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Tuesday Nov 05, 2024
Wednesday, 26 February 2020 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
By Madushka Balasuriya
When we think of industry-disrupting product innovations such as Uber, Netflix or AirBnB, the ideas themselves are almost irrelevant. The intrinsic magic behind all these products is to be 
found in their execution; that certain je ne sais quoi which makes you sit up and go, “hmm, I wish I would have thought of that”. Even though, in reality, it wouldn’t have mattered if you did because, again, execution and implementation is everything.
For Australian property management company :Different, this is at the core of its ethos – providing a service in what many would consider an otherwise fairly saturated marketplace, but in a way that makes the process more streamlined and efficient for all parties concerned - and at a cost that isn’t prohibitive. And while the company presently serves only residential investment properties, plans are in place to expand to other property types in the future.
“People need homes, but the reverse is also true – homes need people. When something gets broken in your home, you have to call somebody to come and take care of it. And that’s really hard. How do you find somebody you know you can trust, who’s going to come when you need them to, who’s going to do things at a fair price. It’s not easy,” explains Mina Radhakrishnan, Co-Founder of :Different.
“Yes, you can look through a directory service but it’s not trusted, it’s not curated. And we felt that’s a big problem. :Different can be the solution to that problem, ultimately a solution to your home.
“We know that there is this whole group of people out there, people who own investment properties today that need home assistance, they need people to go and take care of their tenants, manage their rent, deal with the maintenance issues in the house, deal with documentation, any legal issues, anything that comes up, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for home assistance.”
Indeed, the home assistance market is already fairly fertile, with real estate firms responsible for servicing a large portion of it, but where :Different hopes to differentiate itself is in the use of technology.
“We fundamentally believe that property management is the type of business where technology can drastically improve it, by providing a more scalable and more efficient experience,” states Mina.
“Our biggest competition is traditional real estate agencies, who have been providing this service now for a hundred years. I think the challenge though, is that with these particular agencies, the people who own the real estate agencies are sales people, and the process of sales is very different from the process of property management.
“Property management is fundamentally about work flows. Following up, making sure that things are done a certain schedule, that they’re confirmed, that they’re completed, and that everybody is moving forward. I think that’s the kind of stuff that technology is really good at, and that’s the way in which we try to build our business.”
Mina and her husband Ruvin co-founded the business in early 2017, though the idea was conceptualised years earlier when something about the present state of real estate management didn’t quite add up.
“While helping our retired parents get their finances in order, we found they’d been paying an agent, what seemed like an obscene amount of money in fees for the past 20 years,” reads a section on the :Different website (www.different.com.au). “In the meantime, their property manager had changed every few months, sometimes with no notice, and they weren’t getting real value for their money.” This is when they decided to step in and redefine property management.
One of the most unique facets of :Different is that of the 41-strong team working on the product nearly half (19) are based in Sri Lanka. The reasons behind these are manifold. The first is the most straightforward – Ruvin is Sri Lankan with ties to his homeland – but of more relevance is the fact that one of the earliest investors essentially gave the company a team of Sri Lankan engineers based in Colombo as his investment. This really set the ball rolling.
“Ruvin and I were travelling and working remotely at the time, so it wasn’t that we were based in any one place either. So that team started with us in February 2017. And I think the big thing is that we can find incredible talent here [in Sri Lanka]. That’s really the core thing.”
:Different is headquartered in Sydney, with smaller offices in both Melbourne and Brisbane. The Sydney and Colombo offices are equally large at this point, and Mina says they intend to grow both branches in the future. This though does not mean some branches are more important than the other – quite the contrary.
“One of our core company values is ‘One Team, One Experience’. For example, we have people in Sri Lanka managing people in Australia and vice versa. So really it’s two core values we get out of our team in Sri Lanka.
“One is that we’ve been here a long time – we have a lot of experience, our existing engineers out here [in Colombo] have a lot of knowledge about our business, how it’s grown, how it’s changed.”
"People need homes, but the reverse is also true – homes need people. When something gets broken in your home, you have to call somebody to come and take care of it. And that’s really hard. How do you find somebody you know you can trust, who’s going to come when you need them to, who’s going to do things at a fair price. It’s not easy
We know that there is this whole group of people out there, people who own investment properties today that need home assistance, they need people to go and take care of their tenants, manage their rent, deal with the maintenance issues in the house, deal with documentation, any legal issues, anything that comes up, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking for home assistance
Property management is fundamentally about work flows. Following up, making sure that things are done a certain schedule, that they’re confirmed, that they’re completed, and that everybody is moving forward. I think that’s the kind of stuff that technology is really good at, and that’s the way in which we try to build our business
– :Different Co-Founder Mina Radhakrishnan"
The second, aside from the obvious cost benefits, is the convenient time difference – five-and-a-half hours – which can give the business a unique leg-up on competitors.
“With a traditional agent, if you’ve got an inquiry or something that needs to be dealt with at 8 p.m. Sydney time, good luck getting somebody to deal with that. You’re not going to get anything till 9 a.m. the following day, whereas we are here working till like 10 p.m. So there’s consistent coverage throughout the day.”
