Danielle Brown of K&D Properties has won the Transform final with One Daily Desk, an app she built to pull her tasks, calls, appointments and team chat into one place.
Ten finalists pitched live on Zoom on Thursday 5 November, with five minutes each to show their app working on real work.
They were scored on the same four things as their final assignment: whether they redesigned the process, who is better off, where a person checks and decides, and whether they tested it with someone else and improved it.
Claire Weggery of Get Smart Property in New Zealand came second (A$1,500) with Property Passport, and Erin Marr of Belle Property Orange came third (A$500) with PM University. The A$5,000 prize pool was provided by PropertyMe.
“You did make it bloody hard for us,” Elite Agent managing editor Samantha McLean told the finalists before the results were announced.
“I think this has been the hardest Transform year we’ve ever had to judge.”
How One Daily Desk works
Ms Brown runs K&D Properties with her brother Ken Wearing and agency manager Penny Barby, and works as both selling agent and team leader.
She said the team’s day was spread across Rex, Airtable, Outlook, Slack and spreadsheets, and she was constantly jumping between them.
The app started as a daily checklist from one of the Transform exercises. It now builds her task list from her emails and an AI note-taking device she wears, so commitments made in a meeting or in the car are waiting for her when she gets back to her desk.
A daily call list pulls in new buyer enquiries from REA and Domain, open home follow-ups, appraisal leads and client nurture calls, and she can dial straight from the app.
At lunchtime each day it reads her calendar and prepares the standard documents she takes to her upcoming appointments, so her own research goes into the parts that are specific to each client.
After her sales meetings, the app lists the action items it picked up and Ms Brown approves or rejects each one before it is assigned to her, Ken or Penny.
She gave it to the team to test, and changed it when Penny’s day didn’t fit, adding time-based reminders for her. She has also built a team chat into the app, and won’t renew Slack when the subscription runs out in December.
“I’m engaged with my client, I’m focused on the meeting, rather than trying to make sure I have remembered what I’ve got to do once I leave,” she said.
Second and third
Ms Weggery’s Property Passport tackles the paperwork of taking on a new management, whether from another property manager or a private landlord.
Owners get one link per property that walks them through what she needs under New Zealand law, from Healthy Homes and smoke alarms to insurance, and files everything into the right folder.
She said one recent takeover took eight emails back and forth with the outgoing property manager. After one tester found the confetti distracting, she added a Calm Mode that switches it off.
Ms Marr’s PM University uses AI to turn her office’s procedures and Loom videos into training modules, each with a quiz at the end.
A person checks each module before it goes live, and a manager signs off once a team member has finished.
“It’s not just a library of materials,” she said. “Should a process change, it’s really easy to fix it.”
The finalists
The ten finalists, in pitching order, were Robyn Rule (Barfoot & Thompson), Sue Rowles (Peard Real Estate), Claire Weggery (Get Smart Property), Ian Wilson (Barfoot & Thompson), Joseph McCurry (Harris Leech Property), Linda Gulabovska (Right Choice Real Estate), Erin Marr (Belle Property Orange), Vicki Sayers (Sayers & Co), Danielle Brown (K&D Properties) and Zali Reynolds (Shelter Real Estate).
The judges were Kate Sunol from PropertyMe and Elite Agent publisher Mark Edwards.