Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Realty Talk: A better way to build your home

Episode Date: March 30, 2024

Having a home built can be a nightmare.  Just ask anyone who has done it.  Even with a builder, you might experience missed deadlines, cost blowouts, misunderstandings, little or no communication and so on.  This experience leads some people to do it themselves as an owner/builder.  Unfortunately, most owner/builders don’t know what they don’t know.   There is a better way.  It is called Build Buddy.   NEW – join our Facebook group, The Property Hub Collective: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1857513011165686 Join the Property Hub community on Substack! Sign up to get Australian property news, opinion, and episodes in your inbox: https://propertyhubau.substack.com/ Subscribe to RealtyTalk on the Property Hub channel: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Email Property Hub is a collaboration between Bushy Martin from KnowHow Property, Kevin Turner from Realty, Andrew Montesi from Apiro Marketing and Apiro Media, and Australia’s largest independent podcast network DM Media. Business and partnership enquiries: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello and welcome to this week's Realty Talk Show. Having a home built can be a bit of a nightmare, just ask anyone who's done it. With a builder comes missed deadlines or potential missed deadlines, cost blowouts, misunderstandings, little or no communication and so on. Okay so maybe we should do it ourselves as an owner builder. I mean what can go wrong? We see therein lies the problem because most owner builders don't know what they don't know.

Just ask a tradie. There must be a better way. And there is. It's called BuildBuddy. And we'll talk to the creator of BuildBuddy and an owner builder who is using it right now. That's up shortly. But just before we start, I want to thank our supporters and content partners, Realty, BMT Tax Depreciation, Know How Property Finance, Get Rare Property and Apiro Marketing. Now, if this is your first time with us, welcome. We hope that you're going to enjoy the show. And don't forget, too, that you can find us on all podcast players and through the Southern Cross Oz Stereo Network. If you like the show, certainly hope that you do, please hit that subscribe button.

Help us to continue to bring you the very best guests every week. You too can join the conversation anytime on Facebook by going to the Property Hub Collective. You'll find that easily in Facebook. It's called the Property Hub Collective. We'll be back in just a moment as we kick off this week's show. Property deductions can save you thousands of dollars each year. To make sure you maximise deductions, you need to work with the most experienced quantity surveyor in the country. BMT Tax Depreciation is the leading specialist in the industry. They've completed over 700,000 tax deduction schedules for residential investment and

commercial properties Australia-wide. BMT guarantee to find double your fee in the first full financial year deductions. Call BMT on 1300 728 726 today for an obligation free quote. Realty Talk from Property Hub on all podcast players. As I said in the introduction, the way we build a home today could arguably be broken the desire to find a better way is what drove danny asabgi to develop build buddy now interestingly danny is a builder himself and he runs a successful building company as you're going to learn danny set out to find a better way and he created the build buddy platform which offers an intelligent and unique approach to residential building enabling anybody to control the quality progress and budget

on their residential project danny joined me recently to talk about bill buddy hey danny welcome to the show good to be talking to you thank you for inviting me to say kevin yeah we're going to dig a bit into the platform by bill buddy um get some details of that shortly but firstly can i just tell you um why did you do it and what experience do you bring that's allowed you to build bill buddy okay i guess that's a great question to start with um so before i get to why i created the bill buddy platform let me tell you a little bit about my experience in the building industry uh as i think that will actually give us a good segue into why i created the bill buddy platform now other than being the ceo and founder of bill buddy

uh you might find it funny to know that i'm also the ceo and founder of hudson homes um you may know hudson homes a major australian uh home building company um that i guess before the current slowdown was doing 500 plus homes a year uh were recently named the 2023 australian professional builder of the year by the hia the housing industry association and i've personally been in the building industry at a senior level for for more than 20 years in 2016 i was also named the australian executive of the year for the building and construction industry by ceo magazine Now, I mentioned these points not to blow my own trumpet, but rather that I think it's fair to say that I've got a good understanding of the entire home building process, what works, what doesn't, as well as having some, I guess, firsthand experience on how I believe it can be improved. Not just the process, but the entire industry as well.

