| Episode: | E121 |
| Show Title: | Campaign Agent – Pay Now, Pay Later Real Estate (with Joshua Simmons) |
| Cast: | Aaron Horne, Patrick Berry & Joshua Simmons |
| Show Length: | 19 minutes 54 seconds |
This week Pat and Aaron are joined in the Podcast Studio by Joshua Simmons of Campaign Agent. Campaign Agent are creating a world where vendors & agents have the financial freedom to maximise their property’s potential. Once a real estate agent has prepared a marketing strategy, homeowners can choose to Pay Now, or Pay Later for their marketing costs.
Listen along, or find out more about Campaign Agent here
Transcript:
Joshua Simmons
Let’s just say I of had David Jones all the time on their online store. Yep. They’ve got your pay now options as well as a simple pay later option. And that’s what campaign agent does on a custom branded agency platform. Gives your vendors a number of options whether they can afford to pay for their marketing, staging or home improvements upfront.
Joshua Simmons
Your agency or they want to have some flexibility up to six months to pay that back.
Aaron Horne
Going what’s going on why don’t you’re listening to the. All right guys welcome back to the property pod, your weekly engagement in the real estate here in the Hobart marketplace. I’m your host, Aaron Horne, and it gives me great pleasure to be joined by only one of the probably property Potter team members. What’s happening, Patrick Berry?
Patrick Berry
Not much me, but I love your intro. You say weekly. I think we have to put a disclaimer it’s pretty loose these days.
Aaron Horne
It has been loose lately. I will say that it’s been a very busy start to the year yet having a baby, having kind of like the fun of COVID and all those things have definitely thrown a spanner into the works of of being a weekly podcast. But we are working on it and we’re trying our best from here on out.
Aaron Horne
Let’s see how many weeks we can get in a row. But thank you for all the people that have stuck with us through the ups and downs of the bi weekly podcast.
Patrick Berry
It’s always good though, because now it’s like, it’s almost like a little Easter egg surprise am I going to get a new episode today or not? Oh look.
Aaron Horne
People have text me and asked like, is the podcast still a thing just because we’ve been away for like two weeks? And I was just like, well, still good. Are you still got your year update on the Hobart marketplace? So yeah, look, we’re missing Jon this week and I’m, I’ll just put pen to the empty chair. There’s no in the camera for him.
Aaron Horne
So sorry about that. Everyone. I didn’t plug in his camera. Jon’s around the Philippines. He just kind of randomly ended up in the Philippines.
Patrick Berry
Yeah, traditional Jon style just sort of kept to himself. Thought he had told everyone that he was going and wasn’t too like a day before. He’s like, Oh.
Aaron Horne
I better put in a request. Yeah.
Patrick Berry
So anyone that knows Jon knows that, you know, he’s a bit of a free spirit and we’re just.
Aaron Horne
It’s notorious for his organizational skills are something to leave.
Patrick Berry
Hey, a little bit more skill required in that training area.
Aaron Horne
Indeed. Indeed. We’ll get him there one day. But speaking of skilled operators, today we have a guest on the podcast. We yeah, we’ll get you a little inside baseball. We are actually recording this for the third time. The last time I tried to do the intro, it didn’t work for me. Say, look, we’re back here. One little Easter egg for today’s episode.
Aaron Horne
If you see a little badge on my chest, it was my birthday the day of recording, so wish me happy birthday.
Patrick Berry
Anyone that knows Aaron knows that that was a little bit of time so that’s how well we’re going at the moment.
Aaron Horne
Very true. It just means it’s a busy market might we’re just flat chat. Yeah. So yeah, today we have Josh from camp an agent on talking with us and I’m Josh came in and had a really, really good chat with us in regards to their product. They kind of a a pineapple pilot, a real estate company service.
Patrick Berry
Yeah. And look, I think it’s a really clever product for the marketplace we have where we’re shifting as we move forward, like it’s been such a busy market and as it starts to plateau out, become that even sort of market in the days on market, get a little bit longer. Yeah, I think some of Josh’s products are going to be really helpful for a lot of people buying homes as well as vendors selling homes.
