My guests in this episode are Chris Spanos and Mike Thanos from IDS, a company that specialises in conducting high calibre, automated property valuations at scale for government agencies with technology that is likely to impact how our cities are planned. Now, Chris and I used to work together at CoreLogic. In fact, we sat next to each other for over a year as co-workers on the solutions team. So we'd love a chat, but we kept it together in this episode with minimal in-jokes. Chris is a General Counsel and Executive Director at IDS and is a finance and valuation industry specialist with a double-degree in law, economics, and econometrics.

While Mike is a founder and director at IDS with an extensive career as an entrepreneur in the lending industry. And this includes involvement with LIXI, which promotes data standards for lending an LTI, a mortgage documentation e-signing, and workflow business. With residential property ownership being one of the most valuable assets in the Australian economy, it's absolutely critical for governments at all levels to have accurate insights into property valuation.

01:52 - The IDS elevator pitch, what it stands for, and what problem it solves

04:19 - Why do I need different sorts of valuations?

09:48 - What about rural properties?

10:55 - How big is the issue of property, data, and valuations in Australia and globally? How big is this as a market? How much of it do we need?

14:58 - How was IDS created?

24:25 - How has COVID affected valuations?

32:05 - How big are IDS at the moment?

38:55 - AI vs Government bodies?