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Property Management Made Simple with Cem Savas and Andy Belton

12.5.21

The Propcast: Property Management made simple with Cem Savas and Andy Belton

In this episode The Propcast talks to Cem Savas from Plentific and Andy Belton from Notting Hill Genesisabout how property management can be made simple.

Click here to listen to this episode and check out this clip of our chat below!

The Propcast by Louisa Dickins, Co-Founder of LMREthe leading Global PropTech recruiter, is brought to you in partnership with CREtech and ReimTech. This show will focus on connecting the PropTechs, real estate funds and VC’s globally…and get everyone talking about innovation of the build to rent environment.

About Guests

Cem Savas

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cem-savas-3686673/?originalSubdomain=uk

Cem Savas is the co-founder of Plentific, an award winning digital platform for property management. This platform empowers housing providers to streamline operations and enhance resident experience, unlocking operational savings throughout and competing work order management solutions and work to get the marketplace better trade professionals. Plentific is now in six countries, and has over 165 people. Prior to this Cem worked for some of the world’s best known banking institutions but always maintained a keen interest in property, conceiving the idea for Plentific with co founder and CTO Emre Kazan, as the pair believed property management could and should be better – for local trades specialists, property managers and tenants.

Andy Belton

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-belton-0925a2/

Andy Belton is Chief Operating Officer (COO) and a member of the Executive Board for Notting Hill Genesis. Notting Hill Genesis is one of the largest housing associations in London and the South East, owning and managing more than 66,000 homes and around 2,000 staff. NHG provide homes across a range of tenures and are committed to continuing to deliver housing that is affordable to all. With roots reaching back to the 1960s, their legacy organisations were established by local people who shared a similar vision – to house west London’s working poor, providing them a home from which to build themselves and their families a secure future. In 2017 Andy lead a digital transformation programme of ‘automation and efficiency’ to support our corporate strategy, called the WorkWise programme will be key to delivering the Notting Hill Genesis strategic objectives to modernise and improve customer services and to operate more efficiently.

Resources Referenced

LMRE website www.lmre.co.uk

UKPA website www.ukpa.com

Plentific website www.plentific.com

Notting Hill Genesis website www.nhg.org.uk

Insights From This Episode

  • You have to be very close to your clients and understand their pain points and get their feedback, but then sometimes to disrupt and to change how things work, you also have to challenge them and bring different ideas and different concepts to them, which they might not be comfortable with Cem Savas
  • Where it falls down is not necessarily about bad repairs, it’s often about poor communication –Andy Belton on property management
  • Longer term, what is very helpful is case studies and raw data to show to clients. And the more you can show, the easier it gets – Cem Savas
  • I think we’re over a lot of the resistance now, and I think more and more people are seeing the power of technology – Andy Belton
  • On the governance side (of ESG), data is always the most important driver of making the right decisions going forward – Cem Savas
  • We’ve introduced a number of issues and initiatives to try and bring black and minority ethnic people through the organisation faster and into senior roles in the organisation – Andy Belton

Episode Transcript

Louisa

Hi everyone and welcome to the Propcast, my name is Louisa Dickins, co-founder of LMRE and board director of the UKPA, and I shall be your weekly host. Each week for 30 minutes, we will be connecting the VCs, PropTech start-ups and real estate professionals globally, and assist in bridging that famous communication gap we all love talking about. So, sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcast. Today’s show will be on simple property management and today we are joined by Cem Savas, co founder and CEO of Plentific and Andy Belton, who’s the Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO of Notting Hill Genesis. So, welcome to the show, guys.

Cem

Hey, great to be on the podcast. Thank you very much for the invite.

Andy

Always great to be on, thanks for the invite as well.

Louisa

Thanks for joining me, now let’s start off with Cem’s story. So he founded Plentific in something like 2012 and Plentific is now an award winning digital platform for property management. This platform empowers housing providers to streamline operations and enhance resident experience, unlocking operational savings throughout and competing work order management solutions and work to get the marketplace better trade professionals. Plentific is now in six countries, now that’s including the US which is a recent expansion, and has over 165 people. Before devoting his time to Plentific, Cem worked for some of the world’s best known banking institutions but always maintained a keen interest in property, conceiving the idea for Plentific with co founder and CTO Emre when undertaking property management projects.