Patrick Berry
They’ve got a selection of different products. And yeah, we’re really excited here at full and forward to have their team joining us. Yeah, and services to our clients.
Aaron Horne
Yeah. Came in and did a bit of training with, with a bunch of the staff here it was. Yeah. Really engaging and really interesting and yeah, as you say, it’s good for vendors, sellers, and it’s really good for real estate agents or any agents as well out there listening. Yeah, this is really great service. So yeah, campaign agent, we might cut away here to Josh and I’m yeah, I enjoy the.
Patrick Berry
Listening on the flip.
Aaron Horne
Side. So in a way, hopefully.
Patrick Berry
See you guys.
Aaron Horne
That’s right, guys. We’re here with our guests today on the property pod. We’ve got Josh Simmons from Campaign Agent. Welcome to the property pod.
Joshua Simmons
Josh, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Aaron Horne
Not a problem, my friend. Thank you so much for coming in and having a chat with us. Just for our listeners out there, is it possible to. Yeah. Give a little background on on who you are and and what you’re doing here in our studio.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about me. I’ve worked in the property industry since 20, 13. I’ve worked my way up through property management sales and now I work for a company called Campaign Agents working with some of the top agencies across Australia. Around 1400 agencies, including 41 for Property Co.
Patrick Berry
Yeah, we’re super excited to be joining you guys because your products are going to help our vendors out dramatically.
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s we’ve got some awesome products actually, not only to help vendors but also to help real estate agencies maximize efficiency with our products. As well.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, looking into some of the stuff here that that you’ve been going over and just done a quick training session with a bunch of our team here, I just kind of like taking notes yeah. Fervently just being just, oh my God, oh my God, I didn’t know about that one. Oh, oh, we should talk about that one on the podcast.
Aaron Horne
So yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff to cover. We’ll try and yeah, jump into as much of it as we can, but yeah, I guess primarily. Pat, do you want to kind of give a rundown of how it’s beneficial for kind of not just vendors, but for the agency as well?
Patrick Berry
Yes. I think what excites me the most about you guys is probably your window pane, our pay later option for advertising and I guess just funds needed when you sell a home. So for people that may not realize when you go to sell a home, fees are broken down, I guess into two components. You’ve got the commission aspect which is when we get paid for selling your home, but then there’s always an advertising aspect as well.
Patrick Berry
And that’s the money that us and I in an agency will invest to promote your property. For sale. And now this is always a fee that, you know, has to be paid in some format. And for some vendors it can be a little bit hard to come up with the funds upfront to be able to, I guess, get a property ready for market.
Patrick Berry
And this can be more than I guess just advertising the property and real estate dot com. It can go into actually preparing the property for sale as well. And that’s where you guys can help out, I guess.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the really nice thing about and campaign agents flagship VPA product is being able to I guess replicate an online store. Let’s just say I shop at David Jones all the time on their online store. Yep. They’ve got the pay now options as well as a simple pay later option. And that’s what campaign agent does on a custom branded agency platform.
Joshua Simmons
Gives your vendors a number of options whether they can afford to pay for their marketing, staging or home improvements up front your agency or they want to have some flexibility up to six months to to pay that back.
Patrick Berry
And that’s probably the feature I like the most because at the moment, you know, we do that to a degree for some of our clients. However, it is getting more and more difficult to be able to help client fund the sales. And this option here from you guys just really streamlines it. It makes it a lot easier for people, but for us, we can only really help you out for real.
Patrick Berry
Estate, dotcom, for instance, all your photography type fees where the ability for us to go in and, you know, talk to a vendor and say, look, we can get you more money for the home. If you could do these small renovations or if we can get a garden makeover done just to make the street appeal more, present it.
