Kylie Davis

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. It's so great to have you here and to share stories of innovation and opportunity across real estate, property and building services. And the aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible across how we design, build, buy, sell, rent and invest in property and all of the associated behaviour and activities around that. Now, none of this would be possible without our sponsors, so a big shout out to the Direct Connect team making moving easy, dynamic methods, the innovators behind the forms, live and RealWorks forms, and the Proptech Association of Australia. Thank you for your support of the podcast.

Kylie Davis

I'm very excited about my next guest, Andrew Cox, because he is from a brand new prop tech just launched called Sensor Global. Sensor Global is doing groundbreaking work saving lives with next generation Internet of Things software designed especially for residential properties. IoT are smart devices that are connected to cloud based software and Sensor Global's first product is a new automated smoke alarm system that will revolutionize how smoke alarms are monitored and managed in residential properties across the country. Because the fact that they are constantly connected means that they no longer require annual physical inspections to remain compliant. And this will make life easier for both tenants and property managers, and also safer. But they also have a raft of new devices planned for market. Andrew has extensive experience in both the property construction and proptech industries, having successfully exited property safe to Australia's Home Trades Hub, which was a joint venture between IAG Insurance and the RACV in 2021.

Kylie Davis

He's a proptech entrepreneur who knows his product, knows its purpose, and is very clear on his company's vision and how he's going to achieve them. Andrew Cox.

Kylie Davis

Welcome to the Proptech Podcast.

Andrew Cox

Thanks, Kylie. Thanks for having me.

Kylie Davis

Oh, it's great to have you here. Yeah. Now you are a brand new startup, although this is not your first rodeo in proptech startup land, so we'll dive into that in a minute. But the first question is always the hardest. What is the sensor? Global elevator pitch.

Andrew Cox

Well, essentially, Kylie, we are saving lives with automated compliance in the property management sector.

Kylie Davis

Awesome.

Andrew Cox

We have built an ecosystem of Internet of things or IoT devices such as smoke alarms, connected that to an easy to use software dashboard for property managers. And the combination of those two things, automates compliance and I'll just explain that a little bit further. For example, smoke alarms. The platform undertakes the automatic and remote testing of smoke alarms for property managers.

Kylie Davis

Okay, awesome. So how often does it do that, remote testing?

Andrew Cox

Well, the standard industry practice is generally once every twelve months. In the previous, I suppose, years, people would go out and press a button. You don't need to do that anymore with Sensor. But what we do is allow the property manager to set what's appropriate for their portfolio so they might say, I want to test the smoke alarms four times a year, for example, and that doesn't cost any extra in terms of sending someone out to a property, because we just don't need to send people there.

Kylie Davis

Yeah, right, okay. How big is a problem? Is it like we've all had smoke alarms for decades? It feels like I feel like I've been changing the batteries or dealing with shrieking alarms because I burnt the toast for 100 years. How big a deal is this?

Andrew Cox

It is a big deal, and probably the fact you said you were changing the batteries makes you one of the very few diligent people who actually do it. It's a known statistic that 56% of people who die in home fires die in homes without working smoke alarms in the home.

Kylie Davis

Right. Boy, that's a lot, isn't it?

Andrew Cox

It's a massive issue and unfortunately for the property management sector, a test one day a year, although that may be the legislation in some states, it only gives the property manager a window to that property for that 15 minutes or that 20 minutes one day a year out of 365. So that's the problem, is the 364 days a year there's no vision into the property.

Kylie Davis

Yeah. An existing technology smoke alarm does give you a warning that its battery might not be working, because it does that really annoying beat that takes days for you to work out what the hell is going on and then you work it out. Right. But it would better if you had sort of an alert on your phone or something that said, look, it's coming close, so next time you're at Bunnings, go to something about it or something.

Andrew Cox

And I think that's the as technology moves on with product and other things. In Sensor smoke alarms, you don't have to replace any batteries because it has a ten year lithium battery in the first. So the only layer battery warning will be in close to ten years time when the batteries, the alarms need to be replaced every ten years anyway, that's generally legislation. So, yes, the alerts are more in the platform around that we've created, around Tampering, for example. And the thing is, too, with most existing or your existing smoke alarms in the market is it just alerts the person in the property, there's no outside connectivity, and reach to the property manager to either understand if there's an issue or the compliance status of that property. And that's what we've created. We've created that two way synchronous link between the alarms and the property manager's dashboard.