This ‘One Team, One Experience’ motto permeates right through the very fabric of :Different, with Mina proudly describing the team as “fully cross-functional”.
“What we expect is really high quality engineering, otherwise we wouldn’t be here [in Sri Lanka]. If we didn’t think that people were going to be able to provide the kinds of products and experiences that we set our bar for, we wouldn’t be continuing to doing what we’re doing.
“I’m really proud of the way our team has grown. We have a very collaborative environment - and I don’t think that this is always the case elsewhere – so it’s not enough to, as an engineer, sit in a corner and code. It’s engineering, it’s product, it’s design, it’s operations.
“Our engineers are right next door to our operations manager – they hear the phone calls that they’re having with owners and tenants, when something goes wrong they’re very aware of what they’re doing. So when they release a feature, they know exactly what it impacts because it’s 10 less phone calls a day that that person has to deal with.”
This attention to detail is what Mina hopes will set :Different apart from the undoubted clones and copycats that may look to latch on to the idea once it takes off. At present, the service they offer can be categorised into two apps - one for tenants, another for owners (along with an online owner portal).
These two mobile apps ensure on demand access to leases, statements, maintenance requests and more, 24/7. But this is only around 20% of what makes :Different, well, different.
“It’s actually so much more than an app. We think of ourselves as a fully-stacked product company.
“Eighty per cent of what we do is making that feel seamless and really easy. In many ways I feel a lot of my experience at Uber very directly carries on. You open up the Uber app, you press this button, you get a car and you’re on your way. That feels so simple, it feels so easy.
“But in order for that button to feel that way, you don’t see the 80% of things that are happening behind the scenes. It’s very similar to what we’re trying to do at :Different.”
As such, included in this 80% is of course the countless hours dedicated to developing workflows and essentially automating so many of the time-consuming but essential tasks that traditional real estate agencies spend hours completing.
But there’s also the thorough vetting of tradespeople, something that is critically important if trust is to be built with users of the service, be it tenants or owners.
“We’ve built up a really good tradesperson book. Because when something goes wrong, how do you trust and verify that the person that comes to fix the problem is going to be the best possible person in place? We want to answer this question, and not just through the data.
“We do a number of things – it’s a very granular process – we track all of the things that happen with a maintenance request. We do things like checking how long they take to accept a request, how much do they charge for a request, how long does it take for them to schedule a request, to resolve a request, to send us an invoice, or send us details upon completion. “And when you can track at that level, what you have is a very good sense of being able to say, ‘this is a good person to solve this type of problem’. And so we do it for every single tradesperson in the system and we’re consistently improving, getting more data, and adding more people into that so that we can continue to track that data.”
The end result is an efficient, trustworthy service, its outward simplicity belying its well-oiled internals. For Mina, that magical final product is what makes all of the trouble worthwhile.
“I think that’s where we’ve spent the most of our time – making that one click feel so simple. That’s how you scale your business. If you want to grow your business 10 times the size, in a technology company you can’t just hire 10 times the number of employees. You actually have to be able to scale your business to a thousand times the size while maintaining the employee size. I think that’s the real power of what we do.”
It would not be understating matters to say that this is where her work experience really comes to the fore, as highlighted by her impressive resumé.
Her role at :Different aside, she’s also currently a board advisor at AirTasker, a Sydney-based Australian company which provides an online and mobile marketplace enabling users to outsource everyday tasks. Most notably she was the global Head of Product at Uber, having started as employee no.20 when the UI was still a big green button. Also on her resumé are stints at Google and Goldman Sachs, to name a few.
Suffice to say, her business pedigree is sound, and in terms of getting businesses off the ground, she knows exactly what she’s doing. Which is what makes it all the more impressive from a Sri Lankan perspective that it is their engineers who are at the forefront of this groundbreaking venture.
“A big part of why we want to build this team in Sri Lanka is that we think there’s a real opportunity to create a great product company here,” explains Mina.
“There are a lot of great tech companies out here, and their focus really seems to be on agency and outsourcing. So the idea that we’re a product company – we want people to focus on building the products – that they work directly for the consumer, that they’re very much a part of this overall plan, is very appealing to them.”
Sri Lanka has for some time now been a go-to destination for recruiting talent from the IT industry, with companies such as WSO2 leading the way in this regard. The widely-accepted notion is that the country is brimming with young, hungry IT professionals who are more affordable than their regional counterparts and – crucially – hungrier.
This however is yet to translate into a Sri Lankan homegrown product or company making its mark on a global scale. For Mina, the hope is that the experience of being such an essential cog of a product with global ambition – :Different hopes to launch in the United States soon – will eventually spur her employees on to bigger and better things.
“So much of what technology is based around in Sri Lanka, is that there are all these great engineers, who are building products for people outside of the country. Creating a great engineering culture, and a great new product company. I would love it if some of our employees go on to start new companies.”
Pix by Upul Abayasekara
