00:00

Kylie Davis

Welcome to the Prop Tech 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. 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 behavior and activities around that. Now, none of this would be possible without our sponsors. A big shout out to the Direct Connect team, making moving, easy, dynamic methods, the innovators behind the forms, live and real works forms, and the Proptech Association of Australia. Thank you for your support of the podcast. My guest in this episode is Christina Lennie, Chief Customer Officer of StaffLink. 

01:00

Kylie Davis

StaffLink began as a property management Prop Tech, founded by Corey Davis and Joel Davis, no relation and brin humble, but it has now expanded to remove pain across all areas where processes and tech cross over, including sales and even strata management. It was born out of the real life experiences and pain of running a real estate office and all of its solutions are still tested at Image property. This is a fabulous conversation with Christina as we look at the intersection of outsourcing processes and Prop Tech. 

01:33

Kylie Davis

So, here to tell us all about it, Christina Lenny, welcome to the Prop Tech podcast. 

01:37

Christina Lennie

Thank you very much, Kylie. I feel really privileged to be here, actually. 

01:41

Kylie Davis

Oh, no, it's great. It's great to have you guys here. The hardest question is always the first one, what is the StaffLink elevator pitch? 

01:49

Christina Lennie

StaffLink help to create more sustainable, scalable and saleable organizations and we do that through tried, tested and proven tech based solutions. 

02:00

Kylie Davis

Cool. Now, you guys play mainly in the property management space, is that correct? 

02:07

Christina Lennie

We definitely started focusing solely on property management and naturally we've organically grown into sales, commercial and strata as well. 

02:16

Kylie Davis

Okay, so tell us more about how it works. Exactly. 

02:19

Christina Lennie

Yes, definitely. Look, I think we empower real estate professionals who want to take advantage of technology, remove those inefficiencies within their business, and in turn create a high level of accountability through visibility. What this would look like for a business owner. So, working mainly with those real estate professionals, a business owner in Australia or New Zealand at the moment, you are having to operate in a space where there's a lot of change. That landscape is shifting and we've got a lot of movement in teams. For us, what it looks like, as I said, for those business owners, is we've created and digitized best practice workflows that are followed by all in a platform that is live so that teams can work together. Cool. I did actually reflect on Dean firth from Macquarie at our conference last year mentioned that the rent role is or it does make up 96% of the business value within a real estate business in this market. 

03:27

Christina Lennie

The other interesting thing that I've read recently is that a PM in the industry on average is in a role for nine months. 

03:36

Kylie Davis

Right? 

03:36

Christina Lennie

Quite concerning for a lot of the clients that we're working with because you've got people that are leaving your business that are taking that information and knowledge on your largest asset and they're walking out the door because it isn't recorded and centralized in one area. I think that really points as well to the issue of the sustainability of take for example, the PM role. I think with the business owners that we're working with, it's about creating those solutions so that they can effectively empower their teams. One Dash, which is a product that sits within our platform, a business owner in Australia can sit at his or her desk and they can see everything that is going on with their PM or their sales business in the one place. They can see from an office standpoint, from a department or from an individual. Okay, how many applications do we need to present to owners today? 

04:34

Christina Lennie

It ten, is it twelve, is it 15? How many lease renewal actions do we need to complete today? How many outstanding maintenance jobs do we have today? Being able to take in that large volume of information really quickly in the one place, I think four or five years ago that would have taken you three, 4 hours to get that information, whereas now you can get it in a matter of minutes. That's that business owner perspective in terms of how I see what we're doing with them from a team perspective, I think we're just getting teams to do what they do best. Sales agents. It's listing and selling property managers, it's managing and building those relationships, not completing 84 CMAs for properties and it's outdated. I think the other thing that we've done, particularly with PMS, and we hear this quite a lot, is property managers are afraid to take annual leave and they're afraid to be sick because they're concerned about the workload that they're coming back to. 