Now together, Emre and Cem are driving Plentific’s international growth across the property management ecosystem, and are also becoming a leading voice and future PropTech. I’m really looking forward hearing a bit more about this product and further plans in a moment. But also today we are joined by Andy, who is the current CEO of Notting Hill Genesis, which if you don’t know Notting Hill Genesis for a lot of our listeners in the US and APAC, Notting Hill Genesis is one of the largest housing associations in London and the Southeast, which owns and manages more than I think it’s 66,000 homes and over 2000 staff, is that about right, Andy?

Andy

Yeah, that’s about right

Louisa

Now in February 2017, Cem stepped out of his operational brief to lead a Digital Transformation Program Automation and Efficiency to support Notting Hill’s corporate strategy. And he has a strong track record successfully leading large diverse teams in both private and public sectors. Before joining Notting Hill in 2002, he worked in the IT industry and held a number of senior management positions, including Managing Director of European shared services during his 16 year career at Unisys, and is Irish and has lived most of his life in London, and has also worked in Germany, the Netherlands and North America. And so yet again, thank you both for joining me and without further ado, why don’t we start with the questions. So, Andy why don’t you begin with the story behind Plentific, how did you get into this space and from banking and tell us a bit more about Plentific’s mission?

Cem

Yeah, thank you for the for the nice introduction. Plentific first started with basically figuring out our own pain points. Back in the day, when we managed a few properties ourselves and invested in property development, it became apparent that it was still a very manual process to provide good service. And there wasn’t really any solution out there that would connect the end to end experience for my residents to the supply chain, the contractors. And when we looked at different solutions in the market, it was legacy systems built many years ago, not very cloud based, or point solutions that didn’t really use data to its advantage to manage properties better.

And that’s how it all kicked off quite a few years ago. And looking forward now as you mentioned, we’re now over 170 people across multiple countries, have over 350,000 properties now in the management or that are used to the platform, and looking at fully digitalising the experience from a resident to the supply chain in different ways, and happy to go into more detail but ultimately it’s all about bringing the data out and showing to work clients, look what’s happening in property management is all based on looking at the right information, digitalising workstreams, improving operations that way, which ultimately leads to happier residents because it’s all about transparency. It’s all about the Amazon like feeling for residents now. And that’s what Plentific’s all about.

Louisa

Do you find a lot of people becoming more open to looking at say, technology? How is your client changing and what they want? And maybe now Andy, we can hear from you in a moment after Cem’s expanded on that.

Cem

Yeah, it’s interesting. We had a number of different types of clients over the years, and Andy is definitely one of the early adopters, and thanks to him we also been able to get into the sector much faster into the housing sector in the UK. We now have PRS clients, private rented sector clients in the UK and Germany, and so have different sector range now. But adoption of PropTech I think, is still early days a lot of focus has gone into PropTech, bigger investments are happening across different companies but it’s still very early days. We’re still fighting with a lot of legacy issues and a lot of clients are still hesitant of scaling PropTech solutions. And I think the asset class is one of the biggest in the class, it’s very old school and lots is happening. But Andy can probably attest to it, there’s still a long way to go when it comes to implementing PropTech solutions.

Louisa

How did you two first meet, Andy how did you hear about Plentific?

Andy

So I was, as you said, I stepped out of my traditional COO role in 2017 to help what was Notting Hill then before we merged with Genesis, to move the organization forward in terms of digital offer. We’d had lots of earlier attempts at putting services on the web and things like that, and it hadn’t really come to very much so. So I was involved in 2017 and we’ve begun to build our own internal platform in the cloud, we call it Workwise. And then I happened to be a trade show where Cem and Emre were presenting Plentific as a potential solution for the housing sector.

