While the law can take a long time to change, proptech can revolutionise and re-engineer a property “pain point” and in turn experience rapid and organic adoption, inndox co-founder Trish Mackie-Smith says.
After two decades running BuildingPro, Brisbane-based proptech enthusiasts Trish and Andrew Mackie-Smith combined their collective experiences in property law, building consultancy, seller disclosure, commercial development and certification to roll out inndox, a next-generation property management tool.
“During that time together we saw the same issues arising time and time again,” Trish Mackie-Smith said.
“One of the clear constraints was the availability of a building’s records—particularly at the time of sale, purchase and leasing as well as warranty claims and defects issues.
“Most people wouldn’t buy a car without a logbook detailing its history with servicing and maintenance and we questioned why that centralised experience couldn’t be replicated within a property environment.”
The solution is a single application that generates property “logbooks” for online record management of the property’s life-cycle from planning and construction to handover and transfer of ownership.
“We wanted to streamline that handover process—which up until that point had been a pain point for property developers trying to pull all this information together at the culmination of a project,” Trish Mackie-Smith said.
“Currently 90 per cent of property handovers are delivered on paper, which can be damaged or easily be misplaced and on average 50 per cent of sales are delayed due to the requisite information not being readily available at sale time because it is sitting in multiple places.
“inndox packages this all up in a single application for a new owner and not only that, it also provides warranty and maintenance alerts and delivers accurate and up-to-date trade contacts to help that owner actively manage a new property.
“Some household warranties can last as long as 25 years and some cases can be split into a multitude of parts; take a solar panel for example—the inverter, the batteries, the panel itself—so we provide owners with an accurate and real time overview of every part of their property.”
The software provides developers with a range of tools and features such as templates—to quickly checklist required compliance information for a particular property, or cloning—to generate information requirements quickly across large scale projects such as apartment buildings.
“The program is not just for mum-and-dad investors or new owners, it is very much designed for top-tier property developers wanting to have that information digitised and available rather than having to have their consultants solving it,” Andrew Mackie-Smith said.
“It's a relatively new concept, and people are a bit set in their ways as the property industry is fairly traditional, however, the emergence of proptech has created a change in attitudes and the recent health crisis has fast-tracked the uptake in our product.
“Moving forward, when people are buying a property they will be asking for the building’s inndox in order to receive all the important information in one centralised handover.”
Taking advantage of the game-changing technology has been national building inspection company Jim’s Building Inspection, which has recently onboarded and digitised its reports.
Similarly, e-conveyancing platform LawLab has also connected with the proptech provider in order to bridge its platform for a seamless “handoff experience”.
“As well as top-tier developers, insurers, and building inspectors, property agents are also beginning to think outside of the box to give themselves a fresh, competitive edge,” Andrew Mackie-Smith said.
“They see inndox as an extension of their product offering, or as one agency recently labeled it a ‘gift’ to a new homeowner at the end of the sales process.
“Agents see inndox really as that next level for after-sale service that has been very much missing after a property handover.”
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