And that's why I said it was funny, because I'm a professional builder running a major home building company. I've built thousands of homes for Australians over the past 10 years. But I've also created a software platform that's now encouraging Australian families to build their own home without engaging a build-up. Yeah, isn't that a conflict of interest? Well, if you let that sink in for a moment, it's not necessarily a conflict of interest. It's a completely different direction, isn't it? When I first mentioned the concept of BuildBuddy to my colleagues in the industry, they thought I'd gone nuts. but the building industry had gone through some some of the biggest price increases and challenges

that certainly I've ever experienced and customers were paying I don't know 30 40 percent more to build their homes customers were frustrated builders were failing all around us and the rising cost of living meant that affordability and value for money was becoming becoming even more important than it had ever been and I thought the building industry hasn't changed in in i don't know more than 75 years and it had to be a better way and it had to be a technology-based solution that that really a solution that really puts the customer back in control one that eliminates the needs for multiple levels of management and a way to pass on all those savings directly to the customer so essentially it was a way of cutting out the builder

um now the the the concept of owner building is not a new one um i don't know it's been around for like forever and i don't know what the exact statistics are but something like 18 000 owner builder applications made every year in australia so it's a big segment of that market that's not really being looked after um and then i agree that nobody likes dealing with the owner builder uh it's not just the trades uh they don't like dealing with them it's it's the banks it's the suppliers it's even the real estate agents and and the reason i believe is generally generally owner builders don't know what they're doing uh actually precisely they don't know what they don't know i mean it it seems easy to think i'll go and do this and that i guess that's why

a lot of people do actually go down the owner builder road but i just want to sorry to interrupt while we're on the same train here who did you build this for because i i know that not everyone wants to be an owner builder because a lot of people realize how difficult it can be so who is your target market here well you would think it would naturally be uh the owner builders and the owner builders would um i guess by default use this but i didn't actually build a platform for them um like i said even though they're certainly going to be the most obvious use of the platform i actually designed it for for the school teacher police officer husband and wife looking to build their dream home wanting to pay control of the process being able to save you know

20 or in some cases even more of the cost of building their home that's who the app has been specifically designed for people with little to no experience that's obviously not going to be for everybody and there is a role that still exists for you know certain homes or certain people to to delegate the entire task to a builder uh but there's certainly a big chunk of the market that would be suitable for a platform like this there's actually two platforms so there's there's there's bill buddy that's the one for the homeowners and then there's bill buddy pro and that's for the suppliers the consultants and the contractors uh and they both work hand in hand and one connects the other kind of like um like uber and uber driver i guess um so it's

built for the entire building industry homeowner included okay let me let me ask you another question now um the you mentioned how big the owner builder market is i think 18 000 applications you said a year or something like that how how had have you tested this do you do you know what the market size is going to be for buildbuddy um i'm going to make a prediction but i'm going to say that more houses will be built in australia through buildbuddy in five years time than through any major builder that's a prediction but have you like bill bunny's operating now can you give me an example of um and any like popular stats how's it being picked up by consumers so we ran had a small pilot program launching at the end of last year so i wanted 10 customers that came

onto the platform purely for free as a pilot program just to give me feedback and i promised them that i was going to hold their hand through the whole process and i would have my team at hudson home support them and everything else so i want to start with 10 customers we got the 10 customers at one home show in sydney and we're working through them through the whole process to give you an idea of the size of the market on sunday night there was a five minute segment on tv that interviewed one of the people going through that pilot program and within 48 hours 730 people had downloaded the app uh 568 had validated that they were real people off those 568 i come with the exact number but it's around 158 people uploaded their projects

on to build buddy and been inundated in the past 48 hours um getting back to all these people but it kind of runs itself now so the app has been completed it's got so many functionality and so many features that it can stand on its own two feet so that was in the last 48 72 hours um and that has really really reassured us that what we're building there is a big segment of the market that wants to build their dream home they know they've been priced by builders they don't trust builders i mean this morning i woke up to the news of two more builders collapsing one that's been around for 50 plus years and another one that had 120 million in pipelines these aren't small businesses these are major builders who are struggling hudson homes have

struggled in the last three years i mean ever since covert came along we we increased our sales dramatically but at fixed price contracts um at the old pricing so all builders are doing are tough and people don't want to take that risk anymore yeah there's so much that goes into building a home and I've looked at your website by the way I'll just give that we'll throw it up on the screen build the buildbuddy.au sorry buildbuddy.au now I've had a look at the site you clearly state there that there's so much that goes into it like planning budgeting getting suppliers and quotes scheduling tradies tracking progress knowing what to look for and that's a key thing isn't it making payments and keeping track of finances now all of these

things have been built into it how much of that did you discover in that first 10 uh that you tested it with i mean was it shaped out of that or did you have a fairly good feel when you first built it when i first came up with the concept of build buddy uh i started flow charting i thought to myself it's not apps that build homes right we all know that it's people that build homes and if you really think about what a builder does a builder adds value in three ways essentially in broad broad terms they have a workflow so they've got a step-by-step process they follow to you know coordinate and manage the process of building a home secondly they've got contacts so they've got established supplier relationships they've got a network of consultants and

contractors who actually do the work and thirdly you would hope that they've got some type of quality assurance or safety protocols as well. Now, when I first started, I mapped all this out on an A1 sheet of paper of every step in the building process that we did at Hudson Homes and all the things that could possibly go wrong. By the time I was done,

