BuildApps – Making Data Easy to Manage [Transcript]

Kylie Davis: (00:00)

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.


Kylie Davis: (00:19)

Now, 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.


Kylie Davis: (00:33)

This week we're taking a look at a new innovation in the commercial property space with an interview with Paula Guino, COO of Build-Apps, a platform that creates a common data model for property portfolios and allows you to aggregate a multitude of data sources so you have a clear view at both an individual property and an aggregated portfolio level.


Kylie Davis: (00:57)

Paula has a background as an entrepreneur and is a director of Proptech Brisbane, and before joining Build-Apps with founder Liam Murray, she was at CBRE looking after digital and technology delivery.


Kylie Davis: (01:08)

Now, Build-Apps uses the Microsoft 365 system and is modular, which means clients are already familiar with how a lot of it works and can adopt the technology piece by piece to get used to it before scaling to bigger adoption.


Kylie Davis: (01:22)

So, here to explain more, Paula Guino, welcome to The Proptech Podcast.


Paula Guino: (01:27)

Thank you. Thanks for having me.


Kylie Davis: (01:29)

It's great to have you here. I'm looking forward to today's chat. So, we always start with The Proptech Podcast, it's probably the hardest question of the whole interview, but, what is the Build-Apps elevator pitch?


Paula Guino: (01:41)

We're a portfolio solution that's owned and governed by portfolio owners, in summary.


Kylie Davis: (01:46)

Right. And so what does that mean? What does that mean?


Paula Guino: (01:51)

That means that we've built a solution that really puts the data of anything that relates to the portfolio, the buildings, in any aspect, operational, sustainability, financial, anything, and it kind of aggregates all the data to provide some insights.


Kylie Davis: (02:09)

Right. Okay. So you guys are a data solution for property building owners.


Paula Guino: (02:15)

Correct. We base it on a common data model. So we pretty much create that common data model for the portfolio, just aggregating the data from different sources or internal, and giving access at different levels across the organisation just to make sure that at any time you can have live insights into anything that relates to your portfolio.


Kylie Davis: (02:39)

Right. So, look, this is a really big issue, isn't it, this issue of data in commercial property portfolios? What's the landscape? Tell me a bit about that.


Paula Guino: (02:51)

It is because a lot of portfolio owners, to run the portfolio you engage with a variety of vendors and you have access to a number of different services to be able to run that portfolio, and sometimes your data is not as easily accessible, or it's dependable on somebody else giving you that information.


Paula Guino: (03:13)

So the idea is that once we aggregate all that data, different people in different levels of the organisation can have different access to that data and just really at any time just go to a dashboard and really see anything that has happened on that portfolio at any time.


Kylie Davis: (03:32)

Right. So, I was talking to Caoimhin Ardren, who's part of the NABERS programme, and talking about the importance of having a centralised data pool in the commercial space, because in the residential side we kind of see that we do have that; I mean, it's owned and you do need to pay to access it, but there is common language and common data definitions and things like that around data in residential property, whereas that's not the case in commercial.


Kylie Davis: (04:08)

What we see in commercial is that the data of a building is kind of almost owned by either the agents or it's controlled by the technology that you're using, and you can't aggregate that and see it all together. So that's, I guess, what Build-Apps is doing, is coming up with that common language.


Paula Guino: (04:30)

Correct. And we've built a variety of apps that will... well, they all work together. Clients can actually have just a few of them but, of course, the power of it is actually having the whole thing; so, if it's asset management or if it's project management, if it's financial, if it's vertical transport.


Paula Guino: (04:48)

So, one of the things that we see... So, if you have a portfolio, you have a variety of buildings. You may have different brands of elevators, for example, in your portfolio, which you have to access different solutions to actually get some feedback into whatever's happening, when was the last entrapment, or any issues that you've had, and pretty much what we do is, we can connect to any of these solutions that will bring the data into this common data model.


Paula Guino: (05:21)

Really what's really powerful about it is that the framework that was developed, it kind of crosschecks information. For the insights, it will take into account your tenancy, the investment you've made, the assets and the schedule, the condition audits, the sustainability audits. So what is really smart behind the common data model, it's not just bringing the data together but really the framework that was developed in the background that makes the apps kind of communicate and cross information back and forth.