05:46

Christina Lennie

Whereas this platform is almost creating that live handover of your portfolio at any point in time. Someone could effectively sit in your seat and know exactly the tasks that need to be done. They can comment and read the comment history of that particular lease renewal negotiation application so that they can actually effectively cover that portfolio for that day or that week or that two weeks. I think that's been incredibly powerful for us because we're starting to see that correction of that sustainability in that role. 

06:17

Kylie Davis

Yeah, fantastic. The secret source that sits behind some of the work that you're doing is actually this connection with this live connection with the outsourcing and the role with outsources, isn't it? 

06:30

Christina Lennie

Yes. We do refer to it as an ecosystem because we have multiple products coming together to kind of enhance that team's journey. You are right, we are overlaying that offshore support into it. Not all of our clients uptake offshore support, and that can be a personal decision they make, but ultimately, that platform allows those teams to work together simultaneously. 

06:53

Kylie Davis

Yes. Okay, awesome. Tell us, how did you guys start? What's the background behind StaffLink? 

06:59

Christina Lennie

Yeah, so we do own our own real estate business, image Property. They're based in Brisbane sunny coast and down there in sunny Melbourne as well. Sometimes probably not. We started 1213 years ago in terms of image property, and no one knew what they were doing at all. We started with 200 properties and it. 

07:28

Kylie Davis

Was sounds like a very typical real estate story when everyone give it a go. 

07:36

Christina Lennie

Yeah. About five, six years ago, we had a team were scaling very aggressively as business. Were growing and putting those properties per month on. We knew right then and there that it wasn't sustainable for the PM team and it wasn't sustainable for us as a business. That traditional model of one property manager managing 200 properties end to end, we could see that then it wasn't working. We knew we needed that additional support. We did look to offshoring to do that. That was definitely something we made that decision based on increasing support, not reducing cost. So, went to the Philippines, hired an offshore team, and today some of them are still in that team. We call them the Image OG. So that was incredible. That first variation with that model was, okay, let's map out the roles and responsibilities within every single process. What are those admin tasks that we can actually shift to the offshore team to leverage the PM's time? 

08:51

Christina Lennie

So, take, for example, the renewals process. That was one of the first we started with. At the time, the expectation within our team was, okay, you need to create a CMA for every single property and owner. You need to collate the rental analytics. That was the median rent, the vacancy rate, the stock levels in the immediate and surrounding suburbs, and that was the start of it. Not to mention the tenant intentions, the instructions, the lease prep. So, 50 minutes tasks, that was 01:00 p.m.. Doing one property, we clocked it at a 50 minutes task by overlaying a best practice workflow and incorporating the offshore team, we took that down to eight minutes. 

09:30

Kylie Davis

Wow. 

09:31

Christina Lennie

Immediately we thought, wow, we're onto something here. However, that email back and forth with the offshore team, it wasn't going to cut it and it wasn't scalable. We were determined in order to get to 400 properties to 5000, we knew we had to do things differently. This is where we started to build out that digitized best practice workflow solution. That was kind of that kind of unlocked that ability to go, okay, now we can do this at a much higher level because we've got processes onshore being followed by all and the offshore team. We're using automation to basically dictate what you do next. You're not having to come back to us and say, what do we do now? What's next? What do In this scenario? We had mapped that out and we had the automation set up to basically drive that for the team. That's how we began in our own real estate business and tried and tested it first. 

10:35

Christina Lennie

Naturally, in real estate, one person goes, hey, that's really cool. How are you doing that? Business owners are saying, yeah, look, I'm doing offshore, but I'm not getting this result. I think it was one client said, hey, can my offshore team sit with your offshore team? And that's how this began. Here we are four years later, and there's staff link. 

11:00

Kylie Davis

Fantastic. 

11:01

Christina Lennie

So that's where we grew from. 

11:05

Kylie Davis

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12:16

Kylie Davis

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12:26

Kylie Davis

So how big is StaffLink now? What size of you? What are your sort of metrics? 

12:32

Christina Lennie

Yeah. In the Brisbane team, as of March 2023, we're 74. That comprises of obviously the sales team that are working with prospective clients. I'm kind of educating them on the benefits of the system. We've got the client operations team, and that's a combination between a training team that are solely focused on training internal team members here in Brisbane, but also the offshore teams. We've got the client success management department. I've got to give a shout out to them. They deploy over 500 hours of support each week to our clients. 

