Proptech Australia - President's Report 2025
- Kylie Davis
- Dec 10, 2025
- 20 min read
Updated: Dec 12, 2025
2025 has been a foundational year for Proptech Australia. The skills of our 2025 directors set us on a path that was more thoughtful, intentional, grounded and long term future focused.
The numbers that you see in this report reflect this - they are solid and demonstrate consistency. We have not had the wild growth of our past early years. Instead our performance has been deep and anchored. And that is extraordinary given the headwinds that have immersed the sector generally.
The work of the committee has focused on projects that are creating strong foundations for the association and which will move the needle for all proptechs. Key initiatives have included:
New website and rebrand
We started 2025 with a bang relaunching the website with our new branding as Proptech Australia and signalling our bold new direction for the association.
The site has been built on the Wix platform, which gives us event ticketing, membership sign up, retail (when we get to that) and our CRM all in the one place. The cost savings that we made moving away from Hubspot alone made the project worthwhile and we would like to thank the team at Proptech Guru for their assistance.
But it has not been without its many and significant teething issues. While members of the association are companies, our member database was full of people and individual emails - many of which were out of date. The work to clean up membership contacts, map people to the right companies, provide appropriate permissions and THEN work out if memberships are financial or lapsed has been considerable and the focus of much of the year.
If there is a moral to the story, it is beware out of the box solutions that promise to do 75% of the task. It is that last 25% that is the killer. And that in itself is a timely reminder for all proptechs about how we position ourselves in market.
Membership clean up and structuring
Proptech Australia is hugely indebted to the work of our secretary and treasurer Chris Mason for his diligence and rigour in cleaning up our member database and delivering a strategy and project plan for its ongoing improvement.
It has been the goal of the association to move from a manual to an automated membership payment system for many years. This year, we achieved it technically but in doing so, created a host of other issues for our accounts and bookkeeping.
Chris has spent an unholy amount of time getting to know the data of our members and thinking through the onboarding journey and its financial implications both for reporting and governance, but also membership and revenue growth.
The work he is leading in 2026 with our new suppliers Pondsplash, is a major initiative and investment for Proptech Australia and will, I am confident, prove to be fundamental to the association’s ongoing success for the long term future.
Ecosystem visibility and data capture
The Proptech Association mapped the proptech ecosystem back in 2023. It was a completely manual job that nearly killed us which is why it hasn’t been an annual initiative.
This year, with the new website and CRM in place, we began the task of trying to both capture the broader proptech universe and clean up our own dataset. How hard could it be? You create a form on a website and the job’s done, right? Bah hahahah!
If there is a hallmark of the proptech industry, it is that we don’t like deadlines, and we refuse to be categorised. So while the capture of proptechs out there doing work across the property, real estate, construction and planning sectors - and their associated finance and insurance sectors - has been relatively straightforward, verifying them and deciding which box they fit into has been very much another that is still an ongoing rubix cube. Then add to that what seems to be the consistent flow of buyouts. It’s been like nailing jelly to a wall.
We are grateful for the level head and systemic approach of new board member Hedy Ivanovski on the project and are working to deliver the 2026 Proptech Map in the new year. If anyone would like to sponsor its launch in February, please let me know.
Government consultations
After giving evidence at the Senate Inquiry into housing affordability in 2024, Proptech Australia has been on the radar of both federal and the NSW state government and is now regularly being asked to consult.
Government is recognising that across a disparate ecosystem of property developers and builders, owners, agents and managers, proptech is one of the few sectors able to get cut through and deliver consistently across local, state and federal legislation.
New board member Hedy Ivanovski and I - with significant input from Erik Tveitnes - presented to the Federal Department of Finance on the Digital ID initiative.
Our position was that a Digital ID and identity verification system is an essential piece of infrastructure to support Australia’s digital economy and should be funded appropriately in the same way the government funds national roads, NBN, rail. We also argued that its rollout should be free - at least initially - to support business adoption of Digital ID as a replacement to traditional “100 points of ID” requirements and aligned with other new regulation including AML and privacy.
Proptech Energy Efficiency Data Standard
One of the biggest initiatives launched this year was the Proptech Energy Efficiency Data Standard, although the soft rollout of the data meant we still have a long way to go to putting it on the radar of every Proptech and much to do around explaining its use.