Kylie Davis: (05:54)

Okay. So, let's use the example of the elevator, I guess, as a great example. So, you might have a property portfolio with 100 different buildings and they're all different heights and they're all different footprints and all of that, and you could, I guess, have, what, five or six or even 20 different elevator types inside all of those buildings, but using an app like yours, you're able to look at, for example, elevator performance and see how they're comparing or see what their downtime is so that you can actually... yeah?


Paula Guino: (06:26)

Yeah. Exactly. This is very common, and what we've been doing as we've been working with the current client is, we've been connecting as many APIs as we can, and the platform's quite straightforward so it's very easy to connect APIs to any of these platforms.


Paula Guino: (06:41)

I see the Build-Apps platform as a collaboration tool almost because everyone's doing whatever they need to do for the smart buildings, for their ratings, for anything it is, and it's just about giving different access to anyone who can have any input into that portfolio.


Paula Guino: (07:00)

So if they already have a solution which we can API and bring the data in, great. If it's a vendor that's going to site and doing a condition audit or uploading images or doing anything else, they will have a specific access to the platform so they can do it within the platform. And the best part of it is, because it's controlled by the portfolio owners, they will grant that access, they will have control to what they're granting. It's not a third party, it's not a SaaS thing. It's them giving a limited access for a vendor to perform some maintenance, or anything in their portfolio, and they will enter it into the platform and they will update all the insights that they have immediately. So they don't have to wait for the PDF condition audit summary that they're going to receive after months of people going to site.


Paula Guino: (07:48)

It really is a digital transformation, but really that needs to be started from the portfolio owner.


Kylie Davis: (07:55)

Awesome. So, traditionally, I guess, the way commercial property owners have done it is that they've had this information in the silos of the individual buildings. So, individual buildings have been run as kind of almost independent business units, and the information inside those business units has been captured in the brains of their facilities or operations or property manager and inside a whole pile of paperwork. Would that be true?


Paula Guino: (08:25)

Yeah. And Excel spreadsheets.


Kylie Davis: (08:28)

Of course. The ubiquitous Excel! What did we do before it existed? But you guys also use Microsoft 365 or something, don't you?


Paula Guino: (08:40)

Yes. The whole solution is built in the Microsoft architecture. It was thought like this because it's a low-code/no-code solution. So it's built on Power Apps, and it can be very easily built on top of what we've done. So there is nothing that our clients need to come to us for anything that they want to change or anything that they want to rename. They can pretty much have someone in-house that is able to do any no-code/low-code on a platform and just add it and just do whatever they want with it, just take it to wherever direction they want to take it.


Kylie Davis: (09:22)

Fantastic.


Kylie Davis: (09:23)

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Kylie Davis: (10:30)

Do you have any insights into the costs of doing it the old way and how much Build-Apps changes that?


Paula Guino: (10:40)

Yeah, not specifically in the cost that people were spending, but we do know that... I mean, there's only two ways now. There is the software as a service which you have a recurring model, which is fine, a lot of powerful applications are out there, but there is a dependency on using that software as it is.


Paula Guino: (11:04)

And then there is going down the route of building your own solution, which is what people were trying to walk away from, but a lot for people have spent millions of dollars doing this and what we're doing is so simple and it can be applied to any portfolio and you can mix retail, industrial. All the thinking, all the framework's already been established, and when it gets to that point... And that platform's actually owned by the portfolio owner. So, once we actually deploy the solution, we deploy it to the client's 365 environment, and once it's deployed, it's theirs. If they want to continue engaging with us for support and for updates, then they can, but once it's deployed, it's deployed. So they have full control, full security.


Paula Guino: (11:57)

The point of doing it in a Microsoft architecture is that there's so much money being invested in security, and a lot of people use Microsoft 365 in some ways. So it is quite simple. All you have to do is, we give a list of a couple of licences they need to have for the Power platform and that's it; we create an environment and we deploy the solution. And, of course, the fact that the Fortune 500 companies, a lot of them do use the Microsoft to a bigger extent. So it really was a bit of a no-brainer and we thought a solution that it can really solve the problem very quickly and people can just very easily build on.


