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. My guest in this episode is Will Alexander, CEO of New Zealand Proptech Renti, which is making it easier for property managers to provide a better service to tenants and help them apply for rental properties more easily and move in more quickly.

Kylie Davis

Will has had an extensive career in real estate. Before joining Renti, he was the General manager of property brokers, spent a total of seven years across two stints at Barfoot and Thompson, one of New Zealand's biggest real estate groups, represented the property management sector to the REINZ and worked at Auckland Property Management. Renti and Moveme are his second Proptech startup after he spent two years as a founder of More Minutes, a proptech designed to help property managers get more out of their day. So, here to tell us all about it, Will Alexander. Welcome to the Proptech podcast.

Will Alexander

Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Kylie Davis

Great to have you here. And look, I am really interested in hearing about what's going on in New Zealand in the rental and the property management space. So before we kick off, first question is always the hardest. What's the renty elevator pitch?

Will Alexander

Easiest question for me. Renty. We're all about making renting enjoyable.

Kylie Davis

Fabulous. For Renters or for property managers or both.

Will Alexander

Everyone comes into contact with rentee is our job is to make it enjoyable. Whether you're a tenant, a property manager, an agency owner, someone working in renty, we just want to have fun and make the experience enjoyable. Wow.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so if property management and renting is anything like it is in Australia, in New Zealand, that's a pretty big ask. How do you guys do that?

Will Alexander

Yeah, it is a big ask, and I think they are similar. There's a lot of similarities. We do it a by having fun. So one of my big things is we don't want to be a faceless software business. And we've all had those horror stories of where we subscribe to a piece of software, we've been sold the dream big marketing machine in behind it, and then that's the last you hear of them. There's no customer service, there's no support. Renti is very much ingrained in the industry, and we spend a lot of time and effort getting out, talking to people, traveling, getting in front of our clients, supporting events. We've put a lot of energy and money into building a very good support team, customer support team. So we monitor that. Like, for example, from receiving a ticket to closing a ticket, on average, is 16 minutes.

Will Alexander

So that's a big part of renty, is that's the first part is making it enjoyable, making sure that we are just not a faceless software business. I hate that stuff. And second part is building software that is intuitive and easy. Because I come from the industry, I've been in property management for 16 years, and the best property managers typically have no idea how to use the software. They've been in the industry for 30 or 40 years. They are brilliant at what they do, but this is not something that they're confident with. So we have to build software that suits them all the way through to people that have just done the Bachelor of Property degree at Auckland. Four years come out very savvy, very switched on. Software is just what they do. So we've got to build it for either end of the scale. So that's how we make it enjoyable for our clients and people who come in contact with renting.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so what is the rental market like in New Zealand at the moment? Give us a little bit of a background on it.

Will Alexander

Yeah, it's very strong in terms of it's a supply and demand issue. It's a landlord market at the moment, there is a shortage of available rental properties. I actually heard an interesting statistic the other day. I was in Christchurch st clients, of course, and they said that the available rental levels was about 500 and 5600, which is exactly the same as what it was after the 2011 earthquakes, where all the properties were wiped out. There's this huge demand for whatever was available. So just gives you a sense of the competition there's. Very tough rents are going up. As you probably know, when the sales market slows down a little bit, rentals tends to pick up and becomes very strong. So it's a good time for agencies. They're organically growing. Everything they bring on is not replacing what's been sold, which it's been like in the past.

Will Alexander

At the moment, it's just good net growth, good organic growth. But, yeah, I think a lot of the legislation that the government has rolled out over the last few years, as we all said, the person that's going to pay for this is the tenant. And that's exactly what we're saying.

Kylie Davis

Right, okay. So renty software, you've got a solution for property managers. Tell us a little bit about that. And then also you've also got an interaction with renters, I'm assuming.

Will Alexander

Yeah, absolutely. So it's pretty cool. Renty. Basically, it's the end to end solution for the whole sort of securing a tenant onboarding a tenant through to passing it over to the daily CRM for day to day management. People will be familiar with propertyme or PropertyTree or palace over here in New Zealand. So renting from the very if a property is listed on trademirealestate.com sorry, co NZ, which is equivalent to over there. So people see a property online, they want to inquire all of that is captured within renty. Then they want to book into view the property that's all done through renty. Then the agency can conduct the viewing with the prospective tenants, then they can apply, which is all through renty. Then we do all the vetting process through all the credit bureaus reference checks, everything like that. Then we build the tenancy agreement, which meets all the residential tenancies act, Privacy Act, all that sort of stuff, all digital signatures.

