From the Ground Up: Kay Glendining on Building, Balance & Bayleys

David Faulkner is at the bach in Foxton Beach with Ryan Steven of realestate.co.nz, joined by Harrison Vaughan from the Tommy's office in Wellington, for a data heavy look at the rental market with the PMC a week out. Ryan came to real estate via the Navy, spent fifteen years selling, swung the gavel at several thousand auctions, and now runs sales at realestate.co.nz. He brings the numbers. Nationally, asking rents are up just 1.9 percent year on year, which means in real terms they are going backwards. But that average hides everything. Central Otago Lakes is up 7 percent, Canterbury 5.8, the West Coast 5.4, and Christchurch has become one of the most liveable small cities going. Meanwhile Auckland’s average asking price has dropped below a million for the first time in six years. There is a clear shift in what renters want. Apartments and townhouses are losing interest while houses with outdoor space win, a change both Ryan and Harrison trace back to lockdown. The second half turns to marketing, and it should make a few GMs sit up. Why property management marketing budgets deserve a hard look, what a $30 upgrade does to days on market and what that is worth in a landlord’s pocket, and the awkward dilemma of private listings on an industry owned portal. Then AI: why the site is now optimising for how people search in Claude and ChatGPT, how semantic search surfaces a property with a vege garden the listing never mentions, and the surprising figure for how much traffic actually comes from AI platforms today.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined by Tal Messa, co-founder of Tapi and principal sponsor of the PMC, with the conference now a fortnight out. Tal tells the origin story properly for the first time on the show. Dropping out of uni, the Creative HQ incubator, an investor asking what on earth he knew about property management, and the answer being nothing. So he and Florian booked forty hours of rental viewings a week until Wellington property managers started asking them to please just take the house or leave. The idea was called Flatfish. Harrison, one of the first doors they knocked on, politely told them to get lost. Nine years later Tapi sits on just under 600,000 active properties, an estimated 95 percent of New Zealand’s managed stock, with Australia growing fast and the UK and Ireland live since March. The meat of the conversation is AI, and Tal takes a position that cuts against the hype. He walks through the shift from systems of record to workflow to action to coordination, then argues the next move is back toward the human. Tapi announced a voice agent a year ago and deliberately pulled back from it, because that was not the future they wanted to build. His case is about accountability: a landlord hands you their biggest asset and wants someone to answer for it, and you cannot blame an AI. There is a drive thru comparison that makes the point better than any slide would.

David Faulkner is in Wellington with Harrison Vaughan at Tommy’s, and joined from Melbourne by Jason Colbey, head of community at Tapi, for an announcement. After six conferences on the bounce, David is handing over the microphone. Jason will co-MC the PMC with Samantha Arnold on 29 and 30 October at the Pullman. Jason has MCed BDM summits, PMP awards and industry conferences across Australia, plus charity work with the Starlight Foundation. He also lasted two years and nine months in property management himself, after telling a manager that only a pathetic person would quit inside three years, and he has never forgotten it. That experience is behind the message he wants to bring to Auckland: property managers are the most important people in this industry, and he will die on that hill. The conversation gets pointed on value. Why management fees in Victoria sit at five to seven percent while Tasmania runs at eleven to seventeen, what that does to a rent roll multiplier, and why cutting fees to chase doors leaves everybody poorer. Why property management is still treated as a stepping stone to sales rather than a career. And what Jason thinks New Zealand does better than Australia, which comes down to competing brands actually talking to each other. Also: the Wellington market lifting after a dead winter, what the election is doing to owner decisions, Labour’s flip on interest deductibility, and the PMC Awards judges revealed, eventually.

David Faulkner is joined by Rico Gomez of Neurofit, a Christchurch based neuroscience coach who works with elite athletes and business owners, and who keynotes day two of the PMC. Rico came to this work the hard way. He and his wife went through serious mental health struggles about eleven years ago, and after nothing else worked he went looking for answers in cognitive neuroscience himself. What he found changed both their lives, and it became the basis of the rewire process he now runs with clients. His core argument will challenge how most of us think about burnout. The answer is not to remove pressure. Pressure is the hand squeezing the toothpaste tube, and what comes out of you under pressure was already inside you. What determines whether someone lasts forty years or five is not the performance itself but where their head is three days afterwards. For property managers caught between landlords and tenants, and for the managers leading them, there is plenty here that lands straight away. Why your hard conversation should never be your first conversation, and what relational equity means in practice. The trust box and the performance box, and what happens when a leader lives in only one of them. Why scrolling and outsourcing your thinking to AI is quietly making you less resilient. And a story about imposter syndrome that turned into the most important yes of Rico's career.

David Faulkner is joined by Sarina Gibbon of Tenancy Advisory, alongside Samantha Arnold and Property Brokers' Sarah Green, to flag a case the whole industry needs to watch. Earlier this month the High Court gave a tenant leave to take a question of law to the Court of Appeal: just how far does a Section 78A rent refund for unlawful premises actually go? Sarina walks through how we got here, from the 2013 Anderson decision that pushed unlawful premises outside the RTA, to prohibited transactions under Section 137, to Winton v Pabu and the "footling breach" line, and why the binding authority everyone has relied on since 2018 may not apply to Section 78A at all. In this case the tenant is seeking $113,000. The heart of it: if the Court of Appeal decides the benefit of accommodation is no longer a good enough reason to discount a refund, tenants will start ringing councils to check consents, and plenty of agencies will not know what is sitting on their rent roll. Sarina's argument is that this is an opportunity rather than a threat, and she gives three moves to make this week. Also: where liability actually lands between the agency and the owner, whether your indemnity clause would hold up, what happens to fees already collected, the granny flat rules and why consent free does not mean compliant, and the question of why the only intervener in this case is a tenant advocacy group. Sarina and Sarah are speaking back to back at the PMC on 29 and 30 October, with the Renti soiree the night before.