Kylie Davis

Yeah, because I guess that's a real issue, isn't it? Because at the moment, the process would be alarm Beep goes off, or the low battery beep goes off, takes tenants a day or two to work out what the bloody noise is and where it's coming from. Then they alert the property manager. The property manager then organizes a time that works for everybody. And so you're talking about a week or so with that.

Andrew Cox

Yeah. And the low battery, you're likely to.

Kylie Davis

Pull it out in just sheer frustration. That's what I would do.

Andrew Cox

And that's what the reality is. People take smoke alarms off the roof because and not realizing that what they've just done is, one, made their property non compliant, probably breached their lease, and thirdly, it's dramatically unsafe without a smoke alarm. The purpose of smoke alarms is to alert someone in the instance of a fire, and that's what it's for. So we're very serious about saving lives. That's one of the core reasons we exist. And be able to give that property manager one evidence if someone has tampered him something or evidence that the alarm has been removed or someone's taken it off the roof. This is really important stuff and it does help property managers. In the event of a fire or an insurance investigation or a coroner's inquiry could, God forbid, we want to make sure that our customers have got the adequate audit trails to show that they were being diligent, they were going above and beyond what's minimum requirements most of the time.

Andrew Cox

And that gives people comfort knowing that something's connected 24 7365, which gives them that peace of mind that they are compliant. And most property managers, I mean, I won't mention any names, but I've had plenty of property managers say to me, there's no way I can put my hand in my heart and say, I know my homes are compliant for smoke alarms. Because you don't know for 364 days a year.

Kylie Davis

Yeah, because they're just dead devices, aren't they? But this is making them actually alive. So the only Internet of things technology that I've heard of in homes today has been more around that home security or Nest know in the US. They've got thermostat I don't know if they've come out here yet, but that kind of more home security stuff. Are you the first guys to be doing Internet of Things in the residential space?

Andrew Cox

Yes, there is some IoT devices, as you mentioned, in existence across different types of technologies. Probably what we are, we know the first that have LinkedIn it's a patent pending system. We've got we're the first that have linked the IoT device to a software dashboard, and then that dashboard then links through to the core software that they use. For example for example, PropertyTree full integration with PropertyTree for the customers in Australia, it's trust accounting software, and we're doing that for community housing et. So yes, the other part of it is probably the remote is in some existing technology from a home, you can press the button and test the alarms, or you can press the actual button on the alarm. It's not going to approve the alarm anyway. You still can do that. But it allows we're really the first that have allowed for the remote testing to stop that truck roll out to the property for someone to press a button on alarm once a year.

Andrew Cox

So that's absolutely a world first, and so much so that we've got a patent pending on the whole thing, as I said.

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Awesome. So how long has it taken you to develop the tech?

Andrew Cox

Yes.

Kylie Davis

Tell us about that journey.

Andrew Cox

Since that was overnight would be done. Truth, no. It's been about two and a half years in the planning and making and obviously a number of investment dollars from our founders and investors in creating that. But around two and a half years, the approval process for a smoke alarm alone is generally up to six, seven months just to get it approved for the CSRO for sale in Australia, allowed to be sold. And then the software, we probably accelerated the software because as you mentioned at the beginning, had a bit of history in the sector with workflow software as well in terms for property technology software. So we believe we understand the customer reasonably well and what they're sort of expecting. So the software has probably been crunched a bit quicker than most people could do it because we've got that sort of past experience in the past business.

Kylie Davis

That seems like a good segue for you to tell us a little bit about your history. How did you get into this craziness?

Andrew Cox

How was I land on this planet? Okay, so my background is property development for around 20 years. And it's always been if I look back now, when you think about it and say it's always been the sort of the construction risk and compliance sort of areas. So property development, land development. I've built 700, 800 houses in my time, so I understand trades and how that part of the ecosystem works. And I'll talk about trades in a minute. And then moved into retirement villages. We built and leased essentially homes in retirement villages. So I've been a property manager. We're also the carer for the people and we also for the compliance in the retirement village, where you do have people who are often less capable of doing things. So you want to make sure everything's triply safe and secure. This was ten years ago. We didn't have any of this technology.

Andrew Cox

We were doing it all manually on spreadsheets. And I always looked at the compliance of those sector and just said, wow, this is hard work, there must be a tech solution. And I was trying to create this stuff ten years ago in workflow software, which we sort of did then from property development, moved into a property technology startup, which was sold around two years ago to a consortium of an insurance company in one of the auto clubs in Australia. And that business, we had a lot of success in helping property managers, one, manage risk because it was around workflow software for maintenance and audit trails around showing that the property manager was diligent and did these things. We also in that business had safety reports. We were going out to the landlords doing property safe reports, and were identifying risks and hazards in properties. But all through my 30, OD years of working in the construction and risk management and sector and property technology, smoke alarms and the antiquated nature of the sector in terms of pressing a button once a year and not knowing what's happening, that's always been something I've looked at and said years ago.