And I thought it looked really interesting and a completely different approach to anything we had in the sector. So we spoke afterwards and I think we pretty quickly agreed to do something , Cem would say it took ages! But we agreed to do proof of concepts using Notting Hill as an organization where Plentific could adapt the platform for the housing sector. And we started with a couple of 1000 properties as a test and we did that process and gradually refined that for about a year. And then after about a year, we gave access to more and more of our property portfolio to the Plentific platform. The other thing is, seeing Plentific it woke us up to this whole PropTech idea really, that organizations like us can use platforms like Plentific or other people’s solutions, and we can hook them into our own technology. And that was a real eye opener quite honestly back in 2017. We hadn’t really realized what was going on and the situation we’ve got to now is, about half the volume of our day to day repairs go through the Plentific platform.

Louisa

Oh, wow. That’s quite something. And what direct impact have you seen since rolling out across your portfolio?

Andy

Well it’s obviously in lots of ways it’s much more efficient, and it gives us much more choice around the supply chain. So the whole concept of Plentific is on the one side, it’s really a supply and demand platform, but it’s giving us access to lots of suppliers that we wouldn’t easily access in our normal world. There are a lot more choice in terms of the supply chain and then in terms of the whole process, it’s just bringing it into the process of either us or one of our residents ordering a repair now is a bit more like ordering a parcel on Amazon. And the whole process works end to end and all of the communication happens all the way through the process. People get messages and they know what’s going on.

And as much as the repair itself, that’s where these things fall down. It’s not necessarily about bad repairs, it’s often about poor communication and if we make an appointment next week, and the person forgets, and then the tradesman turns up, then the whole thing falls apart. Whereas if people are kept up to date and they’re getting text messages etc, then the process has a much better chance of working. So the headlines I guess are modern technology, big leap forward for us, and, and very much in line with the work we were trying to do with our own Workwise platform, and then access to a better supply chain. And also we’ve seen much greater efficiency, we have seen areas where we’ve both reduced the time it’s taken for repairs greatly. We’ve reduced costs, and also we’ve seen much higher satisfaction with the process.

Louisa

I live at a flat right now, and I’m trying to get a few things fixed myself and every tenant or owner is looking for efficiency and transparency and getting the job done quickly. But also, you want to be able to work with a provider that you trust, and by sounds of it Plentific has access to this pool of tradespeople that a lot of people wouldn’t know how to tap into and it just makes it quite painful. Cem maybe I can bring you in on this, you obviously started out with part of the portfolio and Andy you’ve worked together to roll it out across it. Was it that easy to do? It’s the public sector, getting people to buy into technology and change the way they’ve run this massive association, how has that been, growing that relationship in getting buyers for the business?

Cem

It’s a complex sector to operate in and the complexity comes from the procurement requirements, the public procurement requirements that are in place across Europe, not just in the UK. So the buying process is lengthy, is complicated. And for young companies, oftentimes not really on their radar when they get into a sector like this, so they have to learn how people behave in terms of buying a solution. So it took us a little bit to figure that one out at the beginning, the dynamics I think in housing associations are also slightly different than for example, the private clients. And the size of some of our clients, including Notting Hill also means that there are many different types of businesses in the group. So Housing Associations are not just doing social housing, they also develop fantastic new buildings for lease holders, they retain a free hold, some clients have care homes, some clients have student portfolios.

And so a very large organization to work with, so navigating through who makes a decision, is it the procurement team, is it the finance team, is it in Andy’s case the COO, or is it the CEO? It requires a little bit of experience, and I guess longer term, what is very helpful is case studies and raw data to show to clients (about widening client base). And I think across every country we are in now, that’s definitely the case with large clients, they just want to see data, they want to see case studies and when you go into a large enterprise sales, it takes a while. And the more you can show, the easier it gets. And we now have when we launched with Notting Hill Genesis, as Andy mentioned we had a few 1000 units, and it took us a while to grow, and we’re now getting clients on boarded that give us the entire stock right away. We recently had a council come on board say 18,000 units, there is no pilot, right? Because we can now say, look we have a number of very large clients already. You can speak to them before you sign a contract with us, but this is all based on real data we’re showing you and then it’s much easier to convince this decision makers to go ahead.