13:12

Kylie Davis

Wow. 

13:12

Christina Lennie

That is those live sessions with the business owners and their teams on how to use this platform, how do we implement it, embed it into their businesses. We've got the development team, so they're responsible for things like creating our one dash, the hub, and they also are responsible for building all of our custom built APIs with all of the different softwares in this space, which has been phenomenal. We've got the marketing team, which is headed up by Matt Anson, so wouldn't be here today without him. We've got HR and finance, obviously, Philippines. We've got 390 staff that we're supporting over there. So together we're quite a big organization. 

13:59

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Well done. That's huge growth for four years. Well done. That was one of the questions you just touched on what is the CRM or the property management system? There a specific one that I need to use with StaffLink or who do you integrate with? 

14:18

Christina Lennie

No, we love them all. We can work with them all. We do have an API integration with Propertyme and Property Tree at this point, but we have clients on console cloud rest and it's definitely not something that we're looking to replace. They do that well and that is not an avenue we want to go down, but I think we see ourselves as an extension of them. 

14:44

Kylie Davis

Yeah, cool. So what's your business model, Christina? It SaaS or is it how do your clients pay for you? 

14:52

Christina Lennie

Yes, it is a SaaS model and that's something where I think as a team that ever changing landscape, we've had to pivot in the last one to two years in terms of what do we see as our focus as a business. In this moment, I definitely think that the ability to provide those solutions, particularly in the property space, is our core focus, complemented by obviously that offshore perspective that we're working with as well. 

15:25

Kylie Davis

Yeah. If I'm a real estate, what's the kind of typical real estate agency that would use you? How big are they? What does that avatar look like? 

15:35

Christina Lennie

Yeah, look, it's really dependent. 

15:38

Kylie Davis

I just freaked out a whole bunch of real estate agents by saying they're an avatar. 

15:41

Christina Lennie

Anyway, no, we work with a complete range of clients, so I've got clients on board that they manage 200 properties. They've got one to two agents, right up to 8000 plus properties with a really large sales team. We have the support in place that we can basically recommend a support package based on properties under management, the size of their team and ultimately how quickly they want to embed this system into their business. 

16:13

Kylie Davis

Right. How long does it typically take? 

16:17

Christina Lennie

Again, we've got two different options. We've got StaffLink Starter, which is very much designed to help those smaller sized businesses. People managing 200 properties and that's perfect for them and that can be rolled out within a four month journey with us. That Client Success Manager is going to really help you to progress and challenge your team because it is a change management piece. That's what that Client Success Management team do incredibly well. It's about removing that fear, challenging the team to go, hey, we can't keep doing it the way that we're doing it. We're not going to survive if we continue to do it that way. The StaffLink pro is definitely for those clients that are wanting to your large corporate groups or your large offices that are really quite robust, they might be onboarded for 812 months. I've got clients that have been on boarded for three years with us because as with property management in particular, it never changes. 

17:29

Christina Lennie

It always changes. I should say you've got different team members in there's legislation changes, so they find that very valuable. The sales side we generally tend to find because that life cycle is a lot shorter in the sales landscape. It's a four to six month journey for them. 

17:47

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Okay, if I sign up to staff link, have I then got specific offshore staff in the Philippines or am I sharing from a pool or how does that work? 

17:59

Christina Lennie

Yes. Every single client will interview and hire their own team members. 

18:04

Kylie Davis

Right. 

18:04

Christina Lennie

I think our mentality and we're very passionate about educating clients on the fact that it is their own team member and to incorporate them into their team. The staff that we support are ultimately the clients. So we're not that share pool model. 

18:24

Kylie Davis

Okay. We've talked a lot about how it works in the property management space. How does it work in the sales space? 

18:31

Christina Lennie

Yes. With the sales space slightly different, we would never want a sales agent. Take for example, jumping into the live platform. 