With all the energy efficiency data points now confirmed and released by CSIRO expect to hear a lot more about this in 2026 as it is by far one of the most influential and game changing initiatives that the association has been involved in to date.
A huge debt of gratitude goes to the head of our Energy Efficiency Advisory Committee Chair, Cecille Weldon, for her vision to create the standard and her hard work and collaboration with key stakeholders, including CSIRO, that has brought it to life.
This is the first time that the property ecosystem and proptech have coalesced around a consistent and rigorously tested data set. The benefits are significant to everyone who decides to embrace the new naming conventions and descriptions, removing the need to resource data clean up and data matching while also opening up a raft of new opportunities for proptech products in this space.
All Proptech Australia members can sign up to the Proptech Energy Efficiency Data Standard free of charge.
Home Energy Ratings consultation
Proptech Australia was asked to submit a proposal and was successful in winning a paid consultation to both the NSW state and Federal governments on ways to enable better adoption of residential Home Energy Ratings.
Again, this leverages the excellent work done by Cecille Weldon as the head of our energy efficiency committee, her deep subject matter expertise and the past two years of work that has been done engaging with government at all levels, including a successful roundtable last year at the Proptech Forum. But I would also like to thank our treasurer/secretary Chris Mason and vice president John Minns for their support and hard work in pulling together the winning tender documentation over a very exhausting weekend.
The consultation has been a landmark not just for Proptech Australia, but for our industry and is a key sign of our growing maturity and reputation as a sector. Governments have a tendency to come up with ideas for regulation, roll them out demanding compliance and then it is the job of proptechs to try and make sense of the obligations and update their technology or processes to accommodate for our clients.
But this is the first time that the proptech community has been asked to provide insights specifically in how regulation could work better and be more effective by working with us practically before legislation is drafted and with a goal of making compliance easier.
This has allowed us to provide key insights into the behaviour not just of proptechs, but residential real estates and property consumers. We would like to thank Realestate.com.au, Domain and MRI Software for their feedback and insights so far, at what has been a very hectic sprint at one of the most difficult times of the year.
The report will be delivered early in the new year and will be shared with members, followed by an extensive six month campaign to bring all members up to speed.
Proptech Awards 2025
Our Proptech Awards were an extremely successful event again this year with 330 people celebrating at the Fullerton Hotel.
This year, we had 151 finalists and gave out 35 awards, including a new award for Proptech Team of the Year.
A huge thank you to our MCs on the night Belinda Sinclair from Domain and the irrepressible Peter Schravemade from REACH Australia. It is a big job to hold the room together and keep the awards rolling along and the audience engaged.
This year we raised $9100 for the Property Industry Foundation charity, with the money going towards youth homelessness. A big thank you to AJ Chand and RESO for adapting their tech to make the online auction possible.
The Proptech Awards are a major initiative in our calendar linking our work around building awareness of the work that proptech does while also recognising excellence and setting standards for achievement. The entries also provide insights into how proptech is adapting to the market and the impact of future trends.
It is a huge organisational undertaking, especially for an association that is mainly volunteer run. And this year our member manager, KC Rodriguez wrapped up her time with us just a few days before the awards, putting additional pressure on the team. I would like to thank my Proptech Guru team for leaning in so hard to get the awards over the line, especially at a time when we were also trying to address issues on the website, membership and ticketing. The work of Mark Hollands, Jillian Escudero and Jen Escudero was heroic.
A big thank you also to our sponsors who made the night possible and our judges for volunteering their time and commitment.
Next year, the Proptech Awards will be moving to The Ivy.
Member Meetups
The changeover between our previous member specialist, KC Rodriguez and our new coordinator, Patricia Louise, while our supplementary team focused on the Awards and later Forum, meant we didn’t host as many Member Meetups or online events as we intended in 2025.
Nevertheless, those that we did organise pushed the envelope on what is possible and were extremely successful giving us new templates for 2026 and beyond.
How to Partner with REA
A huge shoutout to Erik Tveitnes, our board member from REA, who organised an extremely successful How to Partner with REA evening in Melbourne, inviting proptechs to meet the REA team and hear what REA looks for when partnering with proptechs, the thinking proptechs need to have done before they approach, and the different angles into the big red team. We had 30 people attend.