Kylie Davis: (12:36)

Okay. So, this is awesome. So, the fact that, as a property owner or as a property business, you might have invested a lot of money in the past into your proprietary system, I guess the timing of technology and how... Like over the last five, six years, we've seen the cloud basically explode, I guess, in terms of its use, and so a lot of the decisions that your tech team might have made 10 years ago or eight years ago are going to have timed out now if they were based on legacy platforms.


Paula Guino: (13:13)

Yeah. Absolutely. But there's all the legacy data that can be brought into the platform.


Kylie Davis: (13:17)

Yes.


Paula Guino: (13:17)

So, not all is lost.


Kylie Davis: (13:19)

Yeah. I guess what I'm trying to break down though is that if you went on this kind of journey sort of 10 years ago to build out a whole lot of your own tech, don't get hung up on the whole sunk cost of you can't move away from what you've got because we're in an environment now where the landscape has completely changed and the computing power and share-ability of that technology is now unprecedented, and that a lot of investment in the tech has gone into actually capturing the data. So you can sort of transport that over into this new world and start to get a whole lot more value out of it without the need to invest constantly in an ever-more expensive piece of tech, right? Because legacy platforms, they're called legacy for a reason, people!


Paula Guino: (14:14)

[inaudible 00:14:14] legacy.


Kylie Davis: (14:15)

It's a weight round your neck. Outsource that to someone that you trust.


Paula Guino: (14:18)

Yeah. And the other thing is that really, with everything that has happened with COVID, and we've seen portfolios, they really needed to have some resilience to get through this stage, and it's still going because a lot of the other parts of the world are not in the same position as we are in Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand a lot more. Your operational efficiencies have to be really spot on so that you can get return, so that you can give your investors the return that they're expecting, and the only way we can do this is with this digital transformation to the point where you really have your live data insights.


Paula Guino: (15:03)

And top of that we have the net zero carbon goal knocking on the door and people talking about 2030. Oh, my God, it's almost 2022 and we're still talking about it? The only way we're going to be able to do it is really if you really understand the decisions that you need to make, because even with the rating... And we work very closely a lot with the rating tools. So, we have had a partnership with the Green Building Council of Australia, and now with the New Zealand Green Building Council, building their tool. The tool is actually built on our platform-


Kylie Davis: (15:38)

Awesome.


Paula Guino: (15:38)

... which means that it's very seamlessly connected to our platform as well. But what that means is that you can very easily bring your rating data into your portfolio information and really cross-reference it with a lot of other insights, which not just the rating tool will give you, but one of the apps that we do actually have a lot of predictions that you can just have your old data and really have an idea of where you sit within those ratings and really achieve this. If we're going to achieve this by 2030, there's a lot that needs to be done now to move away from independent platforms and Excel spreadsheets and PDF reports.


Kylie Davis: (16:24)

Look, just Excel spreadsheets and PDF reports and independent platforms is slow and resource-heavy and, therefore, expensive, and commits you to supporting that expense going down the track. So, eventually, hopefully, the pain of doing it will be a lot less than the pain that people currently feel of doing it.


Kylie Davis: (16:51)

I just want to circle back a little bit and get really locked in on what the benefits are of bringing all of your data together in something like a Build-Apps. So let's just sort of tick them off. You do already have a lot of data as the owner of a property portfolio, it's just sitting in lots of spots. So you're able to bring all of that together. You're able to see how your individual properties are performing and then, I guess, create benchmarks that show how different buildings are comparing in their performance across different features or facilities?


Paula Guino: (17:33)

Yeah.


Kylie Davis: (17:33)

You're able to do all that probably in real time, or a hell of a lot faster than trying to build a report on it that make takes weeks or months to even do so, that you're then making... you're able to make decisions really quickly around what needs to change or be addressed, rather than making decisions based on historical information that could be out of date by the time you're looking at it.


