Travis Williams
For years, real estate agents have used cards and yellow sticky notes to index their clients. Travis Williams is changing that.
Williams is a prime example of an entrepreneur who seized on a niche and turned it into a thriving business. Williams, a former dredging industry IT engineer who ended up helping run his father’s real estate business, decided to create a small software company to manage clients.
Melbourne-based Box + Dice Software, which has been going for more than five years now, sells software solutions to real estate agents. While it now has 89% of agents in Melbourne with display advertising space as customers, the company has now expanded into Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and New Zealand. Since opening in 2005, its revenues have been growing at 30-40% a year. Having just expanded interstate and overseas in May this year, Box + Dice could be on the edge of something big.
Instead of putting the customer’s information on cards, real estate agent clients load the software into the system. The agent can use it to send the client emails, listing the property, processing commissions, balancing trust accounts, writing letters and all details of that contact history. Instead of sticking it on cards, it’s all on their computer.
And while agents can handle about 200 clients using cards, this system allows them up to 10,000. The system also allows them to load their information on to any of the growing number of real estate portals now springing up.
Williams, 40, says he was amazed to discover that no one had actually done anything like this before. After graduating with a degree in geomatic engineering, Williams started work as an IT specialist in the dredging industry, working in Sydney, Northern Territory Germany and Spain. It was supposed to be three months on, one month off, but he ended up working 12 hour days, seven days a week.
After 12 months, had had enough and gravitated back to his father’s real estate business in Williamstown. “When you took an inquiry, you went back to your desk and you either put it on cards or yellow sticky notes,’’ he says. “I just couldn’t do that. Everything in my life was stored on a computer so that’s where I had to store my names and numbers.”
He whipped up a data base, then got everyone else in the business using it. After a break and a three month visit, he came back determined to set up his own business. Box + Dice got its first client in November 2005 and it has been building ever since.
Williams says much of the drive to create the business came out of his own personality. He admits he is an obsessive. “My nature is I get 1000 per cent immersed in things and that, in my opinion, is a driving attribute to getting a business off the ground,’’ he says.
“You have to be obsessed with it. I am always thinking of the business. I am always getting my lap top out, writing notes on a process or an idea, or writing up an email that I want to send on Monday.”
He says he works four to six week obsessively and then takes a week or two off.
“I switch it all on, and then I switch it all off,’’ he says. “That works for me. It probably won’t work when I am having a family which I don’t have right now. I have not been presented with that challenge in life yet.”
There are 10,000 registered real estate agents around Australia but the list includes lawyers, accountants, developers and financial services companies. Instead Box + Dice targets real estate shop fronts focused on growth.
Williams says most of the business now coming in is from word of mouth. “Our greatest source of sales is referrals from our clients,’’ Williams says. “Our greatest form of growth is industry talk
He does not believe in social media, claiming that’s purely social. “It’s for old school friends and if you start injecting a business model through a social environment, it’s so easy to get shut down.”
Instead, his company generates word of mouth sales by giving clients everything they need. “We can’t tell them to talk but we can make them feel good and they talk naturally,’’ he says.
He says there is enormous potential for growth because most agents still use paper. “There are still many good agents today that use paper systems and that’s our market. There are still agents there that use cards, and very good ones.’’ he says. “The value that we bring to the table is scalability. Our target market is the agents that want to grow their business.”
Real estate, according to Williams, is not about sales. “It’s not a sales job, it’s a profession,’’ he says. “The good ones understand and specialise in multiple fields like finance, psychology and life relationships. Ultimately, real estate is about helping people make decisions. You are proving evidence so that people can make well informed decisions and the better you are at representing facts and information to people, the better the real estate agent you are.”