The event was so good, it inspired Domain to host something similar as a satellite event at the Proptech Forum which quickly sold out.
The meetup gave us insight into the hunger for connection and understanding between the startup and scaleup end of town and the established proptechs. It also demonstrated that events don’t have to be highly curated and top down and that there is a big role for crowd sourced content within the community. So if you’ve got an idea, hit us up.
Commercial Meetup
A fantastic initiative by Carolyn Trickett as the head of our Commercial Advisory Committee and our secretary/treasurer Chris Mason, brought together approximately 30 handpicked commercial proptech stakeholders to identify how the association can better engage with the commercial proptech sector.
Carolyn, who is the principal of the JLL Spark Global Innovation Program hosted the event at the stunning JLL headquarters and got the evening off to a rowdy and fun start with speed introductions before some collaborative problem solving. Great work by Chris Mason driving the feedback session.
NZ Meetup
JLL were also generous enough to support a proptech meetup in Auckland. We had about a dozen attendees including members of MRI, Valocity, the Real Estate Institute of NZ, JLL and several smaller proptechs and some good relationships were forged. While we are often asked the question “when will the association expand to NZ” this isn't something that is specifically on our radar. We're happy to include Kiwi founded proptechs into our ecosystem but an association for New Zealanders needs to originate and be founded by New Zealanders.
Proptech Pitch in the Pub
One of the funniest things about Proptech is its absolute unwillingness to be organised. We are a sector that treats deadlines like a suggestion and has complete faith that it will all be okay on the night or/launch day. Equally, as a group of people we understand pressure, are ready to be flexible, love applying genius and there is always someone who can solve a last minute problem.
Such was our first Proptech Pitch in the Pub, a rollicking event that was the perfect way to kick off the socialising before Proptech Forum and a great connector between the satellite events and the main conference.
Five proptechs pitched on the night. Only two of them we knew were coming. One said he was coming but we couldn’t reach him to confirm and he showed up anyway. Two more said they were coming but didn’t, and two never told us they were coming but were brilliant. Whatever. With drinks and pizza in hand, everyone rolled with it.
A huge thank you to Australian Land Registries Organisations who were our sponsor and to our judges on the night. Congratulations to TracIT who won on the evening, and a huge thank you to Tim Morris of Agentsy who rescued us from a tech drama when I forgot to bring an HDMI adapter, and allowed us to run the evening from his laptop.
Proptech Panels
With so many major initiatives and a lack of coordinating resources, our panels fell off the radar a little this year and we hosted just three. They will return in 2026.
Proptech Forum
This year’s Proptech Forum was our most successful yet and its move to Melbourne gave us both a fresh injection of energy and the opportunity to rethink how we delivered.
The theme of Navigating an AI-Enabled Future resonated strongly and I was personally proud that unlike other events I’ve been to all year where AI was on the agenda, the conversation went deep, focussing especially on the responsibilities we face as the deliverers of AI solutions. An abundance of ideas and examples on how members are using - and managing AI - were shared and the vibe in the room was passionate, connected and engaged.
Two key initiatives were announced at the event. The need for AI Principles and Guidelines, and a heads up on the Centre of Excellence for Affordable Housing Solutions.
This year was the first year we’ve had sponsors who were suppliers to the proptech industry - not just supportive members and that also improved the quality of the event. Thanks to Pendo, Cloudflare and Cloudstaff for their contribution to the day, and especially to the REIV who hosted us at their beautiful new headquarters.
We also thank our main sponsor Domain and the wonderful Foucauld Dalle who was our MC across the day.
It was also the first time we hosted Satellite Events as part of the forum - providing three unique opportunities to dive deep into subject material in small groups. A huge thanks to Realestate.com.au, Domain and Cecille Weldon for their contributions. Attendees raved about what they had learned.
Third party events
Sydney & Melbourne Build
This year, Proptech Australia provided panels for the Sydney and Melbourne Build events - the largest construction events in the country. They were eye opening for us as an association giving an insight into an entirely new layer of technology going on in the construction industry. And they were revelatory in the conversations that came out on the stage and the relationships that emerged as a result. Big thanks to Erik Tveitnes for hosting the Melbourne event and to the proptechs including Mondus Capital, Property Dollar, Little Hinges, Downsizer and Urban Prospects for their contribution.
