Henry Pedersen on the Campaign Data Buyers Never See

In this episode, we dig into a part of the property market that's been operating in the shadows for far too long. The opaque world of sale campaign tactics and the information asymmetry that keeps buyers guessing.

We'll be talking with Henry Pedersen, co-founder and CEO of Homer, a platform aimed to surface the data that's usually kept from buyers.

We'll explore three core tensions, what buyers can really learn from full, unedited sales campaign histories, whether patterns in selling agent behaviour genuinely illuminate the truth or risk being misinterpreted without industry context, and the bigger question of how far aggregated big data can go in accurately assessing individual properties, which are by nature hyper-specific and influenced by nuances algorithms can easily misinterpret.

miss. This conversation will challenge assumptions on all sides, including whether more data automatically means better decisions. Welcome to the elephant in the room. This is the podcast where we love to talk about the big things in property that never usually get talked about.

I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent, buyer's agent and buyer's agent mentor, co-host of Foxtel's Location, Location, Location Australia, author of Auction Ready and co-host of Your First Home Buyer Guide.

Hi, I'm Chris Bates, ex-financial planner and mortgage broker, currently ranked number three in the annual MPA Top 100 Mortgage Broker Awards. Before we get started, everything we talk about today is not personal advice, and we recommend you engage the services of a licensed and experienced professional.

Our guest today is Henry Peterson, co-founder and CEO of HOMA, a platform aimed to surface the data that's usually kept from buyers.

Coming from a data and growth background rather than real estate, Henry brings an external lens useful for interrogating fresh ideas, but also worth pressure testing against how the property market actually behaves on the ground. We are very happy to be chatting with you today, Henry. Thank you so much for joining us.

Hi, Henry. Thanks for coming on. I found an article just on the weekend that you were quoting around price guides and underquoting is such a topical issue for years and years. But what got you to start Homer in the first place? And how's it going, I guess?

Yeah, I was lucky enough to join with the original founders of Homer earlier this year. And I guess it's always a bit of a personal story of how you come into these things. So trying to buy a house in 2021, probably the wrong time.

The worst time to buy anywhere in Australia, actually. Yeah.

So it was a bit of a personal story then. And then one thing led to another. I bought a house, clearly. So it wasn't exactly the best time to go and start something. So I went and joined an automotive vehicle aggregator.

So they go and pull all the data on basically every vehicle that's for sale across the country, help them scale, obviously, domestically and then into four other markets. Most recently, the UK came back with a young family needing to stay put a little bit in Australia.

So I joined the team at OMA and kind of taken them on the next phase.

Okay, so Home is a platform that is designed to give buyers more visibility. For example, you've got campaign history data. So I know in some of the subscriptions that I pay for, I can see the history of how many times a property has been advertised for sale.

So you see failed campaigns, you see that, you know, price guides, if they were published, you get access to all of that.

But as a typical buyer, if you're looking, say, on the portals, the green one or the red one, domain or realestate.com.au, you will see the last time it sold, but you're not getting access to, well, have they tried to sell it a few times over the last few years?

Or was it on the market for three months before it sold last time? I guess, what led you to include that? And why do you think that's valuable for buyers? And I guess, what proportion of properties would have some intel in that regard that is being hidden?

I'd suggest every property currently has hidden data.

So, if you, for example, change your brief or you get a brief, Veronica, for a new customer and you've not been searching for that particular type of property, if you are an everyday person, you would just go on the platform and say, okay, there's 32 properties that match the search.

You won't know, for example, that five of them have had failed auction campaigns. You won't know that a bunch of them have been listed for over 60 days, 70 days, 80 days. You've got no insight.

You're kind of just that wood duck they used to refer to and sales that have just come in unwittingly. So, I think that's one of the key differences that we're trying to- For a fresh buyer coming in.

So, someone who's not sort of, you know, tried and true and been pounding the pavement in their market for three months or six months or whatever. So, this is for someone coming fresh off the boat, so to speak. Yeah.

Fresh off the boat, but when I was buying a house with my wife, like we kept the spreadsheet going of all the campaigns because like otherwise, you know, property experts to one side, like you can't keep track, but you're trying to memorize data points based on photos that you looked at or you're doing what we did was scroll down a kind of spreadsheet of every property we were interested in.

to keep that kind of campaign history for ourselves. And that's obviously just not like that scalable. So, we ended up starting the spreadsheet of 12 odd columns worth of data.