I ended up with nine A1 sheets of paper. They're on the floor in my office here and I looked at it and I thought, forget it, this is way too hard. And I folded it and actually I'll show you, this is in my drawer here. This is one of the sheets that showed you what I came up with. I don't know if you can see that, but I've got, I've got. And then I met my co-founder Vince and Vincent.

I've known Vince for ever since school, actually. And he was a software engineer. He'd done some senior work with CSIRO. I showed him this idea and he said, this is brilliant. He says, and when COVID came, he says, why don't we just get started? I thought, okay. I said, how long will it take? He said, Oh, probably a few hundred thousand dollars and six months we've put in over four million dollars now and it's been two and a half years but what we ended up with was something that just became better and better it's got a full banking app in it we're trying to change the way that people

transact trades people are the ones that cop it when the builder goes bust on our platform that's impossible to happen so we protect both sides we protect the consumer not handing over money it's all done through digital trust accounts digital wallets so we're using technology in such an advanced way that we've taken every process in the build um in the building process and we have used a digital tech-based approach to every single step uh quite amazing um let me let me ask you now um what what's the cost of this for someone who wants to come on you said there's 700 people came on and downloaded the app i imagine is the is the app free by the way um it is 100 free for the consumer the person building the home uh we're paid a referral free by the service providers on

the platform um so when you find our platform to get a quote from an engineer the price you get from the engineer is the same price that they would offer at hudson homes and when i started building that side of the platform the first people i went to were my trade base at hudson homes and many of them have been with me for 10 years plus i know the quality of their work and my deal to them was this i'm going to feed you so much more business through build buddy but what i want you to do is treat them with the same level of quality same level of service and the same pricing you offer me as a major builder they've done it yeah well i was going to ask you then how you how you make money out of this but now i know and those trusted suppliers and

tradies that you mentioned are they selected purely on your own experience with them at this stage it is a closed marketplace so because we don't charge them a subscription fee our motivation is not to build that like you know some of the other platforms that are out there where you can find a tradie and things like that we are not interested in that what we are interested in doing is building a curated marketplace of verified trades people that only service the major building industry. You won't ever find somebody to hang a picture or hang a door on my platform. You will find a large business that does electrical work and are professional. The best thing about this is this is the first website that exists where you actually rate the tradie. Now people rate

builders all the time and I give all my customers at Hudson Homes my personal phone number. You can walk into any of my display homes, there'll be a sheet of paper in there with my head on it and it He says, here's my email address and here's my personal mobile number. And people call and I want them to call me because there's 150 things that go wrong when you're building a home. Whether you're doing it yourself

or whether you're doing it as a builder. But my attitude is what the company does when those things go wrong. So I wanna hear about it. So I get a phone call right on that phone right there from a customer three years ago. And he rings me up and says, Danny, I'm such and such a customer

building a house on the central coast. He goes, Hudson Homes. He goes, you guys are the worst painters So I explained to him about how we, you know, contract to a painter and so on and so forth, and he sent me a few pictures, and I had to agree with him, the job wasn't the best. So I ring up Barry, our painter on the Central Coast, and I say, Barry, come on, mate, what's going on here? Sorry, Danny, I'll let you down. I'll be out there on Wednesday to fix it. So I ring up the customer, I say, Barry will be there on Wednesday. Anyway, didn't hear anything further. On Friday, email

comes in, Hudson Homes, one-star review. You know, they lie, they don't care about it, their painting quality is crap hurry up barry i said barry mate what happened here's a wednesday he goes yeah here's our mate surf was up honest to god true story surf was up so here i am as a builder caring about my customer the trades person and this is very sad for me to say but over the past 15 years the quality of trademanship in australia and the care factor has declined now the customer engages directly with the trade and they review the trade so over time the marketplace will determine who stays on the platform and off and my message to the trades people is this if you treat my customers on the build buddy platform well and you're a framing carpenter