18:42

Kylie Davis

We love sales agents, but you're not allowed touch it, no technology. 

18:47

Christina Lennie

The sales journey is slightly different and we really do drive the sales agents to use the platform through the hub. The hub is an LMS style platform and what it does is it's customizing the text back of an agency, including those request forms. Take for example, if a sales agent needs an Ma prepared, they can basically click on a button, enter the details, that goes straight to the offshore team or the sales admin, and that gets pushed back through to them. That hub is ultimately what drives that experience for the sales agents so that they're not having to get too involved in the admin side, which is definitely that platform area. And those workflows. The hub also includes particularly for sales agents and the PMS, it's got the capability of that learning and development piece. A lot of businesses are building out onboarding courses, and they're building out how we manage this internally or what does the sales process look like for us, or who do we use for these types of scenarios? 

19:55

Christina Lennie

And really building out that almost global. Coursework and a digital platform for their team, which is incredibly powerful when we're trying to transfer that knowledge. I think, as well, that team performance piece. Using the hub, you can see how is my business performing and how is that individual within my team? It a sales agent and can I benchmark them against other sales agents in my team suburb, state, country. 

20:23

Kylie Davis

Wow. Okay. Wow. That's very powerful. What have the biggest challenges been of you guys have grown the business? 

20:34

Christina Lennie

I would say scaling it is hard, isn't it? This will be a breeze. 

20:43

Kylie Davis

How hard can it be? Oh, God. It is actually really hard. 

20:47

Christina Lennie

I think we've doubled in size each year for the last four years, and that's being able to scale the infrastructure, the training, and the talent of the team. It's been a healthy challenge, I think. Brilliant. Our team has got more gray hairs than anyone. 

21:09

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Well, look, I'm full of admiration for what you've done because the biggest challenge in real estate that is decades, if not centuries old, is actually mapping the process of what gets done, when and what the workflow looks like. Right. Because we have such a low barrier to entry and it's easy to get started. That usually doesn't happen. Most people just dive in and sink or swim and then just kick as hard as they can to get back to the surface. Right. By you guys actually mapping and product or creating a process around the entire process. That's a huge achievement. Well done. 

21:52

Christina Lennie

Yeah. Thank you. And you're 100% correct. The biggest problem we've seen is that lack of structure, and what that looks like is a complete lack of clarity on where do we start, what do we prioritize, and what does finished look like? 

22:11

Kylie Davis

Yes. 

22:12

Christina Lennie

And you're right. We've got a lot of younger people or people with not as much experience entering this space after a very short course and now doing nothing. 

22:25

Kylie Davis

Wrong with that, but nothing wrong with it. 

22:28

Christina Lennie

I think we've got to provide them with the tools and the training and the resources. I don't think a lot of businesses right now feel confident in what they have documented, recorded and centralized. 

22:40

Kylie Davis

Yeah. When you don't have that, you actually don't have any IP in your business, do you? There's two kinds of businesses. There might be more, but at the moment, I'm going to stick with two. There's either businesses that are energy driven or businesses that are process and structural driven, or the third one is businesses that have got all of those two things going together in the energy in the process of supporting each other. When you start out in a real estate business or in any even a prop tech, it's really easy to just be energy driven. The thinking is, well, if I just work really hard, I'll be able to make this work. That is true for a couple of years until you burn out, until you absolutely wear out. During that time, you need to start to put structures and processes and workflows in place to both make sure that you don't kill yourself and also to make sure that you're being efficient and that you're getting the most. 

23:37

Kylie Davis

Out of the business, but also that you're not at the mercy of having a staff member walk out and losing half your profitability or your IP. Just walking out the door. So well done. I just can't believe it's taken you four years to map the space. I would have thought it would take like 40. 

23:59

Christina Lennie

Look, I think that's probably the one piece that sets us apart is being able to use Image to try and test every product, every feature, every hairbrained idea that we have. First with Image, prove it, and then release. It to clients has meant that we've got that, I think, a bit of credibility in terms of hey, guys, this is what we are doing. A lot of clients will go, yep, let's do that, because why reinvent the wheel?