And then by the end of it, like it would just be a URL kind of in each row and our feedback to each other on the property.

And being honest, mostly born out of frustration from my wife about me just texting her the same property she'd already sent me and all the rest of it. But yeah, so no, we're just trying to do our best, obviously, to surface that current campaign history of a property.

So, no one kind of is hoodwinked based on lack of experience with that current campaign. Then to your point, giving the historic data on previous campaign history, be it Rentals or obviously for sale.

So, it's obviously if someone's telling you that their rent appraisal on a property is $700 a month, but it took them 40 days to rent it at $600 last year, there's a good chance that price is not that substantiated. So, there's the types of things that we like to surface to Bart.

So do you find that the best test case, because that's not new, right? You've been going for a few years. I mean, do you find that the best sort of test case is really that listing sort of data, which you can definitely get through other ways.

And it's really hard to find the price guide on properties as well.

And do you find that that just gives buyers a leg up because obviously they've chased the wrong rabbits, they rock up at open homes and it was never priced at the right point, or they think this market property is really hot and it's actually been on the market for a long time.

And are they the main test case she's trying to solve? So-

One of my mentors once referred to it as like spearing the dead. So, we published some data in the City Morning Herald, which is looking back at last year worth of, you know, guide prices or sale prices.

And you can look at it and go, okay, well, this agent had a median under quote rate for the transaction that we observed at 18%, right? And then Veronica-

I've heard some of your podcasts and videos on underquoting clearly and you referenced the fact that they've got a range. They might only advertise the bottom of the range. So, is it 18% or is it 8% if you take the top or whatever it is?

But ultimately, we are currently building a product which will service buyers to give them that. Okay, well, they're saying one, looking at the last 50 transactions that they've sold, we've got data on, it was 18%, 17%, 5%. So, there are obviously some accurate agents out there.

And that's what some of the data that we previously shared with the ABC articulated was, you know, there's some states like Tasmania, for example, where 10% of agents down there are within 3% of guide for their sold price. So it's not horses for courses, clearly kind of market.

There's different areas that are more prolific than others, but we are building a product, yes, that will help guide buyers as to the historic performance of agents.

Is there issues here that the portals, are they friends with you? The agents friends with you? Like, you know, sometimes you're showing information that they're not wanting to sort of openly share. I guess the portals have got a bit of a dominating factor, right?

The two big ones and you sort of getting along.

We don't compete with portals or agents. We're not a listing platform. We're not trying to step into that place at all. We don't have the property license, so we never even go near that kind of thing.

In terms of whose friend or not friend are we, we're really focused on accessing data and making it available to the public, be it the seller, the vendor, obviously, the real estate agent, or the buyer's agent, broker, obviously, if you're interested in taking a look.

But ultimately, we're not really in a game of deciding what data to show and not show, and I think that's unfortunately the position That platforms like the marketplace, as you mentioned, they're in a structure where they're obviously vendor paid marketing via an agent.

So what they're going to disclose on the campaign is always going to be limited to reduce that exposure for the vendors. Some of those data points that they may or may not be willing to share.

It's interesting around the quoting, because in 2021, coincidentally, I started tracking guide price versus sale price for all the agents in our area, thinking that I was going to be able to see these patterns.

Instead, what I realized is how unreliable that is if you're trying to get a single number out of any of it. If you sort of did a traffic light system, for example, in bans, you go, well, this agent is a serial underquoter. This one's a serial. Some of them even are overquoters.

And this one is consistently within the ban for argument's sake. That will be much more useful. So a bit of free product advice, I guess, here.

Because what I was observing, even though we know, because we're local specialists in our area, we know the agents, we know the ones that are more prone to underquoting versus overquoting versus accurately quoting. But the numbers didn't bear that out.

And the reason the numbers didn't bear that out, so they bear out an indicator, but you couldn't rely on a number for two reasons why this is an issue. One is because they're huge variants in terms of the actual quality of the property. Some are just going to be more competitive than others.

And so therefore, that will just blow out that range, that number. But secondly, the danger is if you put a number on there is that buyers will just use the number. They'll use that median number and they'll multiply the guide by that index.

And that is just as bad as if they just add 10% or 20%. You know what I mean? It's just as unreliable. So that's a danger, I guess, for buyers. But I think if you had a traffic light system, it'd be much more useful.

Also, the Office of Fair Trading might be interested in that too because in New South Wales in particular and Victoria, also Consumer Affairs, both had press releases in the last two weeks in terms of new initiatives to crack down on underquoting. So our regulators are certainly interested in this.

