When you started 2022, did you think you’d finish the year with an Artificial Intelligence concierge with the ability to tell you who to call and when to call to secure your next vendor and listing?
What about having AI that sits across multiple communication channels, converses with potential clients in 13 different languages, and translates it all to you in English?
They’re just two of the biggest wins PropTech pioneer, Propic has achieved in 2022.
Propic Chief Product Officer Patrick Hill says the astounding year started with the acquisition of Property Realm and the merger of its CLAIRE virtual assistant with Propic’s own AI technology.
The tech, aptly named Propic Concierge, provides conversational AI across residential sales, property management and project marketing.
In essence, it provides 24/7 real estate on demand.
Patrick says it’s in property management where Concierge has had some of the biggest wins, automating up to 80 per cent of property managers’ maintenance tasks and inbound inquiries.
And when it comes to payment arrears, Concierge can reduce rental arrears by an average of 48 per cent in the first 90 days.
“The technology has the ability to chase rent arrears, invoice arrears and do it in an intelligent way,” Patrick says.
“It can have a conversation with the tenants, find out what the problem is and resolve it without involving a PM.
“It can also assign, update, deliver, chase and close out maintenance jobs, 100 per cent with automation, without any interaction with the PM.
“It also has the ability to take care of compliance activities like smoke alarms.
“This has all been a big win for Propic this year. We’ve put on tens of thousands of properties under management.”
And many big-name brands have come on board, including Ray White, Leah Jay, Place Real Estate, Kay & Burton and Turner Real Estate.
“It’s been amazing to see the data come out of that, with huge reductions in the outstanding amounts of rent,” Patrick says.
“That (48 per cent) is the average reduction in rent arrears, but some are doing even better – 70, 80 and 90 per cent.
“And it takes five minutes to turn the technology on, you save your staff hours a day and the outcome for your landlord is that they’re getting their money that much quicker.”
Patrick says tenants are also much happier with a Net Promoter Score this year of +33.
He says property managers are given a huge amount of time back in their day they can spend on building relationships, and they have greater job satisfaction, which leads to less attrition – a big battle in the industry.
This year also saw the PropTech launch Propic Advantage, which can mine industry data, CRM data and Propic’s data to tell an agent who to call, when to call and why they need to call a potential client.
The machine learning determines which properties and consumers will most likely transact in the future.
“One of the other big wins from this year is that we went multi-language,” Patrick says.
“We now cover 95 per cent of Australia’s population with their language of choice.
“What that means is if a tenant, a potential buyer or anybody is inquiring on the website, if they start talking in Cantonese, our AI will automatically speak in Cantonese back to them.
“What’s more, is that the conversation then gets translated in live time into notes and sent to the property manager or the sales agent or the management team to say, ‘This is the conversation that just happened’.”
Patrick says another key feature is that the agency, the agents and the PMs can customise how the Concierge talks to customers.
“The AI works with your processes, the different languages, but also the way you talk and with the verbiage you use,” he says.
Despite all of the AI’s features, Propic isn’t resting on its laurels, with numerous additions and upgrades already being worked on for release in 2023.
One of the main ones will be enabling Concierge to run across an entire agency rather than separate departments, such as PM and, individually, sales.
The agency-wide solution will allow ‘cross pollination’ of leads across departments, meaning a tenant that inquiries about open homes can be channelled to a selling agent, or a buyer who mentions an investment property can be handed over to a property manager for the next stage in their property lifecycle.
“Whether they’re tenants and talking there (in your marketplace) and they jump into general inquiry around open homes, or they’re going into a listing or attending an open home and having a live-time conversation in the open home with our AI, or at 12 o’clock at night they’re having a conversation about a listing for lease or sale, it doesn’t matter,” Patrick says.
“They will have the same AI that understands who they are, having that conversation, having real information, in live time, that’s being delivered back and then having a live handoff to the property manager or the sales agent.”
Patrick says the communication channels the AI can work across will also expand next year.
At the moment, it works across web forms, web chat, Google Home, Google Assistant and SMS, but in 2023 WeChat, WhatsApp and Facebook will join that list.
Finally, Patrick says the ability to drive third-party relationships inside the agency, to build more revenue models, promises to be another major development in 2023.
“That’s everything from connections to home loans to financial advisors to whatever it is that you’ve got inside your agency that are ancillary revenue packages that you offer,” he says.
“We’ll be able to talk across those and facilitate that at the right time.”