and you're charging twelve thousand dollars because you've got 55 star reviews and your next person is charging you know two thousand dollars less but they got crappy reviews they're to go and pay the extra money for you especially now they're not paying a they're not paying a builder's margin so if this is not just about saving money it's about building a better quality home now people often say to me well you need a builder they were experienced and so on we haven't ignored that fact every single customer gets what we call a construction buddy a construction buddy is a licensed builder acting in the capacity of a site supervisor but the dynamic of the relationship now has changed they work for you they're rated by you they report to you this

could be somebody who is a young guy who wants to build his business and really look after customers and look after you know 20 customers at a time or it could be a really experienced builder who is towards the end of their career maybe at 55 years of age he wants to spend more time you know coaching his son's football team and just really looking after three or four customers And he might charge them, you know, $25,000 to build the house for them, turns up each day, does a quality assurance checklist. So it's created a marketplace for people that, you know, Uber drivers didn't exist before.

There's no such thing as an Uber driver. Same thing with construction buddies. We're creating a whole new dynamic to it. And that's the secret sauce. The secret sauce that enables the police officer and the school teacher to build their own home without a builder is to still give them a builder but change the dynamic of the relationship. Danny, I love your passion.

I love your product. I said to you or your associate that I really enjoyed looking at your website, looking at your video. By the way, there is a short video on the website. I'll mention that again now. It's buildbuddy.au. Go check that short explainer video. It runs for about four or five minutes, but it'll give you a great picture on how it can help you. Hey, Danny, we're going to have to leave it there, mate.

Thank you so much. My pleasure. What I'd like to do is talk to someone who's actually using BuildBuddy right now, and we'll chase someone down with your help, and we'll have a talk to them in the show as well. So stay with us. It is cool as well. Sorry, Kevin, about that. We actually have a 67-year-old lady in Queensland.

She's never built a house before. She's so excited about BuildBuddy. She's navigating her own way through the entire pre-construction process, and she said to me in her own words if i can do this anyone can and i believe her that's that's fantastic i love it mate all the best um big investment from you it's going to it will be a it's it's a fantastic product buildbuddy.au danny all the best mate look forward to talking to you again real soon pleasure thank you kevin bye bye stay with us after this short break we're going to visit an owner builder who's using build buddy and we'll join him on site that's up successful property

investment is a game of finance do you have the right team and the right game plan realty talk is brought to you by know how property more than mortgage brokers bushy martin and his team of investment architects set you up with a sustainable strategy structured to lower your costs tax risk and stress while increasing your capacity for growth. KnowHow has helped over 1,900 homeowners and investors secure more than $800 million in property wealth. So get set to live more, work less, and live your legacy. Want to know how to invest in your freedom? Visit knowhowproperty.com.au. This is Realty Talk powered by realty.com.au. And I mentioned just before the break that we'd be having a quick look

at a person who's actually using BuildBuddy, and he joins me now from Coomera in Queensland, Greg Lurie. G'day, Greg. How are you doing? G'day, Kevin. How are you, mate? I'm good, mate. I can see the BuildBuddy in the background there.

So I've just got a couple of key questions to ask you about. The decision for you to build yourself, was that made before you found BuildBuddy or after? well it's an interesting question kevin so we um we were going down the stream of the owner builder so i've got a quote through a builder uh a custom builder and it was just astronomical the prices it was a lot more than we thought it was going to be um and then we were um and uh and you know do we cut a bit off the house or do we remove a few things just to reduce the costs so we could actually build uh and then we started thinking about the owner builder route started researching

into that as much as i could uh and then i put a post funnily enough on um an owner builder forum in uh on facebook and um i was just a bit lost and i just wanted a bit of guidance and a bit of help uh i reached out just if someone would know how to um to estimate build costs a bit better and i was trying to sort of go down that stream and then danny from build buddy who i'd never met before um just reached out and he said you know i may have a program that's still in its infancy but um might be able to help you so we started to chat and and it was it was actually what exactly what i was looking for because i'm not a builder i'm not pretending to be a builder um i love learning and i love i'm not afraid you know to to research and look into things but yeah danny's

program just sort of was exactly what i needed so it was sort of it was quite amazing how it well that's good that you sort of answered my next question which is what attracted you to it but i can see the block in the background there so have you really have you started the project yet or are you still in the planning stage uh so it's all through council it's all approved and where it's all been scraped i don't know if you can see so it's been scraped and um and then we've had the surveyor in so he's um he's marked it all out um so the next step is the is the peering so i think it's 57 years it'll go in and then um and then it's all the draining and a bit electrical and getting in so you're pretty early in in the stage but i imagine there's been