Have you checked out the auctions app, which that didn't survive? I don't know if there's another iteration of that coming through, but have you looked at that as a comparison?

So the first one is on the travel light system. Completely agree. We will be providing both. But ultimately, we need to service the actual data. We can't just tar an agent with bad price guide accuracy, red or green for good. We'll need to evidence the statistic that represents that.

Although you are correct that some people will take whatever percentage or number that you give them and just add that on. There's also like a requirement for us, from my perspective at least, to be open and transparent about what is making someone good, fair or bad, right?

So, yes, we'll be surfacing like a percentage regardless with a kind of indicator and then underneath that will be all of the properties that have made that value up, right?

So, we will give the consumer or anyone who accesses the portal clearly the ability to look through, okay, well, this was their most similar property to mine. What was the difference on that?

And as well, we will be providing buyers and any platform users the ability to give us feedback on that property, for example, to say, actually, the guide price, I think, was this. And then we'll obviously go to the review process of that, which we're setting up at the moment.

The problem also, just to throw another spanner in the works, is that the guide often gets revised throughout a campaign. We have a provision there to track it, you know, have a timeline for...

So, we have a first and last is what we're working with. You're obviously more aware than me, some agents never change their guard price through a campaign. Some of them are very active. So, we do give a first and last. I'm thinking about surfacing something like a timeline of, you know,

Say the sole price is 100% and the kind of build up to get there and if there are those changes on average. But I think that as well would be fairly overwhelming.

So, yeah, we're trying to strike that balance of providing indicators, the statistics behind it and the properties beneath that to make sure that we're trying to be as fair as we can.

I think your second point from my memory was fair trading and I'm blanking on the name of Victoria down here, but have we consumer affairs? I think consumer affairs clearly are fairly active at the moment with what they're proposed regarding the reserve prices, et cetera.

My assumption is they wouldn't be pursuing a program like us whilst that change is underway, but we'll see. And yes, I've reached out to them. So we'll see what happens then.

I've just on a personal level, I've been using this app and it's so easy. I mean, this is not a sales pitch, by the way. We never get paid anyone to come on this podcast ever, but it's extremely easy to download.

And it's just so in the listings, which was always a pain in the ass to go on a listing. You type it in RP data, then you'd have to go and look at all the data. You know what I mean? And it's just so easy to use on a portal.

And how has the uptake been on this? Because You know, it's obviously the free versions, obviously really easy to sort of install. Like where are the people most getting the value out of your tool and where you're actually starting to charge people?

So we're at 40,000 installs since inception. So we kind of skipped through that little part at the start. So we were originally founded by one of the heads of engineering at Canva who built us as like a passion project. under the name Koala Data.

So right now, across the country, we've got about 16,000-odd weekly active users. Changes week on week, but we've got a lot of users out there that have found us through forums, Reddit, wherever it's come to their attention. We've started commercializing the product only recently, in the last couple of months, really.

So we're moving into a paid environment, which will be accessing premium data sets, those types of things. But that's, yeah, that's a little while off.

And is it going to go backwards in terms of, you know, I'm looking at old sold listings, et cetera. I'm not sure how good this data is, but are you going to be able to get all the data on old listings and all the old postcards?

And, you know, so whenever any property anyone wants to look at that's sold now or in the past can see experience the seller went through?

So, yes, we will have price guides for that kind of length of time. But yeah, it just depends on the coverage. Like we were a hobbyist business for a period there so that we don't have the full history that I like to have.

But we do have the vast majority of the last five years with potato.

So, one of your features in there is a pricing tool. Now, there's lots of pricing tools out there and most of them are shockingly off. You know, you're pitching it as, look, you need this because this is going to help you actually, you know, make an offer with more confidence. Yeah.

How does it work? Because I've spoken to people who have designed AVMs. There's real problems with trying to get accuracy with these automated pricing tools. What's your secret sauce in this one?

We haven't actually made that publicly available yet, but we are working on it. The biggest difference, we won't be pricing properties that aren't actually listed, so it won't be off-market. properties that will be valued.

One of the really strong indicators for a price following up is the price guide, which you would assume to be incorrect.

But the comment you were making earlier around tracking agents, funnily enough there, if you add them as a feature to a model and you've got all the data on how they've guided properties in the past, what's called mean average percentage error reduces significantly.