Patrick Berry
You know, some people don’t have access to three or $4,000 to potentially do that, but that could net you so much more money in the sale aspect. And that’s where I think you guys being able to step in and help help fund those additional little things to be able to get the property looking at it best I think is where it could be really beneficial.
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely. Absolutely. There’s so many agents that that come back to me having signed up to use campaign agent and have done a few listings and you know, we use our staging and home improvement services and yet they do sell a lot faster, particularly because the market is fairly hot at the moment. And you know, if you can have some leverage in terms of how the property presents, particularly online, and then when you, you know, you’re doing your OpenSSL social connections, yeah, it’s you’re going to have the edge and you know, if you know there’s two properties and and a potential buyer is comparing.
Aaron Horne
Yeah. Looking into it from my side of the fence, I do a bunch the marketing and the photography and organize the team there knowing even just from our side of it of getting to a place and knowing that the agent and I some, some agents have the ability just to be able to talk the vendor into being like, look, we just need to do these few little fix ups and it’ll just blow everything out of the water knowing that there’s a little kind of safety net of being like, Hey, like, you might not be able to afford these, right?
Aaron Horne
Now, but we can kind of get you set up to fix up the garden, do those minor renovations, or get like just a little 1%. As John, who’s normally on the show would say, remove the.
Patrick Berry
But yep. So what it means by that, Josh, is I would buy the home, but I don’t like this feature and or I would buy this, but, you know, I’d need to redo the kitchen and in John’s mind, every time I purchase, this is the but it’s referring to taking money off the sale price. So when we’re trying to get a home for 80, we’re trying to remove as many of the butts as we can so being able to go to a client and offer a solution to be able to fund some money to help get these items done, I think is a massive advantage.
Patrick Berry
Now, obviously we we know that you just can’t find infinite money. What’s what is the breakdown of what people could potentially borrowing they sort of buy now short term type loan arrangements.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah. So great question. So we funds the 25,000 regardless of the estimated sale price for any property. So for those larger properties we fund up to 2% so if my math is right on a me $2 million property, we would fund or be able to fund up to $40,000.
Aaron Horne
Yep, sure.
Joshua Simmons
Which is, which is great. Venture pays a flat 5.9% fee with no credit checks, no interest and no late fees, which I think is really, really nice. And I think that’s what helps separate our products from others on the market because if angels aren’t, you know, you’re not recommending for a vendor to enter into a high interest loan.
Joshua Simmons
It’s a flat fee.
Patrick Berry
You talk about the 5.9% fee. That’s only on the pay later product, isn’t it? Sorry, correct. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when we were just going through the finance or through the training with you earlier today, the vendor gets we send the vendor a link and they can open it up and you described it like an online store checking out.
Patrick Berry
And the one feature I really loved out of all of that was when they arrive in this online store, it has their address at the top of the page. It has how much we’ve agreed so might be $2,000, it might be $5,000, whatever it may be, as the total amount being borrowed or paid for, and then it gives them the option pay on credit card, it’ll be 5000 plus the service fee paid direct debit, it’s just $5,000 and it actually lays it out with all the different payment options, what the total fee would be.
Patrick Berry
So it’s very clear and not confusing for anyone to know.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, the transparency and the flexibility of it was something that I like kind of looked at, not just like, Oh man, this is like the thing that David Jones, like you put all your stuff into your car and you just like dream wishing, just like, Oh man, I wish I could buy all this stuff. Yeah, you can if you do the pay now.
Aaron Horne
But yeah, highlighter is also the option where yeah. Target a fee on a bit. Someone else use the example of insurance when you’re trying to pay your yearly insurance up front to be cheaper than your little effect afterwards.
Patrick Berry
Yeah, definitely. I also like was looking at it as well. I think whenever I book flights on Virgin and those damn service charges, like they’re massive, but it’s not that clear. Like it’s in the small print where the way yours works with the checkout button, it literally shows that is the amount that they agreed to spend on advertising and then that’s the fee involved as well is tacked right in there.