Louisa

And what about other markets as well, you expand into the US, I guess it’s about winning your first client out there and replicating what you’ve done in UK and Germany and other areas of Europe. Andy, how have you found it with working with a business? Everyone’s talks about getting in a senior to change management involved in buying from the senior people, have they been receptive to rolling out different technologies?

Andy

We’ve all got memories of failed IT projects over the years, so everyone’s a bit sceptical, but I think the world has moved on really, particularly over the last year with COVID. Lots of people a year ago, who were sceptical about running their business via Microsoft Teams, or Zoom have had their minds changed. So I think we’re over a lot of the resistance now. And I think more and more people are seeing the power of technology, I think our experience of working with Plentific, again we were trying to develop our own technology, and we could see what Plentific were doing and how they worked and we could see how quickly they worked. So quite often we would talk to Cem’s team during the pilot and say that we had identified some additional requirements for the Plentific platform. And a couple of days later, they come back and say, Well, we’ve done that now. But we weren’t ready to deal with that, we were expecting the requirements to come back in a couple of months later because it is a different world. So I think, we’ve learned a lot, I think I think the housing sector is beginning to move quite quickly now in terms of embracing technology. But we’ve all got legacy technology that we need to move on from and we need to move into the cloud for some of our mainstream business processes. But I think the philosophical battles are probably won now.

Louisa

But it sounds like we’re on the right track. Now there’s another hot topic I’d love to go into and that’s obviously ESG, especially around real estate at that moment. I’d love to a bit more about what are housing providers doing to support their ESG credentials or missions? Andy is there anything which Notting Hill is working on at the moment?

Andy

Yes on a number of fronts. So, obviously we have a big property portfolio, some of it is quite old. So we’ve got a lot of Victorian stock for example, we are very much in favour of protecting the environment. So, we’re working out pretty much as we speak, we’re working out plans as to how we can invest in that stock to improve and reduce our carbon footprint over the next 10 or 15 years. We develop a lot of new buildings, but that is priced in in the new buildings, and we’re introducing and building in technology or materials that will be carbon neutral, or have as low carbon footprint as possible. I guess, on the social front our purpose really is to provide for communities affordable housing, housing for people to live in London, that those people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London. So I think we’re pretty strong on the social front already. And on the governance side we’ve done a lot of reflection this year, and not least of all because of all of the Black Lives Matters issues.

So we have a large part of our staff group who are black and minority ethnic, and a large number of our residents are black and minority ethnic, and we strive to be an inclusive organization, we want to make sure that we’re providing services that are the right services for our residents. And we want to be an organization where all of our colleagues can thrive in the organization. And we’re conscious, like a lot of organizations, that when we looked at the leadership in the middle of 2020, it looked a bit too white really. So we have taken specific steps to bring more black and minority ethnic people into our governance community in the non exec sense. And we’ve also introduced a number of issues, initiatives to try and bring black and minority ethnic people through the organization faster into senior roles in the organization. So there’s a lot of work we’ve done a lot of work this year and last year, and that’s an ongoing effort it’s not a one off thing.

Louisa

I’d love to bring Cem into this as well, when it comes down to the ESG, how does Plentific look at it? How can it help buildings become more sustainable, more environmental?

Cem

It’s a very big topic for all of our clients both in social housing and the private sector. On the E front and the S front, the platform indirectly already does a lot in terms of social value, we connect local jobs to local trades companies, and through that keep the funds in the communities they belong to, and we help strive the communities to grow that way. We support quite a few not for profit, social causes like Centrepoint is one of our partners and we help them to reduce homelessness amongst the youth. We recently also launched the Woman’s Trade Network, together with Notting Hill and a number of other clients to support women into trades and local trade. So we think about the social values all the time already. From an environmental point, again indirectly, because we haven’t really thought about it. But people, contractors, they don’t have to drive very long distances, they go to your local work, and therefore don’t spend too much time in their vans driving around the place. But on the governance side, data is always the most important driver of making the right decisions going forward (ESG). How do I find out what a home consumes? So asset management is super, important, IoT is super important, connecting the data back to say, look this is a property that consumes this much, therefore there might be an opportunity to do the ESG program.