So yeah, we'll be surfacing AVM at some point down the track. And one of the key differences will be using that price guide as it is now, because that is a very good indicator. And that's what I observed as well. So I was in the West, in Sydney.

You'd have some of them that you would put 200 grand on because in my price bracket, not every property, but the price bracket I was looking at, you put 200 on one, you put 50 on another, and you put 150 on the other.

And then thankfully, I was lucky enough to buy a property from the out-of-area agent pretty much at the guide. But actually, fairly quoted it right. It was one of those, which was a good pickup.

And that's one of the things that we'll also be disclosing to buyers is the level of experience that the particular agent who's selling a property has in that area.

Yeah, that's an interesting one. You know, you've got a graphic there. So, obviously, so I've only looked on the website. I haven't tried the app. And there's a graphic there with a dollar per square metre. I'm guessing that's not going to be your main metric? That's just for the graphic?

Yes. The main metrics that we service is just the current active guide price versus... The user also will track their proposed price of the property so they can have a log. So, when you get a chance, obviously, give us a go.

But basically, we are creating a really easy logging system for you to navigate that whole purchasing journey. So, you can go back, for example, two months down the track and go, okay, well, it probably was guiding at this. It sold at that. I thought it was here.

Like, am I completely out of the money, right? Do I have a shot in this particular market or is my expectations unreasonable? And that's the kind of thing that we're trying to service to buyers as much as possible.

Not that the agents are anything wrong with the markets in any way, out of form, but realistically, are they actually a fit for that property? Can they actually sit with those other buyers and compete at that level? Or do they need to change their approach?

I mean, that's really valuable because I've got a buyer's agency. I've been going for 17 years in this business. The amount of times that we get people coming to us and their pain point is that they just can't get what they want for their money, which is a very common pain point.

But a lot of people keep trying in the vain hope that they just haven't You've just got to wait until the right one comes up. But actually what they're doing is the longer they wait, the more they're getting priced out of the market.

They just haven't recognized that there is that gap between what's advertised and what sells. It's almost like they don't track what sells. It's just they just track what's advertised and then, oh, that went out of my budget. But they don't sort of work out that's because it never was in your budget.

So I think anything that does encourage the buyer to take responsibility for their end as well is really valuable because a lot of people, they just blame the agent because The agents underquote because buyers believe them and then they compete for properties that are underquoted. That's basically why they underquote.

And as you picked up a property that was accidentally accurately quoted, what, you were the only buyer or you found it easier to buy?

No, there were other bidders. It was an incredibly competitive market. So, no, we definitely weren't the only bidders, but it was definitely less than it would have been on a Saturday. And if the property was marketed, probably at the comparative point that it should have been.

Yeah. And so, therein lies the problem, doesn't it? As a vendor, you actually want your agent to underquote, don't you?

Yes. At the moment, it's a business decision, right? For the real estate agent. And that's the unfortunate reality. Like for the real estate agents that I've spoken to, I guess on both sides of the fence, they're kind of left without a choice almost, right?

Because if they don't position a property to a vendor in the first place a certain way, then they won't get the gig.

right and then once they've got the gig if they don't position probably a certain way people will not see it because the filters you know sit outside of it or ignore it because they think somehow there's extra value in it because yeah it takes you two to three to four months to get that understanding where the values are if you're paying attention and if you're like we were trying to track everything in the spreadsheet but if you're yeah just coming to the market etc and you see something advertised correctly then you're quite unlikely given all the noise around

underquoting to actually view the property.

And I think that's one of the things that we're just trying to really resolve is like level that playing field because if everyone understands that there is such a thing as the range and then clearly the difference between the range and the actual result on average or median results for the agent, then there will be that leveling of transparency where real estate agents can go to vendors at the expectations, go to buyers at the expectations, or if you kind of hopefully bring it closer to a couple of percent, not 10 plus.

How's it going to work potentially with off-markets and, you know, how are we getting access to some of that data? And obviously, are we linking into the portals? Is there any plans to sort of move into that space?

So, it's user-driven for off-markets. So, when you download our app, you can navigate sole listings or rental listings, that kind of stuff, and pull in the data. So, you can say, okay, well, here's an off-market that I've been sent because usually it's WhatsApp or some other mechanism, right? Yeah.

you sent the off market you then can search the address obviously in our platform we'll add all the data that we know so if it was sold three years ago we'll bring in the sold data from three years ago the pre-populated but all things like the guide price the current agent like that that's on you to fill in so what we're trying to do is create like a single view of search because to your point like domain and rea you can't manage off market searches with on market search yeah it's obviously not really designed for that whereas whether you edit any data because

it's your platform. So, if you want to change the guide price, you change the guide price. And obviously, we don't rely on any of the data that you insert into the system, but it just means that you can stay in control.

