgers, there really isn't a use case for it at the moment.

Nick Bouris: (22:33)

I mean, you might want to, I don't know, maybe create a blockchain for tenancies that are on a lease, that might be an interesting use case for a blockchain technology. But I mean, really, you would only use blockchain where you want to keep something super secure, because it is a secure form of technology. But other than payments, which most people don't want to transact in that way, there really isn't another secure piece of the platform that you would want to make use of blockchain for, I don't think, not at this stage.

Kylie Davis: (23:10)

No, okay. So, just so we're clear, Managed isn't using blockchain and blockchain is a solution looking for a problem in real estate at the moment in your view, yeah?

Nick Bouris: (23:22)

Exactly right, I like that term.

Kylie Davis: (23:24)

Yeah.

Nick Bouris: (23:25)

Don't ever do that as a business owner. Now, don't go out and solve problems that don't exist.

Kylie Davis: (23:30)

I think I may have stolen that phrase from Chris Rolls. But look, yeah, if there's anyone out there who is using blockchain in real estate who would like to counter that argument, by all means get in touch, I'd love to have you on the show. So, Nick, what's the business model for Managed? Because I think when I was looking on the website, you guys, well, you have a free model.

Nick Bouris: (23:52)

Yeah, yeah. So we've actually just introduced a new, more flexible, pricing model. So look, Managed App-

Kylie Davis: (23:57)

Free is pretty flexible.

Nick Bouris: (23:58)

It can be. So the way our model used to work was, we have lots and lots of tradies in our network and we used to effectively levy our fees to agencies on the tradespeople that did work for the agencies in our network. If you know the marketplace problem, it actually doesn't exist in real estate, well, in property management, because each agency that we bring on board to the network, they're effectively their own little marketplace. They've got this great supply of work, being their rent roll, investment properties that are always getting messed up by tenants, and maintenance and repairs, and capital improvements, and things that need to occur as the general sort of life cycle of a property goes. If you've been running a rent roll for a long time you typically have a long list of tradespeople that you work with, right? It's something that I think tradespeople have really enjoyed for a long time, is having access to a large agency with lots and lots of work.

Nick Bouris: (25:14)

So the deal we did with agencies back in the day was, "Well, why don't we give you guys a free platform and then every time a job goes out to a tradesperson, we'll take a little percentage of that?" That worked okay for a while and now we have some agencies that probably prefer to not participate in the marketplace, so we offer a typical subscription fee for them as well. But every agency in the network, if you process enough trades via the platform, you have the ability to get a free platform at some stage.

Kylie Davis: (25:50)

Oh great, okay.

Nick Bouris: (25:51)

That includes free features and free transaction costs and all sorts of rewards and bonuses for making use of the trading marketplace that we've cultivated over the years.

Kylie Davis: (26:01)

Wow, okay. Cool. So how big are you guys now? I mean, because you mentioned before about your investment from REB or Momentum Media and Realestate.com. How big are you?

Nick Bouris: (26:17)

How big am I? Okay. So I'll answer that as best I can. So we've got hundreds of agencies, we've got thousands of managements, and we've got hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions going through every year.

Kylie Davis: (26:28)

Right, okay. Cool. Are you playing coy on your capitalization?

Nick Bouris: (26:36)

Exactly, yeah.

Kylie Davis: (26:37)

Yeah, fair enough.

Nick Bouris: (26:38)

You can't be too specific with these things. It's changing all the time and my shareholders and board of directors don't like giving out that info.

Kylie Davis: (26:50)

Fair enough. No, no, that's fine.

Kylie Davis: (26:52)

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Kylie Davis: (27:59)

So Nick, you are the son of entrepreneur Mark Bouris. Has that been a help or something you've had to work around?

Nick Bouris: (28:08)

Look, it just depends on who you're talking to and what day of the week it is.

Kylie Davis: (28:14)

Whether you've had a family dinner that weekend or not.

Nick Bouris: (28:18)

Yeah. Sometimes it's a help, sometimes it's a hindrance. Look, I think most people out there like my old man and it's certainly helped me in the past. Then there are days where people sort of doubt your credibility and sort of, I feel like, make assumptions about the ride I've had through life and how easy or challenging things have been for me and whether or not I'm up to the task of performing a service for them.