Will Alexander

It doesn't matter if it's a flat of five, it's all done in succession. And then all of that pushes through seamlessly to the CRM. So that whole front end journey is done through renti. And every step is just easy. Doesn't matter if you're an agent, it doesn't matter if you're a tenant applying. It's just super straightforward.

Kylie Davis

So if I'm a tenant applying for multiple properties, do I need to fill in my form once or multiple times for each property?

Will Alexander

Great question. Great question. And it's another problem that we're looking to solve. So at this stage, you do tend to we're not the only available software out there for this sort of process. There is one other sort of major competitor. But what you've just alluded to, Kylie, is what we are looking at is a tenant journey. And that sucks. Right now, if I'm a tenant and it doesn't matter where you're from, what country you're in, that experience, it's just not where it should be. So something that we're working on and we're building out a tenant app to streamline that entire you know, you're building your own profile. You can apply for multiple properties. Because I understand in Australia, you don't do credit checks on people. In New Zealand, you do until they.

Kylie Davis

Will do a credit check on their successful tenant.

Will Alexander

On the successful tenant. Okay.

Kylie Davis

As a confirmation, I'm not sure if.

Will Alexander

That'S consistent across all states, but don't hold me to that. But I think it might vary. But in New Zealand, every time you do a credit check on a tenant, the credit score goes. Know, I know. It's this thing that no one really knows about. So we're working with a big credit bureau called Equifax, brought out a light touch credit score because this alludes to this whole tenant journey that you just talked about, it sucks at the moment. If I'm a tenant and I apply for six different properties, which is common.

Kylie Davis

Yeah, you might need to because things are going like hotcakes, right?

Will Alexander

Yeah.

Kylie Davis

That's awful.

Will Alexander

I know. So we're building out. We're working on that whole journey, making it easy. We're working with equifax. They've brought out a light touch credit score, which doesn't impact the tenant, but then it also goes into, like, I'm a tenant, I've just been renting a property for the last five years. I've never missed a rental payment. Why on earth does that not go towards my credit score?

Kylie Davis

Absolutely.

Will Alexander

If you're paying a mortgage, it does. And often in New Zealand, the weekly rental amount is more than what people pay in a you too. This whole thing around the tenant journey and that big ecosystem, it just needs a big revert, and that's a huge goal for us.

Kylie Davis

It's an extraordinary bias against renters. They're preventing them from ever getting the ability to buy a property because simply, the act of renting and the structural processes around renting basically disadvantage you obtaining future credit.

Will Alexander

Yeah. And it's something that we feel quite strongly about, Kylie. It's a fun problem to solve and we're pretty pumped on doing that. And things are underway.

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Awesome. Okay. How big is the rental market in New Zealand? How many properties?

Will Alexander

So roughly about 600,000, just using round figures. It's a bit more than that, I think. But unlike Australia and New Zealand, roughly 50% of the rental market is privately managed.

Kylie Davis

Yes. How much?

Will Alexander

About 50%.

Kylie Davis

Wow. Okay.

Will Alexander

No one knows exactly, but it's about that. So in terms of the professional management, it's probably 250 to 300,000, because a large part of the rental market is done through Kayanga Aurora, which is a working housing New Zealand provider. So I think they do about 60,000.

Kylie Davis

So is that included in the private rental market?

Will Alexander

Is that regarded as private rental thing, the 200,000? So the cool thing about that is why it's a bit backwards. It also gives you an indication of the opportunity and the ability to grow. I mean, every single agency operating now can effectively double its portfolio because of that private market. So, huge opportunity. But the difference between New Zealand and Australia is australia has regulation and a licensing regime for property management. In New Zealand. We don't. It used to be deregulated when the Real Estate Act came out in 2008, and ever since then, every agency has been lobbying the government to bring it back. They've finally listened and I think over the next couple of years it will be reintroduced and ultimately that's going to be a massive driver from the private moving back to, okay.

Kylie Davis

So how does renti help property managers? So, we've talked about that starts at the beginning of the journey, but if I'm a property manager and I'm inside the renti platform, what becomes easier for me than if I was using other software?