And what about Queensland?

Queensland's interesting.

If anyone doesn't know, it's against the law for an agent to give a price guide in Queensland. So, That is one of the strangest responses to underquoting ever. Let's just not give buyers any guidance whatsoever. But they are running blind.

I mean, how do you increase transparency in a market where it's legislated not to be transparent?

Yeah, I'm assuming you read the article. I think one case of underquoting has been recorded this year, which is obviously astonishing for all types of different reasons. So, interestingly, every single property in Queensland that's for auction that gets listed on one of the major platforms has to actually have a price.

In the back end, because it's got to come up in searches. Correct, yeah.

And obviously, the buyers up there are reliant on using those search criteria to try and figure out where the property is positioned. So, I think to answer your question more succinctly, at the very least, we have the range in which the property appears in search. So, we have that.

And then in some cases, we'll also have the actual figure that the agent has plugged in to one of our systems, which, yeah. It's interesting.

The agents are currently entering price guides on properties that are for auction because any other explanation for the price that they have inserted into those platforms to control that price search has to be construed as a price guide. There's no other way of phrasing it.

So, yeah, my view is currently the platforms are requesting agents skirt that regulation, let's call it. And it'll be interesting to see over time what happens in Queensland because I don't think anyone's particularly happy with it except for probably the regulator for not getting the complaints.

Yeah. Weirdly enough, the odd agent likes it, but people I speak to, both buyers and sellers and selling agents, majority really do not like it.

I mean, be that as it may, is that really what you perceive to be the main pain point when you're buying, the main frustration, the fact that agents would consistently underquote and buyers will get caught out until they get wise?

Was that the main pain point or are there other pain points which you're building into this system?

No, it's more around time. So, it's not necessarily just the under-quoting, under-positioning, whatever you want to call it. That's kind of semi-right for the moment in Sydney.

It's more just the amount of time and effort it goes into like trying to understand the value of property clearly and understand where you should trust, obviously, what is provided to you. It's then all the time and effort of going around to those places.

You can't really arrive at a valuation that well in terms of knowing the number you want to pay for a property unless you've seen it or been to it or maybe have an expert advise you. And then it's all the time and effort of like...

you know, my personal journey, my search of us building, maintaining that kind of shared spreadsheet.

Understanding what we're up to, all the comments back and forth, making sure that, you know, if we've got a contract in review with the conveyancer that we're chasing them up so that we're in a position to make an offer.

We get that annoying text on Thursday saying best offer by 5 p.m. And those are the types of things that like there's patterns like in everything. You will know your local agents, which ones will try and push you the week before an auction for an offer, which ones won't.

But for a buyer, like you find that out, you know, trial by fire, right? You're in the market, you're trying your best, you're kind of getting prepared for Saturday, your whole Thursday gets thrown in a spin because all of a sudden that's your focus, you get the text.

But none of that is generally not new, right? Like you'll have a new agent every now and then we'll be trialing different tactics and strategies.

But I don't think it's particularly fair on consumers kind of go into the market, be spending that much money, be that stressed and everything else and be put through the ringer like that. I'm on a personal mission to help more people make better property decisions.

You know, most people don't realise that they can cost themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars over the medium to long term when they make property decisions without all of the information that they need.

And what I do is help people with tricky real estate problems, which often masquerade as simple questions like, should I sell my investment property because the interest repayments are hurting? Or should I buy before I sell? Or the other way around.

You can connect with me and access all of the tools that I've created to help you make better property decisions at veronicamorgan.com.au. And there you will find resources for first home buyers, details about my buyer's agent mentoring program.

You can connect with my Sydney based property management and buyer's agency teams, Australia wide vendor advocacy, or ask me for introduction to the small group of buyer's agents that I would personally recommend across the country. That's veronicamorgan.com.au.

If you're considering a property move such as buying your first home, upgrading, renovating or investing, the team here at Alcove would love to help you think through your decision and get the finance right. Please go to alcove.com.au to reach out.