Somebody has to go into that property supplier to insulate for example, or change the windows to better windows and the platform sits at the core of some of this data. And so we help our clients to look at this data and make decisions forward. And we’ll be now launching, we have this property programme at Plentific, where we invite clients to join and together discuss new innovations, new ideas, and one that’s going to launch I believe in a week or two, is our building safety labs program together with a number of clients to look at how building safety can be managed. And the next one will be about ESG. So we bring in clients together with us to say, look we have this platform that’s connected to great data resources, we’ve got a supply chain, we’ve got these workflows, how do we create an ESG concept for you to be able to make better decisions going forward?

Louisa

The more I learn and understand about ESG, the more it makes me recognize that every person can play their part. You mentioned about trades men and women just being closer and driving not as far, I think lots of people they think ESG it’s all about just the corporate value, what the bigger businesses can do, but it’s also down to the everyday man and women. Now I would hope to think we are coming close to the end of the pandemic, worldwide we’re all making moves to getting back to the new norm. And now, it’s obviously had some catastrophic effects but it’s also had some good effects on technology adoption. Andy, what have you seen in terms of how it’s impacted the property management? Do you think there’s been some positive changes? You mentioned getting there in terms of adoption, is there anything else you’ve seen?

Andy

I think on the positive side, the way that we’ve been able to manage our business using technology, we were able to move people to work at home pretty quickly and all of that helped us to get through it. We do regard ourselves as a people based business so not only internally but very much externally. So we want our frontline staff to be out and about visiting our residents in their homes, making sure everything’s okay. So, that’s the next big challenge for us really, we had a few false starts last year where we got people to come back from working at home and then every time we did it was a false start. It looks like this time touch wood maybe after June, we can encourage people to come back, start doing some of the work they used to do but we can also see there are lots of things that people do. They can work more effectively at home, or they can at least start their day at home, do some stuff online, then go out into the community or whatever it is. So we’re in a definitely looking at a hybrid situation compared to the way our organization used to function probably, we will still keep a couple of big offices in London as a basis for people to have meetings and touch base. And I think we’ll have some guiding principles really as to how we want people to work. But we want people to work in the most effective way for us and for them, and we’ll work out exactly what that looks like over the next few months, I think.

Louisa

Yes, agreed. I think lots of businesses even mine, are trying to work out what level of flexibility you give your team, how can you ensure that you’re still working together collaborating, but also I think we all get a hell of a lot more done when we’re on our desk at home. Now Cem, what impact have you seen on the property management industry?

Cem

It’s been a funny one, it’s really dependent from client to client a little bit, some clients seemed to manage really well through COVID with government stipulations of doing emergency only or keeping the flow going and managing that. So we see some clients who have come through it really well, not many backlog issues and no complaints, and then we see other clients who have very large backlogs, haven’t really been able to manage because they didn’t have the digital processes in place to do it through COVID and remotely. It’s definitely a big impact on supply chains. So as clients where in house teams have had big parts of in house teams fall into the COVID being sick, and we had also through I think Brexit, more suppliers leave the country or more contracts with the country. So combination of Brexit, of COVID, put a lot of pressure on getting works done with clients that typically use the older ways of getting work done with smaller number of contractors.

So we had an increased number of clients come to us and say, Can you help us please, both from a supply chain problem, but also from a digitalization and starting to work area? The big trend that we’ve seen last year with us was this flexible economy approach view that clients started having of saying, even if you have big in house teams, even if you have contract relationships in place, Plentific as a platform can actually enable us to use a supply chain flexibly in any way we want because we have the solutions to enable clients to do that. And so we have all sorts of clients now with big in house teams, with no in house teams, with a number of larger contractors in place, using the marketplace using single contractors, and that’s definitely been a big value add that we got last year. And that’s pretty much it. So we have a lot more discussions now than we had the three years before.