a lot that's happened already getting council approval and so on at this very early stage has build buddy been able to help you through that and is there something that you've learned that you might not have known about because of build buddy i there's a lot i haven't known uh and like i sort of touched on earlier every time you know i come up with a problem then i've got to find answers to it and uh the team up in queensland for build buddy uh because of my questions i guess that sort of helps them in a way uh on what they need in the program but they've been nothing short of fantastic so i can phone them up with which might be a silly question for them but it's sort of a good question for me so i'll ask them whatever and

they're they're fully accommodating to to help me you know get to the next step in the next step and because when you're going through something like what you're going through there is no such thing as a silly question if it's a question for you it's going to be a question that someone else will ask because they simply don't have that knowledge tell me are you surprised by the number of things that are involved in building building yourself i reckon i was a little bit naive as to so many processes uh and so many trades and everything that's involved in it but um i'm very process driven sort of person so i just break everything down into little steps and work out what i've got to do to achieve that and then i'll move to the next one and the next one

and I'm taking a lot of notes on what I've done and who I've had to contact for certain things and especially all the council requirements, what they need. So, yeah, so far I'm absolutely loving it and I understand and I'm fully aware that there's going to be hiccups along the way, but, you know, we'll just work through them and then go to the next step and just keep going forward until we've got a house.

Yeah, fair enough, mate. But knowing what you know now, what do you see as the biggest advantage in using the app? So there's probably two things. So the main thing, or one of the main things, is obviously the cost. So there's massive reductions. And like I said earlier, to be honest, we probably wouldn't have been able to build this house if it wasn't for BuildBuddy to the size and scale of what we're building. So that's probably one. and then I suppose the flexibility and not knowing what's going on in the building industry

that was another key factor that scared us so we got a quote through another custom builder and it was high but then I sort of asked them I said what's the what's the guarantees that you're going to be around to finish the house and they you know they said you know we're looking to be around by then but there's no guarantees um so it's a lot of money and we were quite nervous about putting money into other people's hands because in this estate where we're building there's two other porter davis houses that sat for i'm just guessing maybe six months just sitting at frame stage so with this lease i'm in a lot more control especially with the money side of it um so you know if i order something then i receive it or if i'm paying a trade for their

work then i know the work's been done yeah there's a lot in behind build buddy that the that danny and his team have built in to you know get the schedule on track for you with all the budgeting and so on um have you got an estimate as to how long the construction is going to take you i haven't got that just as yet so next week is the construction phase release of the app So I've gone through all the selection phase. So I've completed everything for the selections and I've got a BOQ, a bill of quantities, which outlines all the prices and the trades

so I know what the house is going to cost. And then next week we sit down and we go through all the construction phase of it. So that should be when I get the end date or approximate. Yeah, you mentioned cost savings. Is there savings on funds in the construction? I know it's early for you, but have you been able to estimate, you know, how much you have saved in terms of time and money?

And is that important or is it the fact that you get a bit of peace of mind? Well, it's definitely both. You know, with the cost of living nowadays, if I can save money on anything, then I'll try to because it's sort of better in my family's pocket than someone else's, I guess. So money is definitely a big factor. um i reckon i reckon oh it's easily over 200 wow easily up to 200 probably probably closer to 250 000 i reckon we'll be saving um but it's early days you know the house hasn't

been built yet so there's still a few sort of unknowns come back to me and we'll do an interview when there's a house behind me we'll do that we'll actually try we'll monitor monitor how it goes with you because we're talking to Danny as well but um hey Greg all the best man thank you for joining us today I appreciate you giving us the time to do this and particularly since you're on site so all the best and we look forward to watching what happens Greg now I appreciate it Kevin and uh I'm excited as well are you curious about harnessing your super for property investment Propel your future with the enlightening online seminar, The Ultimate Masterclass to Self-Managed Superfund Property Mastery.

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Unlock bonus content now as a premium subscriber. Well, that brings us to the end of this week's show. Make sure that you don't miss a single episode of Realty Talk or Bushy's Get Invested podcast delivered to you each week. And you can do that by subscribing to The Property Hub now on your favourite podcast player or wherever you are listening to or watching this show.

Join the conversation as well anytime on Facebook at the Property Hub Collective. I want to say a special thanks before I go to our supporters and content partners, Realty, BMT, Tax Depreciation, Know How Property Finance, Get Rare Property and Apiro Marketing. I'm Kevin Turner and on behalf of Bushy and the Property Hub team, we look forward to seeing you again next week.