This is interesting because like in my business, we have eight different avatars for different types of agents. And those avatars, you know, we look at how they're motivated, the conversations they have with their owners, the sort of tactics that they engage with buyers, you know, their processes around offers, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's built up over many years experience. And so obviously we, as part of our negotiation strategy, we always have a strategy is to identify the type of agent we're dealing with so we can develop an appropriate strategy.

So what I'm guessing from what you're saying is that you're wanting to start picking up those patterns of behavior and then reflecting them into the platform. Is that what you're proposing to do? And that requires, I guess, individual users to log in. What is it?

Like, is that what you're proposing to try to put the spotlight onto the methodology engaged by different agents?

Yeah. So, I'm not exactly sure of the eight avatars that you've built internally, but- You wouldn't know them because they're proprietary to me, but you know. Happy for you to share them at any point.

So, we're looking at the data on agents such as their last X transactions, how many of them were sold prior to auction, how many of them went to auction and sold there, how many of them passed in, how many of them got withdrawn at the end because obviously didn't get the result, how many of them sold private tree after auction,

How many of them were just private tree strategy in the first place, right? So, I guess at the very front, you can understand, okay, what's the likely outcome of this campaign? And does this campaign match the agent, right?

So, if 95% of their properties get advertised initially as an auction, this is one of the 5% that isn't. Why? We're not going to obviously give them an answer as to why. We won't know that data, but we'll at least be able to help them spot the outlines.

But then also, you know, there's certain agents that have a very strong reputation for selling prior to auction. So, at least disclosing that to them. So, again, they can be prepared the week, day, whatever it is before.

And there's other activities, obviously, there's the how often or frequently do they change the price guide. You assume in Sydney lines, obviously, that's price guide upright, but there are a few go-yos out there. People who kind of start here, come down a couple of days before the auction, then come back up.

And even though some of them will think that that's Not that visible it is. So, there's some agents I know out there that are trying to push people into auctions a couple of days before thinking maybe we'll see what happens.

But yeah, so I think there's some key data points that we can track to build a picture of an agent. Whether or not I'd be putting them into avatars is probably the next step. Maybe we'll chat about that later. But ultimately, we're just disclosing some of those key data points.

What is their typical quote to sale price accuracy? What is their typical sales strategy? Does this property fit that? Does it fit a normal area of sales? Is it beneath them, right? So, we're all ego people at some point.

Is this property a $1 million studio and they're normally selling five, six plus million dollar properties and how likely are they to turn up, obviously, to all the open homes or that kind of stuff? Let's try and build a picture of, I guess, your competition because as a buyer, I'm That's it.

Like other buyers argue competition, yeah, but like you need to know the opposite number.

I've been sort of just playing around with it while we're chatting here and just thinking like through use cases and there's a property near me that I thought I'll just check what's going on with this property because it's had multiple agents. It's been on the market for like three months.

I'll be interesting to see. And, you know, if you just rocked up in the suburb and just didn't know, it presents well, this property. It's not on a bad street. It's nothing majorly wrong with it, but it's been sitting there for a while and bang, it's It's been on for 76 days.

Obviously, you jump online, you're not going to know that. I'm not going to say the address of the property. It started with a price guide of 4 mil, then it dropped to 3.5, then it went up to 3.75, then it went 3.25, then it went 3.35. It's had multiple auction extensions.

It's now down to 3.1. And like how much this property is having a, it's switched agents, you know what I mean? So there's so much just in someone looking at this going, they're really struggling to sell this property and they're massively overpriced it.

That's usually the issue though. Is there something really wrong with the property or something really wrong with the vendor?

It's such great insight to share that, to have that as a buyer. How you use that information, that's a different skill, right? But if you did rock up in the suburb and you've looked at and you saw that sign or you missed it with you, you decided to switch suburbs.

A lot of buyers are switching suburbs, right? One minute they're looking here and then they have to pivot and they take their thought process from that suburb to this suburb and And I think, you know, tracking it all in some type of portal is obviously even better, right?

Because it's very easily you just get overwhelmed. Do you see this moving away from sort of the individual though to the buyer's agents as your market and, you know, basically allowing them to actually also track the market better?

Well, yeah, at the moment we're a free product so everyone can use us from buyers agents to mortgage brokers, selling agents. So, yeah, I think to answer your question, yes, like we are moving into more professional product.

So, which is used for buyers agents, for example, to manage that shortlisting process kind of end to end from...

Sourcing the properties to navigating with the buyer, their comments, feedback, ranking preferences, uploading files to kind of reduce the WhatsApp chaos that kind of can ensue in some businesses or yeah, basically just make a more transparent process for everyone. And then as well for mortgage brokers, like ultimately...