And as Andy said, I think the senior leadership of many organizations have accepted that having a zoom call is okay and we don’t have to arrange a meeting three months ahead. It could be just quick one, 30 minutes over Zoom. That was almost unacceptable before COVID, even if I would have suggested that to someone, they would have not accepted that. So that increased the speed of getting things done, for sure. But on the other side I think one of the questions earlier you asked was, on how we worked with NHD to grow what we’ve done, there were lots of face to face meetings in groups and being creative and coming up with ideas and talking through things, having lunch together. And that is missing that was definitely not a great experience last year. And overall, I think we’ve came we came through okay from a property management point.

Louisa

I think you’re being also very modest, I think everyone listening is seeing the great things and the expansion that Plentific has been doing, so it seems like there’s a lot more positives coming out of it as well, a lot more people are seeing how property management doesn’t have to be such a thankless task, it can literally be very simple and easy. Now, you briefly went into your different clients, you have this extremely strong presence from the social housing sector Cem , are you looking into expanding into other asset classes potentially? What are the plans for the product?

Cem

We already operate in the PR sector with a few clients. So you’re definitely starting to grow into that adjacent market, we have a number of developers as clients who come to us to manage their projects with us in the first one or two year periods. In Germany, we actually are in the insurance claims business already. So we have insurance broker clients who use the platform to manage all insurance claims through us in our marketplace. And the way we build the platform is very modular so we can very quickly adapt to any type of residential clients, and also to quite a few commercial types of assets to accommodate the concepts to apply. So there’s definitely a big focus on expanding into other areas. In the US they’re the differentiations between single family and multifamily oftentimes. And while typically we would look into multifamily as our core areas and what our clients are, our platform is perfectly suited for the single family environments as we work with local trades. So we can actually empower people to manage a few 100 units here, a few 100 units there. So it doesn’t always have to be a big block or stage with 1000s of units. So lots to come.

Louisa

Watch this space! We’re coming to the final part of the podcast, and we finish it off the LMRE part. So Andy, is there one lesson that you’ve learned that maybe sticks out for you in your career to date?

Andy

I think probably two. So don’t waste your opportunities. So you can’t score if you don’t shoot, if you like. And I think it’s all about the team, if you have a good team, you can achieve most things.

Louisa

And so, what about you Cem? Something similar, or anything you’ve learned since your career in banking and Plentific?

Cem

I definitely agree with Andy as well, what I would add is, and this might be controversial, but listen to your clients, and don’t listen to your clients. You have to be very close to your clients and understand their pain points and get their feedback, but then sometimes to disrupt and to change how things work, you also have to challenge them and bring different ideas and different concepts to them, which they might not be comfortable with. Or at first might think, this is not going to work or this is too big of a risk. But how else will it disrupt right? So we very much tried to do both, we tried to listen very clearly and through the labs programs we have we bring them in and talk to them. But at the same time, sometimes we push back and say hey I think we can do this better or differently. Or did you think about doing it this way, just because you’ve done it for 20 years that way, it might work better if you use technology to your advantage? So that’s a big one I learned, Listen very carefully what your clients say, and be close to them and take that in at the same time think outside of the box and challenge them. 33.42

Louisa

Yeah, I guess it’s finding that balance between listening and understanding but also educating. Andy is there anyone or maybe a product that you’d love to give a shout out to?

Andy

I should probably say Plentific shouldn’t I!

Louisa

You’ve nailed it!

Andy

It’s been great working with Cem and his team and I think there’s a lot more to do.

Louisa

And Cem what about you, anyone you want to give a shout out to?

Cem

No, I’ll refrain from this one. Because I would just say Andy and the Notting Hill team ! But as early innovators I think they took a risk, they very quickly moved on and adapted to using technology to their advantage. They have a great program that they started building and continued developing it and I think we found a perfect fit between more established large institution and young, fast growing business and that definitely requires risk taking. And I want to thank Andy and his team for making it happen with us.