Kylie Davis: (17:56)

I guess you've also then got all of the information that you need in front of you to start to accurately build a roadmap for how you're going to improve those buildings or upgrade them so that you can meet new obligations under environmental or smart building codes.


Paula Guino: (18:14)

Exactly.


Kylie Davis: (18:15)

Awesome. Okay. We've nailed it. All right.


Paula Guino: (18:17)

You've got it.


Kylie Davis: (18:19)

So, tell me about some of the experiences that your clients have had using your product.


Paula Guino: (18:26)

It's a bit of a discovery kind of. It takes a little bit of time to really understand what we have. I do understand that this is quite novel, and actually we need to communicate with a few different stakeholders within the organisation because it does involve talking to the CTO to make sure that the whole structure, how we communicate, how do we deploy the solution because it's all done in your environment, and really understanding...


Paula Guino: (19:01)

I think one of the things that we hear the most is people might be concerned that this will actually put a lot of pressure on resources on their side because of the ownership and the ultimate management, but once we actually do a couple of... You do a sandbox and you connect a little bit of their data, and you just really do the step by step from the deployment point of view. Very quickly people can see the results. We usually approach it from the sustainability side, and once we go in through the sustainability side but then kind of demonstrate the power of the whole framework and the tables and how they connect and what insights they can bring, and how we can easily connect it to pretty much anything people have, because everything they have, if they're using 365, it's already in their 365, we just need to-


Kylie Davis: (19:56)

Exactly.


Paula Guino: (19:57)

... we just need to connect. There's a little bit of translation: "Your table says this and our stuff says this."


Paula Guino: (20:04)

There's a lot of expertise from working in this industry for the past seven years from Liam Murray, who is the founder of Build-Apps. It really is pretty straightforward. A lot of things, if you want to change, if you want to rename tables or do anything like that, it's very easy.


Paula Guino: (20:22)

So, I think, very quickly, once we actually get all the stakeholders together, so sustainability, technology and the CEOs to really understand how this all works, it really is quite powerful, and I think people are quite amazed that it can be so simple, that, "I can engage with the vendor." It could be a property manager. I grant you access and I say, "Okay, if you're going to be doing some work on this building, you're just going to go in this platform. You're going to update it here." Once he's updating that onsite, it's updating on your model-driven app, which is what we call the data model, and then from there it connects to a Power BI dashboard which is live and updated. So, people really appreciate, I guess, the easiness.


Paula Guino: (21:12)

But, in the beginning, there is a sense of, "Oh, this is too easy. There's going to be a catch. Maybe I'm going to have to have a lot of resources working on this," but really there isn't because the whole thing is ready to go and we are deploying to their environment, and then we will be helping and training and really making sure that there is an understanding of how the architecture works. And, ultimately, it's in the client's cloud, so they feel a lot more at ease with people going to site, taking photos, uploading stuff about their building, which goes straight to their cloud, it doesn't go through a third party cloud at all. So it does become quite powerful very quickly.


Paula Guino: (21:54)

So it has been very successful with the Australian deployment, and now we're looking at other regions as well, which is what we're preparing for.


Kylie Davis: (22:02)

Okay. I think that speaks to though, doesn't it, a generational issue. So, as a card-carrying member of Generation X... Sorry, what am I? I'm a-


Paula Guino: (22:16)

I'm X.


Kylie Davis: (22:17)

Gen X. I'm X, yeah. I just sort of had this kind of complete mental blank. No. As a card-carrying member of Generation X, we have been at the forefront of all new technology and we've got so many scars from that.


Kylie Davis: (22:29)

We were the first to kind of use computers regularly in our working lives, and we come from this background that I think we need to kind of do the therapy and get over, that all technology is hard to adopt.


Paula Guino: (22:45)

Yeah.


Kylie Davis: (22:46)

Because I remember back in my twenties and... well, especially my twenties, but when I had my newspaper business, the technology came in a box with discs that you had to load, and then as soon as you loaded them, everything broke and nothing worked! We've sort of seen iterations and then we've gone into platforms where you've had to get your brain around how the person who designed it thought.