You can probably answer this question like you send someone out with a pre-approval and how long does it take for them to actually figure out the market is not what they thought it was. You might forewarn them and say like, I'll send you evaluation reports.

Don't so trust them fully, but like it'll give you a better picture. But there is that like, you know, four to six to eight week period where a buyer goes into the market pre-approved and just gets their head kicked in.

But yeah, so I think we'll be on the side of the buyer for a while and focused on transparency there. And then ultimately the same issues persist on the vendor side.

So we do a lot of vendor advisory in my business and you're absolutely right that when you call an agent to pitch for your business, well, they're in sales mode.

You're often asking them really important questions that you're going to base your decisions on, not just on whether you choose that agent or not, but whether you decide to sell now, what your price expectations are for the property, how you market that property, how you present that property, all of these things.

Really, really important things to consider. Should I even sell it at all? And people ask sales agents these questions, but it's the wrong time to get advice from a sales agent because they're pitching for your business. They're not in advice mode, they're in sale mode.

Then you choose your agent, you sign them up. In New South Wales, you get a 48-hour... cooling off period, but they don't do anything until that period's expired. And then Bob's your uncle, then you start to find out whether or not you chose the right agent.

So there's a lot of missing information that is really essential to make good decisions, you know, decisions that you make today that future you will be happy about, which is one of the reasons we do offer our vendor advisory service and why it's

such a great service and really helps people actually make good decisions at that outset that give them the better outcome. So the agents in the middle, they're struggling to be transparent. They'll be transparent as much as the law makes them. You know, they're struggling to be transparent with owners because owners...

actually don't really want an honest agent. They want somebody who's going to flatter them. Buyers don't really want an honest agent, which is why they tend not to compete for properties that are accurately quoted because they just don't trust them. You know what I mean?

So there's all this distrust, generally speaking, in the marketplace and no one really knows what to do with the information they're given. And they also know that there's a lot that they're not given. So you're sort of pitching this idea of transparency, but the next layer of that is

How does the buyer know what to do with it or how does the vendor know what to do with the information once they've got it?

So, we've got to be careful not to err on the side of advice. So, we are presenting data and insights that buyers, buyer's agents, whoever it is, can form an opinion off of and use to make a judgment.

But ultimately, you know, us telling someone that this is the price that you should pay for a property, et cetera, is just not our job. Well, I do believe though by disclosing this data fairly and accurately, there will be a levelling. will it resolve every issue on the market? Clearly not.

But if every single buyer knew, you know, the historic accuracy of an agent, if they knew, obviously, to your point before, Chris, around the historic sales in an area, if someone was just to tell them when they're putting their search criteria, like, it's not going to happen. Like,

There are perverse incentives out there, right? Which kind of gear those buyers into taking that extra time they don't need to take to looking at properties that they shouldn't be looking at.

When realistically, if they were told you put in maximum 1.5 million two-bedroom terrace, 5Ks from the city, zero results in the last, you know, 12 months have sold there. And yet actively, there's like eight of them. That should tell the story.

But obviously, none of the platforms are going to go and do that, you know. their own goodwill because ultimately, they're trying to get eyeballs on properties and people through doors for agents, right? So, I think there's a lot that can be done. Will it solve all the problems? No.

Will some people require further advice even though we give them data 100%? I'm not expecting every single user of our platform to then be able to go and navigate the property only by themselves. There will be buyers that come on our platform, have the same struggles and issues they're having now.

hopefully reduced a little bit, but then still need to go and get professional help after five, six months because a computer can't tell them that they're unrealistic, that a human might have to.

Yeah. And look, I've noticed in this space of late, there's a lot of people trying to come up with an AI buyer's agent.

You know, there's a lot of very transactional desk-based buyers agents out there that personally, I think what they do is ripe for the picking, you know, AI or machine learning could replace them. But you've got a note on there on your website that there'd be an AI buyers agent support.

So I'm actually curious to know what that would look like and what AI are you using?

So, that's something that we're building. So, it's not released. It's more of a support for a buyer's agent or obviously a buyer of like regular kind of questions.

So, if you were to use our platform, for example, for a customer search and your customer would ask, are all these properties within X school catchment, right?

Then we would go because we've got the catchments for the public schools, would go and say, yeah, these six are and that's school catchment, that seventh one isn't. We've got to be really careful, obviously, of what responses it can give that have to be factual based.