Nick Bouris: (28:53)

And look, I always just let my feet do the talking, Kylie. I think with a famous parent or not, with everybody in every relationship, business, personal, or otherwise, you need to prove yourself and that's what we do here every day. Every day you turn up and every day you put yourself on the park and you put your best foot forward and whether you're trying to win new business or keep service and keep the existing customer base that you have happy, you've always got to do your best.

Kylie Davis: (29:34)

Very true. Very true. So look, a few weeks ago we had Mina Radhakrishnan from :Different on the show and, as you know, :Different's business model is really high automation, really high process at the backend, which allows them to charge just $100 a month for their property management fees. That's clearly got lots, well, big implications for traditional property management. How does Managed help PMs compete with something like that?

Nick Bouris: (30:02)

Yeah. So we actually used to share an office with those guys. So Tom, my business partner, he had a minority share in a co-working space in Darlinghurst. And when we first started, before we moved into our digs here at North Sydney with Phil and Al, yeah, they were literally in the next suite next to us. I think they'd just received an investment from a mate of mine, from Daniel Petre at AirTree. And it was interesting, I liked looking at the model. I would call them a DIY product, a B to C product, so going to landlords directly. It's interesting. I don't know, I have never used the platform before, but I would have to say that there must be a hell of a lot of automation going on to charge a flat rate of 100 bucks a month for a landlord, either that or they're haemorrhaging money.

Nick Bouris: (31:05)

But if you look at the things. When we got into this business, we did a lot of research. Momentum has a large audience and we surveyed the crap out of that audience, asking very specific questions around, "Do you manage your property yourself? Do you use a property manager? If you've used it, how likely would you be to manage your own property?" trying to sort of figure out what the market's appetite is for doing all this stuff themselves with the assistance of good technology. And I've got to tell you, it's low. In the surveys that we ran, the landlords that had jumped over the fence into do-it-yourself, jumped straight back into full service property management.

Nick Bouris: (31:59)

It doesn't surprise me. The list is as long as your arm of things that you need to do, Kylie. It's everything from marketing the property, running the open homes, screening tenant applications, tenancy agreements. Then you move into the day-to-day property management, so scheduling maintenance and repairs, collecting the rent, yeah, running the ingoing reports, the routines, the outgoing reports, going to NCAT tribunals when the tenant gets upset. The list goes on. There's just so many things that you've got to do. And you've got to wonder to yourself, what's your time worth? Is it really worth the five or 6% that you pay away every year to a property manager? And in my opinion, the answer is emphatically no. The reason why a property manager can do it for such a low amount is that they've got scale. They've built the business around it. They've got a bunch of different property managers. They've got systems and procedures and they've systemized and created processes, and that's allowed them to manage hundreds of properties, and yours being one of them, at a fraction of the time cost that you, as an individual, could do it yourself.

Nick Bouris: (33:19)

I've got relatives, I'll keep it at that, that are managing their own property and they're smart people. They make lots of money on an hourly basis. And I wonder to myself, "Have you ever gone and done the calculation? You're an investment banker. You're a doctor. You're this, you're that. Surely, your time's better spent doing what you know what to do and giving that job over to the day-to-day of running what should be a passive investment to a manager." It's like trying to sort of manage your own superannuation portfolio, picking stocks and stuff like that. You shouldn't be trying to do that. It's called a specialisation of labour. Everybody should be doing what they have a comparative advantage in the economy to do. Kylie, let's just say that you wash dishes really well and I dry dishes-

Kylie Davis: (34:16)

I don't.

Nick Bouris: (34:16)

No, and I dry dishes [crosstalk 00:34:18]-

Kylie Davis: (34:18)

I really don't, ask my husband.

Nick Bouris: (34:22)

Well, luckily, there are machines for that. But trying to sort of make it as simple as possible, you wash dishes, I dry dishes. I wash and dry dishes better than you. But if you were to ask me, out of the two tasks, what I do better, I dry dishes better. That means that I should dry dishes and you should wash dishes. It doesn't matter if you've got an absolute advantage in something, everyone should do what they have a comparative advantage in doing.

Nick Bouris: (34:48)

It doesn't matter if you think you're the bee's knees in managed property as well as being a doctor, or a lawyer, or banker, your job in the economy should be doing the thing that you're most skilled at, not doing all the things that you think you have skills in doing. So, yeah, look, and that's why we have the partners that we do now. We have a firm belief that real estate agents will continue to perform an important function in this industry, both in sales and both in property management, irrespective of the level of what action that's going on, which I don't think it can be that much better than what we're doing right now for the agencies that we service.