Kylie Davis: (23:11)

As people in their forties and fifties, we've kind of got a lot of baggage around this, that we worry that introducing technology is going to be extraordinarily hard, extraordinarily time-consuming, and it's going to require an awful lot of training and completely... and it will probably not work when we first do it. But what we're seeing, and I think especially Build-Apps is a great example of that, is that when stuff is cloud-based and built inside technology that we're all comfortable with using, like Microsoft, it takes away so much of that pain. It's like, "Oh, my God, it works!" So often the hardest part of it is actually just getting the financial decision... making the decision to start.


Kylie Davis: (23:58)

So, look, tell me a little bit more. You mentioned Liam's name before, but tell me a little bit more about the background of Build-Apps.


Paula Guino: (24:06)

So, Build-Apps, it became a solution. So the solution's actually called ADAMM & Co and it was developed through Building-Performance, and Liam Murray is the founder of Building-Performance. So he's been doing condition assets and sustainability assets in the commercial real estate industry for quite some time. It came with the frustration of engaging with all these portfolio owners, having to deliver the audits and doing it as a standalone whatever model you're going to do what... you're collecting the data and then you just PDF everything and then you just send. And then three years later maybe when you're called in to do another audit, then you do exactly the same thing, go through the same process, PDF everything and send.


Paula Guino: (24:50)

With that frustration, he was like, "We've really got to create something where we can put all this data and just start having comparative data," because you have all these recurring clients where they're always doing these audits for, and really he started giving the option of there is an option to get the PDF or we can actually deploy a solution to you where you will have all your audit data and then you can build, or you could actually engage with another vendor. Like, if you don't want to continue with the same auditor that you have, you just engage with somebody else. You'll still have a lot of the data in a common data model kind of structure, which is a lot easier than just having a PDF or having an Excel spreadsheet where it might be hard for you to compare later on.


Paula Guino: (25:38)

It just evolved over this period of time. So, five years of contacting, connecting with the clients and really just building on it and creating different apps, and then it just became so powerful that a year and a little bit ago, then he decided to make it into a software business and really take it to market to clients that perhaps he wasn't engaging with in the Building-Performance business and really take it globally.


Kylie Davis: (26:08)

Cool. And so how did you become involved in it? Because you've got a great background.


Paula Guino: (26:16)

I've been working with tech for the last five years really, but in different industries. But then I started heavily working in the property technology space for the past two, and for me it was just like, once you've seen tech in different industries and then you come to commercial real estate, there's a couple of things. First there's an initial shock.


Kylie Davis: (26:41)

It's like, "Oh, have I gone back in time?"


Paula Guino: (26:43)

"What's going on here?"


Kylie Davis: (26:44)

"It's the '80s all over again!"


Paula Guino: (26:49)

And then with the shock there comes the realisation that, "Oh, my God, there's so much to be done here. This is an industry that really needs that digital transformation." So there's so much opportunity, hence the fact that there's so many proptech companies out there solving many different types of problems, and all problems that need to be solved.


Paula Guino: (27:09)

Gradually, I guess, the property technology have been getting the attention of the big portfolio owners and the property managers as well. For the past two years it has been an industry that I've really gone into a bit of a deep dive, and then as soon as Liam kind of... First he was just telling me a little bit about it and then once he actually did a full demo and demonstrated, I was speechless for a few minutes, and really once you understand what the whole structure is and how it works, then it really was something that, to me, it was a no-brainer, an absolute game-changer, and really something that we need to be talking about and really... Because it's a digital transformation thing, you really need to be advocating for what you're doing. It's not just a product that you put it out there and you sell.


Paula Guino: (28:05)

So there is a lot to be discussed and to be learned from this. So it is very exciting. So I was very happy to join them six months ago.


Kylie Davis: (28:15)

Yeah. There's a lot of evangelism that goes on in this, isn't there?


Paula Guino: (28:19)

Yeah.


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Kylie Davis: (29:33)

So, how big are you guys now? How big is the business?


Paula Guino: (29:38)

So, in Australia, we've rolled out the solution to about $25 billion of portfolio-


Kylie Davis: (29:45)

Wow.