If it asks them which property is the best value, then we'd have to suggest the rubric by which we provide that. So, it would be maybe on that price per square meter that you kind of were hinting at before.

But they're the types of things that we need to build into the LLM framework. in the training that we'll do to make sure that we have a really strict set of responses that we'll use. But things like which one is the fastest commute? Like we'll get access to Google Maps APIs.

We can call it any times, but cool. Well, this is your workplace. This is your travel time. Or I could ask, you can upload all the photos of your house and we could tell you whether or not all your furniture is going to fit, which piece of furniture you'll have to replace.

Those types of things, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff that we can assist on. But you'll note before on the desktop, buyer's agents kind of as a service model. There is a lot of legwork that could be done, obviously, through technology in that space.

But one of the key things that most of them seem to offer is that negotiation, speaking to the agent at the end, almost negotiating with the buyer. That whole human piece, I think, is a long way down the track for it, Ron.

Have you got a property Dumbo for us, Henry? I mean, it's just a humorous way to sort of wrap us up. Just a story that you could share with us.

Yeah. So if the market's going up and it's never been higher, probably don't know. That was my journey. We bought obviously at the peak and kind of sat there and I think one of the Almost Property Dumbo as we did was we were looking at clearly selling after that.

We moved to Melbourne, like all those like life things happen. You kind of like keep paying a mortgage for a place that we probably aren't going to move back into. So, an almost Property Dumbo was, yeah, selling our property in Sydney, which thankfully we didn't. Property Dumbo...

that's actually happened was didn't get a building and pest. The issue there was it's an 1880s kind of terrace. So, structurally, it's brick. It's not going to fall over. We just had some water issues kind of six months down the track.

But that was also, if you recall, one of the wettest period in Sydney ever. Everything was moldy in the whole house regardless, I think, whether or not you had water ingress. But yeah, I definitely recommend people get building and pests.

It's just kind of hard to get the seventh one after missing out on a whole bunch of properties and outlaying all that cash for no benefit.

I'm going to call that your Dumbo because that sunk cost. You know, like you actually bought one, you bought what was seven building and pest properties you didn't buy and then the one you did buy, you didn't get any report done, which is sort of interesting.

It's a common mistake people make because they think the risk is in paying for the building and pest inspection. I don't think the risk is buying the property without the building and pest. It's interesting though, it was a hot market. Do you mind me asking what month you bought in?

May.

Yeah. So, it was almost at its hottest. You know, I remember March that year, I track every single month of every single year that I've been buying property. March that year, the Sydney property market went up 4%.

I think the Sydney property market went up 4% last year just to give it in context. In one month, you get sort of a normal year's growth and it was nuts. So, that was March. You would have been missing out on properties at in March if you bought in May.

It just would have been so painful. I know that's when I started doing monthly videos for clients because I had to reinforce to them that we persist. We're not going to just overpay and throw the kitchen sink at everything. You will have to overpay.

You're going to have to pay a premium in these conditions. We've got to be very careful about what we overpay on and what that margin is. So there's a lot of really careful decision-making needs to go in when you're buying a setup to hot markets.

So congratulations for weathering that storm and not selling it. afterwards.

Thank you. It was a game of being the biggest idiot for a week, right? That was that time. It was, you would look like an idiot for a week because you paid more than any money that's ever been spent on a two bedroom place in Alexandria.

And then the next week you'd look like a hero. Unfortunately for me, that stopped after about three or four weeks. But anyway.

Henry, thanks so much for joining us. You've created or you're involved in an app, I should say, which is born out of a pain point, your personal pain point. It's very common in the PropTech space. That's what leads people to create these solutions.

So bringing that experience in is obviously irrelevant because it is painful as a buyer. And it would be very interesting to see the transparency that you can bring to this. I'll be watching with interest because some of the data points you're talking about are things that people aren't talking about.

Whether that's useful or not will be yet to be seen, but I'd certainly be watching with interest. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Thank you both. Thanks so much, Henry. If you have a question that you'd like us to answer in an upcoming Q&A episode, you can send us a voicemail or written question via the website, theelephantintheroom.com.au, or you can email us directly at questions at theelephantintheroom.com.au.

If you like what you're hearing, please share this episode with others you feel would benefit. And while you're at it, why not leave us an iTunes review? Five stars would be great.

I know that sounds a bit cringy, but we have it on good authority that every review helps make it easier for other people to find out about us and hear what our amazing guests have to say.