A new white-labelled digital offer management solution for the real estate industry was released yesterday, allowing agents to generate legally binding offers directly from their own website and manage the process between buyer and vendors.
Propps is the latest venture to spin out of ANZi – ANZ Bank’s innovation division – and CEO and founder Daniel Bignold said it was intended to make the process of negotiation easier and more efficient.
The tech solution allows agents to install a “Make an Offer” button on their listings for a property – or even into a marketing email for an off-market property – and accept legally binding offers for that property.
Propps is part of a $200 million investment from ANZi and the latest in a string of proptech business investments by ANZi that includes Valiant, UK-based Bud, mortgage broker Lendi, Data Republic, DiviPay, Slyp, Airwallex, Aider and Cashrewards.
“The spin-out of Propps from the ANZi Ventures incubator program was part of the bank’s bid to help people own, buy and sell homes”, ANZi managing director Ron Spector said.
“We’re looking to build, buy or partner with companies that are offering services that make processes better, cheaper and faster.”
Mr Bignold said he was initially engaged through ANZi in late 2019 to take up a position as an entrepreneur in residence.
“My remit was essentially all about doing an in-depth market scan into proptech emerging technologies and opportunities that may arise in terms of possible existing businesses that we could potentially acquire or invest in, or gaps in the market where we feel that we could potentially build a solution and plug it into the market,” Mr Bignold told Elite Agent.
“After doing that market scan inquiry and quantitative research analysis, we identified that the digital offer space was an area that we felt was quite underserved.”
He said agents constantly received offers from various buyers, some verbal, others face-to-face, or by phone or email.
“Some are on contracts, others aren’t, some are binding and some aren’t.
“The Propps solution helps the agent manage that process and standardise the way in which offers are submitted, for the agent to have clear conversations with the vendor and compare offers, apples to apples.”
Mr Bignold said the reasoning behind developing Propps as a white-labelled product was to ensure agents were not lumbered with yet another standalone app they had to work into their day-to-day operations.
“We had feedback from agents during the pilot phase, where they just said ‘look, we’d love some help to standardise that whole offer management process but we don’t want another app’,” he said.
“They’ve obviously got apps for CRM, they’ve got apps for open homes and they’re juggling various apps. So what we did was actually build a solution that integrates into the agent’s website.
“Essentially it just gives a few lines of code to the web developer, and they can just embed that into the agent’s website and what that does is then activates that ‘Make an Offer’ button on the website.
“The agent can then essentially direct their buyers to their own website to that particular listing and then make an offer by clicking on that ‘Make an Offer’ button, and then we help take them and guide them through that process of making an offer.”
Woodards Camberwell agent Nathan McNamara was part of the pilot and said he found Propps to be a user-friendly experience for agents and prospective buyers alike.
“The service was good in helping buyers who were new to the process or intimidated at the thought of making an offer, but did not remove the need for person-to-person contact,” Mr McNamara said.
“It got that process started, which makes it easier and takes a bit of stress out of it. It’s a good, secure way to make a legally binding offer.”
After successfully completing the pilot phase, which included input from select agents across the country, Mr Bignold said this week’s soft launch was “all about opening up to scale” to get a higher level of engagement.
Although he said the agent’s experience was “at the centre of everything we do”, Mr Bignold was quick to add that the ability to seamlessly integrate into existing sites and apps was imperative, to ensure buyers, sellers and agents alike were not required to learn any new behaviours in order to effectively use Propps’ features.
“That’s where the solution really started to thrive and really started to get the interest from the agencies, because it was just so easy to implement and so easy to use and integrate into their current workflows,” he said.
“And that’s why everything we build from this point forward will absolutely adhere to that same principle.”
Propps offers a free and a paid version, which gives more ability to customise the service and more access to data. For more information, visit propps.com