Paula Guino: (29:45)

... which is about 28 square metres... sorry, 38 million square metres of commercial real estate in Australia. Some of these portfolio owners, they do have large portfolios, and we have actually engaged with some of the biggest ones in Australia, which is good, because they're really-


Kylie Davis: (30:02)

Yeah, awesome.


Paula Guino: (30:04)

For us, after so much research and development, to deploy to large portfolios and really get the results of how everything kind of connects, it has been very powerful and is what really has driven us to take the global approach.


Kylie Davis: (30:21)

Awesome. Awesome. So, there is a lot going on though in this commercial property data space, isn't there? Who do you see are your competitors, or what's the landscape like?


Paula Guino: (30:35)

Yeah. I don't see-


Kylie Davis: (30:38)

Do you have any?


Paula Guino: (30:38)

I don't see a lot of competition because I see it as really a collaboration kind of tool. So we've been speaking with a lot of people, a lot of big players in this space, which could have software that's used worldwide. There's some big players and then there's all the property technology around it. I think we've been communicating with both, the bigger software players and the proptech as well, and it kind of all interconnects and it kind of all brings data from different... So I think everyone's got a purpose. I haven't seen anyone who's a direct competitor because we haven't really seen anyone that would deploy the solution to the client's environment. So I think that's what makes us kind of novel.


Paula Guino: (31:23)

For us, it's been more a journey of partnerships and putting together all this connections because we've got to make this happen, and I really take the whole sustainability thing as a passion. When people are involved in sustainability, they're usually very passionate about this, and there is a big aspect of this that is driving the sustainability aspects of a portfolio, which will drive a lot of the investment that will take place in the next few years, and even a lot of the occupancy as well. The tenants, they want to see that you're responsible.


Kylie Davis: (32:01)

Yeah. And responsive, right? Yeah?


Paula Guino: (32:05)

Yeah.


Kylie Davis: (32:05)

Well, that's what I love about this conversation around big data in commercial property because if you want to... It's almost like, how much brain space have you got? It's like if you want to own all your data and control all your data and have it inside a set proprietary space, you're only ever going to be able to answer the questions that you've always answered. But when you open up your data and you use tools like yours to bring datasets together from different parts of your business and to give you a lot more visibility and transparency around your data, it starts to become... the questions that you always had that you were using, interrogating your data for, become answered without you even needing to ask, and it then frees up your brain space to be asking a lot better questions that can really drive you forward. Does that make sense?


Paula Guino: (33:01)

Yeah. Absolutely. And because the whole thing is so simple and uses tools like your insights... We just do the insights on a Power BI kind of model, which we have like a preset model which we... it goes with the solution, but anyone who can do Power BI can go in there and write a query. So, anything that you think that you will need insights, you can very quickly create a visual with all the data that you have from your legacy data with all the APIs and all the data that's coming in without having to go into different platforms.


Paula Guino: (33:34)

So it really is quite powerful, and they can do that without even depending on us as a supplier. They can just have a champion in-house that will understand all the Microsoft solutions and will just do it themselves.


Kylie Davis: (33:50)

Awesome. So you don't have to incur an invoice every time you have a new question, you can see it all yourself.


Kylie Davis: (33:57)

So, Paula, what do you think the next five years... I think we're at the beginning of an extraordinarily exciting period, but what do you think the next five years holds in this space?


Paula Guino: (34:09)

So I think, as an industry, I really think that there is less than five years really for real digital transformation so that people can actually deliver their sustainability, their ratings and everything else that they need to deliver for investors and for the environment in general.


Paula Guino: (34:30)

For Build-Apps, I think it really is a journey where a lot of people will really realise that this is the way of the future, of people managing their own data and having this in their hands, and across other industries as well. So I think it is very exciting. I think a lot will happen in the next three to five years and hopefully, when we do get to 2030, a lot of these insights have been realised, and, yes, the net zero carbon goals will be achieved.


Kylie Davis: (35:06)

Well, it would be great, wouldn't it, if, through aggregating our data and interrogating it and being able to confidently build an accurate roadmap for how we upgrade our commercial property stock, knowing exactly what the costs and the timings and the work involved is, it would be great if we could do that and then get away from this feeling that we can't get to carbon net zero because we'll know, the data will tell us completely as to when we're going to get there.