Andrew Cox

We're going to solve this one day. And I've been fortunate enough to be, what do you call it, a group together with a bunch of people who've got the knowledge of risk. The software, the IoT devices. It's just sort of one of those where everything sort of comes together at the right time. And the other founders and I, we met at the right time. We had a problem that needed solving. Legislation changing everywhere around smoke alarms and alarms. Now, the more advanced states need to be interconnected. For example, if one goes off, they all go off and moved on. But one of the things, just to come back to something you said before, you mentioned there was an alarm you mentioned before, and it says it should send a message to your phone and that sort of thing. And this is sort of where keeping tenants in the loop and giving a better living experience to the tenant in the home and their peace and enjoyment and disrupting them less and making their life a better experience is just such a most property managers really want that.

Andrew Cox

Yes, but it's been hard to deliver. Everybody's knocking on their door want to do this, so we sort of knock on doors less. And the other thing, too, is tenants get you got to make it really seamless for a tenant. And this was in any application I've worked in retirement villages and in residential and property management. The more seamless you can make it, the less touch points you've got, the better for the property manager. You never, ever want to use their WiFi. And that's all that stuff you mentioned, like the consumer products for IoT, like doors and locks, and most of this sort of stuff relies on you connecting to the tenant's WiFi.

Kylie Davis

Okay?

Andrew Cox

There's no way in the Occupiers WiFi. And when you live at home, that's fine. You got your own WiFi. You connect things up and whatever. But the problem with that is when the power goes out, it all goes out. Okay?

Kylie Davis

Yeah, true.

Andrew Cox

So what we made a huge point about doing is we're never going to rely on the tenant's WiFi. So the IoT device, the hub, which is the nucleus of what we sort of goes in the home to connect all these up to 20 OD devices into it. It's got its own communication capacity outside the property. So we're not reliant on a property manager trying to tell a tenant to hook something up to their WiFi, which would just be an absolute disaster in some technology you'll see coming to the sector that will think, oh, that's great, we'll just get the tenancy. It's just not going to happen. So unless you have it network, it'll fail.

Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

So look, there's so much in that I want to unpack. Let's just rewind a little bit. You mentioned before that you can have up to 20 devices in the dashboard. Is that the property manager who can see 20 devices? Or is that 20 devices in a single property or multiple properties? How does that work?

Andrew Cox

Sure, so you've got a hub which is the connection to the software in the outside world and so it's got its own connection and then the sensor devices in the home. And I'll explain devices because we've sort of spoken about smoke alarms and probably that's if you want to call it the Trojan horse because it's legislated. Every house has got to have a smoking alarm. It's funny, most legislation says working smoke alarm and prove that in old systems you can't, we can prove it, but so you've got your smoke alarm is sort of your lead and then you've got our next device, which is water leak detectors. And this is a hot topic for insurance because there's claims on leaking water and residential properties, water leak devices. Then we're building a building now, carbon monoxide and gas detector. And then you've got the identification of the issue and the alert and then alerting people.

Andrew Cox

That's all sort of the workflow part of the software already there but now we're going one step further, which is where we're going to take our system, be able to take the action. For example, turn off the gas if there's a gas leak, turn off the water if there's a water leak, and actually put the devices in line that allow the system to take action. From an insurance perspective or safety perspective, it's massive. If you can turn off the gas, if there's a carbon monoxide leak or a gas leak, and you can actually turn the gas off in the house and alert the people and get them out of the house, wow, what a great outcome.

Kylie Davis

Yeah.

Andrew Cox

But from an insurance perspective, if you can turn off the water before the leaking, the drip under the basin becomes a full flood for three days. Where someone's not at home on holidays and does $100,000 worth of damage to a unit block or a house, that's where we've got some great indicative support from the insurance sector to say, if you're going to be doing that, we might have a look at premiums, have a look at different parts. So, yeah, it's quite exciting, fantastic, fun story. Devices that haven't hit us yet. There'll be other things that we're not going to reveal all our plans, but we've got a few other devices we're also looking at for the ecosystem.

Kylie Davis

It sounds really exciting, fun story. My hubby was out mowing the lawn the other week back in our house in Sydney, and the mower sunk up to the axles in a wet patch when we had a leaking pipe. And were very grateful that it happened that week, not the following week, because we would have been down the coast, like, next six weeks. So God knows what the so exactly.