Louisa

Now, the R part which lots of people often say they don’t have any regrets in their career, it’s trying to make a positive spin of it. Andy, any regrets you have in your career? Maybe not, or using Plentific sooner!

Andy

I think we bumped into each other at the right time. But I honestly couldn’t say that I really do. I never really had a plan in my career and I just seem to be presented with some great opportunities all the way through it. And as I said earlier, I think probably the right thing I did was take some opportunities that seemed very scary at the time. And if I’m really honest, I couldn’t say that I’ve got any significant regrets. I did once say in an icebreaker where the question was, what would you like to have done if you weren’t doing this? And I did say that maybe being Jack Nicholson would have been fun.

Louisa

And Cem what about you any regrets in your in your career?

Cem

Oh I’m sure there’s a lot of them!

Louisa

Love the honesty!

Cem

I see it as a learning curve from all the things that you can improve on. Biggest regret, probably not to become an entrepreneur faster. I spent a good 10 years in mergers and acquisitions in the city. And while I loved what I was doing, I always had an entrepreneurial interest and I always wanted to be in the real estate sector. Because my family’s in construction, I grew up in there, I wanted to be an architect. And my dad said, no you’re not going to make any money doing that so go to business school. And so yes, a few years earlier wouldn’t have hurt any of my ambitions. But you learn from it, I made good experiences, added skill sets that really are helpful today as well. And so it’s not a real regret but definitely, if I look back I could have been an entrepreneur faster.

Louisa

Yeah, that’s a common theme, which most people that I speak with will say, it’s not having the courage to take risks sooner. But I think there’s no perfect timeline for that. And now we have come to the final question, which is the E part. What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of PropTech? Andy please go first.

Andy

Well, I think large organizations like Notting Hill Genesis can now see the power of technology, and how everything we do across all the different parts of our organization, some of which is really quite old fashioned, we can see how the technology is going to enable us to change that and to link things that much more effectively, the power of data, the power of automation, and just having all of that at your fingertips to make much better decisions. So I think it’s all there now that the technology is on the shelf, almost. And we’re just delving into it and beginning to really use it effectively and see the power of it.

Louisa

And Cem, what about you?

Cem

When we launched, the term PropTech didn’t exist. So a couple years later, and it seems like PropTech is one of the hottest areas to invest in, across many different ideas. And so in a few years time, it’s grown massively. And I still think we’re at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what will happen in this in this sector. So super excited to obviously play a role in it and grow not just Plentific, but support other younger start-ups who are coming out with PropTech ideas. And it’s an exciting time to disrupt the largest asset class in the world globally, and there’s a lot of needs in different segments to bring the data to the front and use that to create better products and had to come up with better solutions, which will help the ESG agenda. So we can play a leading role in helping this planet get cleaner and function better and that’s super exciting to be in.

Louisa

Awesome, thank you for that. Unfortunately, we have come to the end of the show, it’s been a pleasure learning more about how property management can be made more easy and slightly sexier to be honest, technology can do that. But also learning more about your partnership and how it’s grown and lots of our listeners are start-ups dreaming of getting some of these case studies, but it just shows if you just keep working, change your product, listening, understanding your client, what can really be achieved. So thank you both for talking us through that. Andy what is the best way to connect with you or learn more about Notting Hill Genesis?

Andy

I’m on LinkedIn and we obviously have a corporate website, which is www.nhg.org.uk

Louisa

And Cem what about you?

Cem

Website is www.Plentific.com and if anybody wants to get in touch, please email me directly cem.savas@plentific.com

Louisa

Awesome, thank you both for joining me on the podcast and I’m looking forward to speaking with you both after the show.

Both

Thanks for having us.

Louisa

Thank you for joining us this week on the podcast and a big thanks to our special guests. Make sure you visit our website www.lmre.co.uk where you can subscribe to our show, or you’ll find us on iTunes and Spotify where all good content as found. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate if you could rate and review us on iTunes or if you simply spread the word. I’ll catch you later.

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