How Dwelly Is Rebuilding The Rental Market With AI

00:27:21 · Dan LifshitsPlay from here

But if you talk about the kind of more simple, whatever, door handles being broken or I don't know, window kind of doesn't close or something like that, then easily it can be ongoing for two months, for three months, for four months because like average is on average month and a half. I think this is the status quo. And this is something that, again, being as a tenant ourselves and being as a landlord, we clearly have seen an opportunity to kind of to make it better. Put aside that you can obviously provide just a much more digital first, and I think that much more at your fingertips products to the end customers. Would it be the tenant? Would it be the landlord? I mean, we're living in a very digital era where today you can order almost everything by the phone. Right? Starting with a kind of cap, talking about food and any other services, cloth, something else. And I think that the level of standards, across the kind of digital collaboration with technology, I think, has increased in lots of the industries. But I think in property management, as we just described, it still remains kind of to some extent quite fragmented and sometimes kind of a little bit still non, kind of analog and non digital. And I think that not that just you can provide visibility to the end customers about what's going on. Kind of, yeah, just state of the art, kind of tenant and landlord portals where you can see all the kind of, jobs and their status being locked on which stage of the process there are. We assessed it, where the contractor is on the way. It's being resolved. It's being fixed. We're waiting for the quote. So that we can provide visibility to every party about kinda where they are on resolution of this job according to kind of across the process. But I think more importantly, the system can ensure that nothing would be slipped and kind of lost between the cracks. So for example, if you are a tenant, you're writing to your property manager about the specific problem, what we can do on the back end is that we effectively already have pre mapped which kind of contractors in which geographical area for which type of the job are the preferred contractor on the level of the individual property. And the landlord can also impact to these criteria with regards to this is my preferred contractor or with this contractor.

00:29:19 · Dan LifshitsPlay from here

I don't don't wanna kind of do anything anymore because, like, last time, for example, the quality been poor or price been high or kind of something like that. If I go, we have pre mapped this all already. So meaning that when I will receive the request, we almost instantly can kind of tag it along to the kind of right and relevant contractor. Then the system would be having visibility because we'll provide an individual kind of phone, mask phone numbers of the tenant to the contractor. So hence, we can see if the contractor ever has, like, reached out the tenant and if they kind of called or not. In case if they don't call, then again, the system without any kind of personal, effectively human envelope or anything would start pinging the contractor to just say, hey. Please call. Please call. Please call. Kind of few times, it would keep taking the contractor to get in touch with the tenant because we we have visibility and we can see it because it's all running through the system if it ever happened kind of or not. And then obviously, kind of if they did speak to each other and that they agree on the appointment, then effectively throw some speech to text and text to text. You can kind of extract and understand on which day the appointment has been agreed and kind of effectively what has been the context of the appointment and everything. So a lot of the things in the current world, and especially with the help of AI, you can effectively streamline, and you can extract a lot of information from the conversations and from the ongoing context with regards to what's going on to just make sure that nothing is slipped between the cracks. And then kind of in case if something doesn't happen, only then you escalate this job to the kind of to the, effectively, intermediary kind of, human person to effectively kind of get in touch and resolve a bit more complex mediation problem. And that would allow us kind of at the status quo, we already reduced the total, maintenance time by kind of around half effectively. So kind of from something around forty eight days on average across The UK to somewhere in the range of around twenty five days, twenty, twenty five days. And we clearly see that there is a further opportunity to bring it down to kind of to around kind of seven to ten days. And I think that's where you expect it to be.

00:31:18 · Dan Lifshits, Neil C. HughesPlay from here

Because, like, if you have a problem, you're a tenant, and you need it being resolved, then I think that it would be unreasonable to kind of expect those things should be taking more than, like, ten days to [00:31:29] S0: get fixed. And if we were to take everything you've just said there and then scale up even further, I was reading how you'd said that one operator can now manage up to 1,000 departments with a much, much higher quality, which is a a huge shift there. So what does that mean for people working in these agencies at the moment, and how are their roles evolving? Because everything's changing at the moment. And what what are you seeing here? How's that space evolving?

00:31:55 · Dan LifshitsPlay from here

[00:31:55] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I would say that I think that we're not getting to kind of a thousand properties per one person just yet, but I think that we clearly see that there is like a path towards that. However, we obviously kind of do already increase effectively the throughput of the people by kind of, yeah, factor factor of, like, three factor of four. So kind of it's increasing it significantly. And I think that having said that, what happens with the kind of with the role of the people is, yes, their focus of attention does change, but it becomes much more of what I think the people actually were coming in this industry to do in the first place. And this being spending much more time with the customers, with the landlords, and with the tenants to really build a much deeper, long lasting relationships with them. So I think that the the above mentioned example that I've provided, you don't need to kind of, a person to provide the phone number of the tenant to the contractor, and then make sure that the contractor contacts the tenant, and then make sure that they agree on the appointment, and be this middleman just running around the things and trying to align to calendars and intermediating between the two things. You end up having to do that in today's world. Because let's say with a general kind of regulation out there, and especially with the Rentals Right Act kind of coming into force, obviously you have to make sure that the property management is compliant. So hence kind of because you are in charge, you have to make sure that let's say, the guest certificate appointment is being booked and is happening according kind of on time. Because then otherwise kind of you have a criminal liability up to the kind of going to to to prison, right, in case if it's like not happens on time. So that's why as a result, you have to do all that. But with the current technologies, actually, they can take on a lot of this basic admin things that very few people were coming to this industry to do in the first place.

00:33:37 · Dan LifshitsPlay from here

Because provide the phone number, make sure that one kind of party contacts the other, make sure that they agree on the appointment, make sure on which day the appointment has been agreed, then kind of just follow-up, let's say, contractor or the tenant to ask for the kind of has the problem been resolved, yes or no, and then provide, for example, the confirmation of works done together with the pictures and with the quoting of the kind of of the works. It's not very kind of sophisticated process. Right? It's just like basic admin work that should you kind of take it away from kind of from some of the people, you actually do free up their time to actually be much more on the kind of salespeople, be much more on the frontline, be much more on the kind of spending more time with the landlords to really try to provide the excellent level of service to them, and rather be there the customer advocate. And I think that be the intermediator for some of the most complex customer situations when you need really kind of a conscious decision maker in between the tenant and the landlord. And you need to resolve a a deposit dispute, or you need to do some other things that do require kind of conscious judgment compared to the other things that are just basic admin effectively. And I think that's exactly the point that some of the basic admin can be taken away to free up people to just spend time on what really matters the most.

00:34:50 · Neil C. HughesPlay from here

[00:34:50] S0: And if we were to look ahead into our immediate future, if AI roll ups do continue to gain momentum, which is where all the smart money is being placed right now, so it's certainly looking that way, how do you see this model reshaping the wider services economy? And and what should any business leader listening to our conversation today? Any... Anything they should be paying attention to right now?