Andrew Cox

Early warning and notifying people to start doing that's what we're about. But then the thing is, trying to the whole part of this, if I come back to workflow, is reduce the time that property managers got to spend on stuff, property managers, the amount of time they stuff on, spend on backwards and forwardsing, right?

Kylie Davis

Just backwards and forwards, to try and get things lined up. It is.

Andrew Cox

And we've done some bit of number crunching on what we think property managers spend on managing manually smoke alarms now, with access to tenants and keys and tradies turning up and this sort of stuff. And everyone will debate the figure because everyone's got their own number. But we reckon it's about 80 hours a year that property managers will spend mucking around, trying to get access into properties and sorting out and tenants, not letting them in to test alarms and all this sort of stuff. And I suppose because I've listened to the sector for eight years in my last business, talking about the woes of other services and trade services that they had, and some great things and some pretty average things, mostly in the smoke alarm sector, and they never were always that complimentary about their smoke alarm provider. They change all the time and different providers.

Andrew Cox

But the challenge is it's a massively hard business to run when you got 100 trucks running down the road. We don't have people in the field in trucks. It's a technology solution for an existing problem.

Kylie Davis

Awesome. So you've mentioned the property managers. They sound like not the only market. Are they your primary market at the moment or who else are you working with?

Andrew Cox

Yeah, well, probably the sectors if you want to say, where our applications are most relevant to would be residential property management. That's one of our core markets in Australia. Community housing or social housing as some people know it, and retirement villages. They're sort of our three sort of core sectors. There's other ancillary sectors that might not look at smoke alarm technology like factories might look at the gas and water leak and other things. But our core, we're a residential property management solutions business. That's our core. We're very focused on what the problem is and how we're going to solve it and we'll look at other sectors but that's our core. But just to clarify, our customer, it's really interesting who is our customer? Okay, so in a residential property management sector, well, the landlord is essentially the customer because the devices would be going into their home and they're the ones that will pay the small subscription annual connection fee per annum for the devices.

Andrew Cox

Where in a community housing situation you probably will find the community housing provider or the retirement village operator is the end customer even though they have tenants that sort of sit below that. So it's sort of through those to the end customer.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so I love that as an investor I can ask my property managers to put this into my properties. When am I going to put it into my forever home? When are you going to be to see it?

Andrew Cox

That's a very good question. We'll build out our primary, I suppose from an experience perspective is selling one to many is something that we've always focused on and having sort of point to multipoint sales and leveraging sort of bigger networks, larger property management businesses, et cetera. So it's an easier path for us. And our software is built around workflow, communication for landlords and dashboards and a whole bunch of things. Yes, we could run down to the individual customer, but training up individual people at their own home and I suppose in that respect there is already some devices you can walk down to Bunnings and buy for your own home. When you want to connect to your own WiFi that's that criteria there. If you've got your own little network you can go down and get another brand of alarm that will connect to your phone and tell you if it's going off.

Andrew Cox

It's unlikely you'll be able to remotely test it when you're on and check, but it is there's sort of already existing products targeted at the general consumer, and those products just will not work in property management. No, fair enough for that Wi Fi connectivity. Sorry, Kylie.

Kylie Davis

No, that's all right. I'm pretty sure my holiday house will catch fire because the Wi Fi burst in flames because it gets so hot. But anyway, well, I'm promoting property management.

Andrew Cox

You should have that.

Kylie Davis

Property management.

Andrew Cox

See, I'm promoting property management here, for.

Kylie Davis

All I can refer.

Andrew Cox

You a great agent if you want.

Kylie Davis

Thanks. Someone from the south coast. And I am giving you a hard time, too, because you haven't actually launched yet, have you? You're launching late July, is that correct? Yes.

Andrew Cox

We got our first shipment of stock out. We set up a Leaders program. I won't mention their names, but we set up a Leaders program of people who have just been really keen to get across all sectors, too, which is great. Our cool leaders just want to be first in market. So, like us, we are first in market and they want to be first in market and are very excited. So we sold out our first shipment of devices and then that's how this all starts. Customer number one, house number one, last business. I think we ended up over the period of eight years with 700,000 single properties in the system.

Kylie Davis

Wow.

Andrew Cox

The property management sector, as you know, Kylie, it couldn't be more diverse. You've got agencies that are sales focused with a little bit of property management and others that are all property management, and huge rent roles and small rent roles. Just a completely mixed bag. But what I noticed in my last business, and probably where what I'm finding now, the conversations I'm having, is there's agencies that understand really well, risk and compliance. They understand it and they know they understand the risk of what would happen to their business if something bad occurred. Okay? And in my last business, it was the same sort of thing. We found all these agents with risk averse nature who wanted to promote safety reports. And what surprised this is amazing. And what surprised me won't I give too many stats out? Because I'm not sure if I can from stuff from my last business.