Will Alexander

So we've built basically a dashboard, a way of just facilitating and administering the whole process of capturing inquiries, booking in people, conducting viewings on your phone and marking people off, capturing applications. You can do a viewing of 60 people and all the applications come through. And so it can handle mass volume and mass scale like that through to just making it very easy to process applications. The whole experience for property managers, Kylie, is just really easy. And it doesn't matter if you've got one application or 60 application, it's a scalable product that just makes it really easy and no paper is involved. The whole process around building the tenancy agreement, one of the things that Renti does is our integration with the CRMs, like palace property, tree propertyme is second to none. And all the information, if people use those CRMs effectively and store all the information in, that when it comes time to building the tenancy agreement in Renty, that pulls all that information across, populates all the fields.

Will Alexander

So probably about 80% to 90% of the agreement is already done from information that's pulled from the CRM, plus all the information that was captured through the application process. So it's just going through, checking it all off very easy. You send it off for digital signatures and the best thing about it is Renti is free for agencies.

Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

Okay, so look, there's a lot in this I want to unpack, because in Australia, most of the rental property management software sort of starts as a CRM and then builds out. But what I'm hearing and what you're telling me is that actually Renti sits over the top of it and pushes information into the system, into an existing system that they've got. So you need another CRM platform as part of it.

Will Alexander

That's right, yeah. So we very strongly advocate for the CRMs to be the source of truth.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Will Alexander

That's where everything is stored, all the information about the property, the owner, that kind of stuff. No one of those CRMs currently does the application process.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Will Alexander

So that's why Renti, it just sits harmoniously with those things because A, we believe that all the information should be in the first place. So we're not competing, we're just pulling it out, whipping up the tenancy agreements and then pushing it back. And once everything is done, the integration back to them is amazing. Like, we set up the tenancy, we populate all the fields and the endpoints, the documents are separated out and stored in the diaries. So again, that integration is next level. And it's just so straightforward. Awesome.

Kylie Davis

So how did renti start? So your CEO, you've been there, you were telling me before, for about two years, but the business is about three years old, sort officially three, something like that.

Will Alexander

About five or six years.

Kylie Davis

Okay, but how did it start? Who are the founders?

Will Alexander

So the founders are Claudia Smith and Russell Smith. And they're not coincidence there.

Kylie Davis

There's more than one Davis in the world too, so I understand.

Will Alexander

So, funny story, really. They were utility aggregators, so their first business was Moveme, where they would connect tenants with power, broadband, gas. And then a bit of a political sort of thing happened within the industry where they were getting blocked from a competitor. Only way they could continue to compete is to build out a piece of software which is now called Renti. So I was the general manager at Proppy Brokers, which is the second largest private agency in the country, and they got me up, I sat around the board room and they said, what do you think of this? And I was like, I love it, and I love it so much. I promise you I'll be your first client once it's ready. And sure enough, they built it. And Property Brokers, which is 8000 properties around New Zealand and 80 offices, were their very first client.

Will Alexander

It's like still is their biggest client.

Kylie Davis

That's a very big guinea pig on new software on it.

Will Alexander

It was fun. It was fun rolling it out because it's provincial New Zealand as well. So the travel to get everywhere is extensive.

Kylie Davis

I'm sure they gave you some very robust feedback. All of my New Zealand friends are very feisty and know their own.

Will Alexander

Yeah, yeah, that's one way of putting but I guess the one thing from that though, is it was built by property managers, for property managers. And one of the good, the pillars of success of Renty is the engagement with the industry and just keeping our ear to the grindstone. And that started from that very first client where they work with us. I remember the developer at the time, Matt, he would work 24 hours a day and were just hammering them with feedback and they were building it as on. It was great. But they built a really good tool that was solving problems for the industry. So that's how it started, and then it's just exponentially grown since then. We've got about 450 offices around New Zealand now. We've formed a partnership with Trademi, which is the largest listing platform in New Zealand, which gives us exclusivity for booking buttons on listings and application buttons on listings.

Will Alexander

So, yeah, it's just gone from Next. That's it.

Kylie Davis

Fantastic. Look, for my Australian listeners, who might there are some important different things that differentiate Australia and the New Zealand market. Because when you say you've got 450 offices, new Zealand tends to have much bigger offices than Australian in terms of real estate, don't you? Have I got that.

Will Alexander

Sense?

Kylie Davis

Well, in terms of the number of people bums on seats inside an office.

Will Alexander

Yeah. Property brokers, which is provincial, new Zealand offices were smaller.

Kylie Davis

Right, okay.