Patrick Berry
So yeah, it’s very obvious and I think that’s really good. And I love the fact that, you know, even by using the platform, if someone decides to pay the money directly via cash or AFTRA or BP there’s no additional cost for that. So it gives the vendor still the option that, you know, if you want to pay upfront and you’ve got the cash in the bank, right, if you want to use credit card because maybe you’ve got you know, your virgin frequent flier points, if you use a certain credit card, then awesome, you can run it through credit card.
Patrick Berry
And if you’re like me, I’m a point collector. So on.
Joshua Simmons
You would use the Amex option.
Patrick Berry
I would definitely use the and it’s option because even though there would be a larger service charge, may my wife Abby, we always pay the service charge because we’re off to the points. So I know there’s people out there that like me that like that option. And then obviously there’s the other option as well of the people that can’t afford it upfront but are happy for it to come out of the sale proceeds at the end of the sale so that pay later six month option I think is another fantastic opportunity there.
Patrick Berry
So the flexibility and the, the different ways that you can pay I think a really clever with the platform.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah, absolutely. Very, very transparent like you said all the additional costs, not additional cost plus the.
Patrick Berry
Services.
Joshua Simmons
Service fees are laid out flat 5.9%. And that is calculated on the pay later total. And then once you’ve been doing max payments that went through that automated invoice and the money comes into your account you know, with the property address. So you can easily reconcile this.
Patrick Berry
Fantastic. Now for the person that chooses the pay later option, what what’s involved like you know, when you go and do a short term loan, you got to go to the bank and you got to provide them all this documentation and then they make an assessment to decide whether or not they’re going to lend you that money. You know, it can take up to 2448 hours to get a response from the bank.
Patrick Berry
What if I was to choose the pay later option? What’s involved it for you guys to check that I can have the money I guess.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah. Great question.
Aaron Horne
So you’re killing it today. You’re on fire.
Joshua Simmons
On the fire.
Aaron Horne
Maybe we should call in the afternoon all the time.
Patrick Berry
I’m awake. By then I had a cup of coffee that could be in.
Aaron Horne
Sorry.
Joshua Simmons
So we have highlighted services because we are integrated with all the CRM, all major CRM. We’ve already got the vendor’s name, the email address, phone number. All the vendor needs to do is pumping the date of birth and answer a couple of questions. Whether they’re a power of attorney and confirm that their intentions are to repay campaign agents either at the six month points or at settlement every sooner.
Joshua Simmons
And assuming that we can identify who the vendor is based on the information that we have, which we do in the background of this application process, then we can approve them. So it’s really, really quick and easy. Yeah, sure. Really, really quick and easy.
Aaron Horne
Fantastic speaking. Sorry. Speaking of quick and easy, this is the other side of the things that I was just looking at on your website. Was kind of the accessing the equity in your home. So say you’re trying to purchase another place. You’re not sure there’s going to be a calculator here that was kind of helping work out what you can borrow.
Aaron Horne
Is that something we could delve into?
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Deposit now and yes.
Aaron Horne
Deposit now plus.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah, deposit I’m just trying.
Patrick Berry
To get back in the book.
Aaron Horne
Yeah. You know, you keep getting good questions. I want to get a good question in there.
Joshua Simmons
So deposit now and deposit in our place there. You know, I guess fundamental fundamentally sorry, the same products. So let’s just say Patrick’s vendor has just sold up their property. Yep. And the vendor needs some capital to purchase their next property. So.
Patrick Berry
So that’s likely in the way of a deposit for buying the next time.
Joshua Simmons
Exactly. Exactly.
Patrick Berry
Which is fantastic. Because I do a lot of contracts where unfortunately vendors can put like $1,000 down or no deposit and it’s not because they don’t want to, but it’s because their money’s all locked up in the other home. So having that flexibility to be able to potentially borrow a deposit, I think is fantastic because a lot of people may what they may not understand is even though the deposit it’s just a number and it comes off the sale price at the end, it shows strength in your offer when you’re trying to win it over somebody else.