Andrew Cox

But we found this group of landlords. Property managers would say, my landlord, no way my landlord is going to spend money on stuff like this. They won't spend money fixing the tap, but there's no way they're going to buy a safety reporter. No way they're going to do this. And what amazed me the most was so many times the landlord, what we've discovered was they care about the safety of the tenant in their home because their own kids are tenants in other homes and they sort of get that a safe home. It's a right I don't want to spend money on property stuff and make it up people. It's a right to have a safe home. So we find landlords that understand risk and managing risk with technology are going to be the very early adopters and uptakers of this platform. But there is a huge amount of landlords out there to their credit, that really do care about the safety of the person in their home.

Andrew Cox

Contrary to what a lot of people think about a lot of landlords, they're.

Kylie Davis

Just, there is a lot of hooey spoken about landlords that is based on nothing but silly old fashioned stereotypes that have no basis in reality or that are just caricatures of things from Dickensian times. Right?

Andrew Cox

Yeah, we're looking forward to talking to those landlords. And interestingly, our platform is designed that the property manager essentially sends an invitation out to the landlords to say, do you want to head down the path with us of better compliance and saving people's lives? And the short answer is, if you put everything aside, saving someone's life, there's nothing better you can do.

Kylie Davis

How does that compare cost wise, to a traditional smoke alarm?

Andrew Cox

For a smoke alarm? From a technology perspective, if you're going out and buying and I'll just talk about price for a second, if you're going out and buying an interconnected alarm with a base plate and that sort of stuff, and putting in reasonable equipment into your property. You're generally paying in excess of $90 or $120 sometimes for those alarms. Because our business and those companies are just selling alarms. That's their whole business. That's all they're doing. So they're making margins or whatever. On alarms. We're buying pretty well and we've decided that our margin on stock is very low because obviously we're about the software connection that's sort of our we're a software business with cool technology. So our alarms will retail at $89. And that is the smartest alarm, I would say, on the market because it can be remotely tested and sort of tamper alert.

Andrew Cox

It checks the dirty smoke chamber and monitors and that sort of thing. So there's lots of really cool stuff in the alarm. So the alarm is around $89 and the hub itself, which is and sorry, those alarms are ten year alarms, right? So they're ten year battery life. The hub itself is $129 or one off, and that's then installed by an electrician because it is a hardwired device. So generally a smoke alarm in the house is hardwired. It can run on batteries for ten years if there's no hardwiring opportunity and you're allowed to put it in that precinct. If a house has got New South Wales, one hub, one alarm fully installed by an electrician is probably $339. Ink, GST, something like that.

Kylie Davis

Okay.

Andrew Cox

And then if you've got a system which is then there's just annual connectivity charge which is lower than most my client providers anyway.

Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

So you haven't quite launched yet, Andrew, but you mentioned some funding and some people that your investors that were behind you. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Andrew Cox

Yeah, I won't mention all the individual names. We've got some interesting people who understand real estate and I suppose workflow. But probably one of the I suppose if you want to say more strategic investors is probably Second Century Ventures. That's the Reach Australia program that a lot of your listeners would know about. So just to clarify that's the venture capital arm of the National Association of Realtors in the US. And they go around the world and it's nice to be included in the cohort but they go around the world each year and find the coolest news property technology startup businesses and invest all around the world and try and find businesses that have got a global application for their USA is a huge market for us. 47 million rental properties there, by the way. We've got Reach is probably the core is the sort of the VC side.

Andrew Cox

The other investors have come in as early stage investors, some high net worth individuals in there. And that's how most a lot of prop tech startups work is. You've got your idea and I'm an investor myself in the business, which people probably already know who know me, and I'm fully invested in it as a founder and CEO. And that's just how it works. And then we collate this very early stage. We have concepts which we funded and then we've got other investors in as we go through. And probably the Second Century Ventures is strategically is really I suppose, the very well connected group and sort of be the launch pad to the US is sort of where we're going. So yeah, so we'll be in the US selling in the US in March next year, going through the process in the US at the current time.

Kylie Davis

Awesome. Okay, so big shout out to Peter Shruvmaid and Ebony and also Tom Ellis at Reach Australia because they're also another big shout out to them because they're also now looking for applications for their 2024 cohort. So if you are a scaling or startup Prop tech get your application. You can check out their website actually.