Kylie Davis: (35:33)

Right. So what do you think the key challenges are that property managers are currently facing? I mean, given that there's been so much tech coming onto the market in the last couple of years, what do you think they need to be addressing the quickest?

Nick Bouris: (35:50)

I think the things they need to... Look, certainly figuring out how to scale, so how to get all these day-to-day repetitive tasks off their desk. Also trying to figure out, how do they create an ecosystem? How do they sit around the real estate asset as an asset manager as opposed to a caretaker? So what I mean by that is, how do I... And there's so many things that come off real estate investing, right? There's the financing of the property, there's the day-to-day property management of the property, there's valuation around it, there's maintenance, repairs, capital improvements, there's insurance, there's strata management. There's all these things that sit around the real estate investment and then there's accounting as well. So as a property manager or as an agent in an agency, how do I sit around this very large asset and perform the role of an asset manager? How do I perform an advisory role as opposed to a caretaker or dogsbody role, which is sort of how they've existed to date? And how do I skill myself up to perform that role optimally?

Kylie Davis: (37:12)

Yeah, fantastic. And so what do you think the next five years is going to hold for property managers, with your crystal ball out?

Nick Bouris: (37:21)

So look, I think that's what's going to happen. We're going to see a consolidation of all these different services that sit around the real estate investment. We're going to see all these different service providers playing a much more interconnected role with the aid of technology. That's why payments were such an important thing for us, right, is we wanted to sort of build out infrastructure that allowed, that enabled, certain property transactions to occur.

Nick Bouris: (38:00)

And at some stage soon, what's happening with our business, and I'm probably creating a segue for you here, is we're bolting on adjacent services. I think in terms of how you connect those services, you can have referral arrangements and all that sort of stuff, and that's a light integration. But I think the most deeply integrated way of doing that is to put a payments infrastructure around it and that's what our payment partnerships, that's what our respective banking relationships, have allowed us to do.

Kylie Davis: (38:34)

Right. So, that's what the future holds for Managed? Or, tell us a little more about that.

Nick Bouris: (38:41)

So yeah, we definitely see ourselves really owning the real estate investment. So when I say owning it, I mean, it could be the wrong word, really enabling the professionals in this industry to own it. And I'll back that point up. We're a fully white label product. So I mean, every time we sign up an agency, they get their logo, colour scheme, style guide all over the application, for all of their users, for all notifications, for all reports that get generated out of the system. You don't see Managed App anywhere. We're doing some cool stuff like putting them on subdomains for the respective agencies websites as well. So yeah, we want a relationship with the agency. We totally respect that the agency will always own that relationship with the landlord and the tenant and anyone else that sort of sits under their ecosystem, but we want to enable those agencies and the professionals that work in those businesses to provide as many adjacent services to real estate investing as possible.

Kylie Davis: (39:49)

Fantastic. Well, look Nick, it's been fantastic to talk to you today. Thank you so much for your time and for telling us all about Managed App. It's been great to have you on the show.

Nick Bouris: (40:01)

It's been a pleasure, Kylie. Thanks for having me.

Kylie Davis: (40:03)

So that was Nick Bouris from Managed App and I've always been fascinated by the Managed App story. I love the transparency that they offer landlords around spending on their property and their clever thinking around using the technology that we actually all take for granted in banking apps, and using that to streamline real estate transactions and save time for property manager. I love how everything in Managed is actually around the whole transaction process. I also like the flexibility in their thinking around their business model and they were one of the first that I'm aware of that offer their service free to property managers because they had a charging model that was based on trades and services. So if you're in the market for a new property management system, they're probably worth having on your shortlist, and I've included their details in the show notes.

Kylie Davis: (40:51)

Now, if you've enjoyed this episode of The Proptech Podcast, I would love you to tell your friends or drop me a line via email, kylie@realcontent.guru, LinkedIn, or on our Facebook page. And you can follow this podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor, and Apple iTunes. I'd like to thank my audio support, Charlie Hollands and the fabulous Jill Escudero, and our sponsors, Smidge, the official wines of The Proptech Community, HomePrezzo, turning property data into amazing marketing content, and of course, Direct Connect, making moving easy. So thanks everyone. Until next week, stay safe and keep on proptech-ing.