Paula Guino: (35:39)

Yeah. Absolutely. And in regards to new investments as all, because a lot has changed in the built environment with the pandemic in the use of the built environment and repurposing of the built environment. So the investment is already there. There is a lot that will happen. There will be new investment being done, but people will need to have more information about where that's going before new investment is actually made, and sustainable, conscious investment as well. It answers to a lot of issues that we need to solve in the built environment in the next few years.


Kylie Davis: (36:17)

Yeah. I think we're going to see increasingly it accelerate over the next couple of years, that those businesses or those property owners that really get behind this and start rolling it out and using it, not just in new stock that's coming on board but actually going through their existing portfolio and really using it to upgrade that... We're going to, at some point, see a separation between those people who have done that and embraced it and made it happen and the value of their portfolios compared to those who keep lagging behind and not wanting to do it, and, at some point, then the cost of adopting later on is going to become a lot more expensive, both in opportunity costs but also they'll just be so far behind.


Paula Guino: (37:06)

Absolutely.


Kylie Davis: (37:06)

Yeah. Well, Paula, it's been absolutely fantastic talking to you. Congratulations on Build-Apps. Thank you so much for being on The Proptech Podcast.


Paula Guino: (37:16)

Thank you so much.


Kylie Davis: (37:18)

So, that was Paula Guino, COO of Build-Apps, one of the new commercial data solutions for the commercial property industry and a finalist in The Proptech Awards.


Kylie Davis: (37:28)

Data aggregation and analysis for performance improvement is a real growing cohort in Australian proptech. Build-Apps joins solutions like [Forbury 00:37:37], AI Assets, Switch Automation, and a host of others that are identifying and bringing the data together.


Kylie Davis: (37:45)

There's a lot to like about Build-Apps. I love that it's using technology that the industry is already very comfortable with. The Microsoft 365 platform is already part and parcel of nearly every property owner office in the country. So their tech overcomes a major obstacle early on, in that it feels really familiar and doesn't require a lot of instruction to use. I mean, look, it's one step past Excel really, isn't it?


Kylie Davis: (38:10)

I also love that it's modular. So you can add buildings or data sources within buildings as they become available or as you want, and you can bring in data from lots of different sources, which is also awesome. And it provides that data framework for how to bring it in and to identify all the different sources that you've got out there and to get them all talking together.


Kylie Davis: (38:33)

And once you have your portfolio loaded up, you've got that ability to slice and dice the data however you see fit; so whether that's by a device like comparing the performance of, say, elevators in your building or air con units to identify which ones are working the best or have the lowest running costs, or whether that's building by building.


Kylie Davis: (38:52)

Now, the possibilities for analysis and therefore performance improvement are endless, and this is the work that we need to embrace not only if we want to move towards smart buildings and smart cities, but if we want to genuinely start reducing costs and seeing performance improvement in our property portfolios. So, well done, Build-Apps!


Kylie Davis: (39:13)

Now, if you have enjoyed this episode of The Proptech Podcast, I'd love you to tell your friends, or drop me a line via email or LinkedIn or on Facebook. You can follow this podcast on Spotify, Google Podcast, Anchor and Apple iTunes.


Kylie Davis: (39:28)

I'd like to thank my audio support, Charlie Hollands, and the very fabulous Jill [Escadero 00:39:32], and our sponsors: Direct Connect, making moving easy; and Smidge Wines, exclusive wines made in limited quantities by master winemaker, Matt Wenk; and HomePrezzo, now part of ActivePipe, and helping you make engaging content for your email marketing.


Kylie Davis: (39:48)

Now, do you run a proptech business or are you the founder of proptech? Make sure you join the Proptech Association of Australia. It's Australia's new not-for-profit association made up of tech people who are passionate about the property industry and committed to improving experiences in how we buy, sell, rent, manage, build and finance property. Joining will give you access to events and networks across Australia and globally that will help you promote and grow your business. So, go to proptechassociation.com.au.


Kylie Davis: (40:17)

Thanks, everyone. Until next week, keep on propteching.