Patrick Berry
So if you’re in a position and you can put down a 10% deposit or a, you know, a $50,000 deposit you like, that might be the difference between you winning the property over somebody else. So of course, you guys might be borrowing the same amount of money from the bank. You might be looking at the same sale price, and it could potentially come down to something as simple as one person’s got a $10,000 deposit, one person’s got a $30,000 deposit will.
Patrick Berry
I’ll go with the 30,000.
Joshua Simmons
Dollar, shall I say, more committed. Right, exactly right. Yeah. To a vendor. Yeah. But yeah, they can access, you know, between, you know, 30,000 to a half a million dollars really, really easily. Yeah. They copy in their application to our Melbourne based team and within 24 hours they’re approved and then within 24 hours after that we fund them whatever their approval.
Aaron Horne
Yeah, sure. So in a hot market it’s something that can kind of be the game changer between you and another couple or kind of get them to win the purple, to win the property or get your dream home and not miss out based on a small technicality. I’ve had my 14 days to find out this and or add to yeah, there’s a.
Patrick Berry
So I don’t know boils down to people that already own a home that are selling that home because you’re taking, you’re protecting your, your borrow, I guess against the home that they’ve just sold and what equity they’ve got left in that home.
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, they can apply get approved, you know, by the Wednesday, for example, and have the money in their account to be it’s.
Patrick Berry
From Melbourne and auctions are obviously the way to go. You do have to have a deposit ready to go on Saturday.
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely. Absolutely. But nevertheless, you know, it’s an awesome product that’s really, really taken off.
Patrick Berry
I think what I really like is that you guys have got lots of different products and we’ve only touched on two today. But I think the main thing is, is that it’s really facilitator between the agency and the agent. And the client and you guys to step in where you need to to help out. We’re really excited to be able to start talking to our clients about this product, but it just that the whole goal is just to really make it a lot easier for everyone involved.
Patrick Berry
And that’s basically what you guys are trying to do in a nutshell, isn’t it?
Joshua Simmons
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s really, really easy for your agency. You know, to to request and also to make payment for sending an email and text.
Patrick Berry
Exactly. And that’s the best bit.
Joshua Simmons
Yeah. And then managing all your payments as well. You can send the request manage and track.
Patrick Berry
Definitely. Well, we’re really excited to start using the product. We’re going to get this obviously up and running over the next couple of weeks. And yeah, if you are thinking about selling or you don’t know the best way to, I guess, attack.
Aaron Horne
Well, just even if you’re like sitting on the fence and being like, I do really want to just fix up these last few things before I look into talking to an agent or I’m just I just really need to get this done, but I can’t afford it. I’ll wait longer. Yeah, like, yeah, here’s an opportunity to jump on a product that can help out with all those things and yeah, maximize the sale price on your property at a really low risk.
Patrick Berry
Definitely.
Aaron Horne
Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much for coming in. Josh it was a pleasure going to the training and it was also a pleasure having you in the studio. And hopefully we didn’t scare you too much with any of our questions. You seem to have survived, so thank you so much for coming in.
Joshua Simmons
Goodness no. Thanks so much for having me.
Aaron Horne
Not a problem. Not a problem, my friend. Thank you so much for coming in and we will talk to you all next week on the property part.
Patrick Berry
Thanks very much, guys.
Aaron Horne
So yeah, you have been listening to the property bought, recorded and edited by Fool one for Media House in conjunction with, for and for Property Code.
Patrick Berry
This podcast is General Information Only and the thought to views expressed is the opinion of our panel and listeners should always seek the use their own investigation into any topic we discuss to ensure they fully understand their own situation.
John McGregor
It does not constitute and should not be relied on as purchasing, selling, financial or investment advice or recommendations expressed or implied, and it should not be used as an invitation to take up any agent or investment services no investment decision or activity should be undertaken on the basis of this information without first taking qualified and professional advice.