Agentic AI Spotlight
With agentic AI the latest misunderstood trend, we were pleased to host a Proptech Spotlight examining the work that Dynamic Methods have been doing on agentic AI as they opened up their API to allow AI tool creation. It was well attended, and has resulted in some interesting collaborations.
New Member Specialist
Proptech Australia is run by a volunteer committee supported by a full time outsourced member specialist based in the Philippines through Cloudstaff.
Patricia Louise took on the role in August, just in time to dive into the preparation for the Proptech Forum and has done a brilliant job learning the ropes - of which there are many - and starting to bring some order.
Pat has a background as an event organiser, and we have been grateful for her systemic and thorough approach to her tasks. Already the association has bookings in place for the Proptech Awards, the work for the Proptech Map is well underway and we have a calendar of events just waiting on board approval for launch - including a new Women in Proptech event for International Women’s Day planned.
A huge thank you to Mark Hollands from Proptech Guru who has worked closely with Pat to onboard her and supported her through the enormous workload of the Proptech Forum, and to the Proptech Guru team with whom she works daily.
The five year itch
A slightly random announcement that will make sense in a minute. This year, Isaac Coonan announced he was stepping down from Proptech BNE after nearly six years as its main driver. It follows the closure last year of Unissu in the UK. This underscores to me the importance of Proptech Australia pivoting into a stronger new business model that is not reliant on founder energy.
Proptech Australia Challenges for 2026
In 2025, the new board took key and important steps to move the association out of its period as a startup run on founder energy and into a more process driven and sustainable scaleup.
Note I said “important steps” here. Not that we have succeeded - yet.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that to create the new processes, procedures and structure required to move an organisation out of the exhausted energy of startup mode, one must apply - you guessed it - an extraordinary amount of energy.
This year, the effort of that energy was decentralised - something for which I am personally extremely grateful.
Chris Mason did the very heavy lifting of analysing our member and accounting data and identified the true cost of the ‘smash it out, she’ll be right’ approach we had hitherto taken. (#startuplife) Our accounts have never been in stronger order, our plan for online sign up and automatic annual payments is largely functioning and after nearly 12 months we just have a few loose ends to tie off to bring members from our old system into the new.
Chris has a strong vision about how the technology that sits behind our member payment system and onboarding will enable the association for the future and is now running a program with the Wix consultancy Pondsplash to realise it in 2026.
Chris’s greatest contribution, however, has been his analysis of the cost and impacts of our membership fee structure upon the organisation and the valid and important thinking he has made the board do around its fairness when we consider the structure of our ecosystem and where our value lies.
We founded the Proptech Association of Australia to create a national community of proptechs, imagining the sector to be made up largely of startups and scaleups with dreams of tech unicorndom. We wanted to pull the sector out of hiding, to give it a stage to flex, put a spotlight on the cleverness of the solutions and the promise it holds for the sectors that we serve and create greater understanding of the value we deliver. Our goal was to create connection, collaboration and support our client sectors to understand what proptech could do for them while at the same time flushing out the commonalities of what made proptechs successful so that we could all learn from the examples.
The awards, the forum - these were key big idea initiatives to execute on those goals - and they were hard work but possible with a small volunteer committee, a full time offshore coordinator, and the support of an events and marketing team paid (albeit at a discounted rate) to fill the gaps.
But in 2025, here is the truth that the board faced - that the majority of time spent volunteering for Proptech Australia has been on foundational, government and policy work, representing the industry - often with zero notice - to regulators and scrambling to provide industry feedback. And that work occurs largely at the reprioritising of client work by our consulting director members while the benefits of which are disproportionately enjoyed by our established supplier members.
We greatly appreciate the support of our sponsors - their involvement is vital - but equally as a volunteer association, we are not geared to spend the many hours in meetings required to close those deals. If we are to be truthful, the biggest sponsors of Proptech Australia to date have been my own consultancy, Proptech Guru, Cecille’s WeldonCo and Chris’s SolveWorks Advisory that have donated hundreds of hours each to the association across the year.
While this change in our workload is both an honour and a great sign of the maturity and respect that Proptech Australia has been able to command, it is unsustainable. And there is a fundamental lack of fairness that the business model behind us as an association is effectively startup and scaleup membership fees and free consulting time that delivers significant benefit to multinational organisations. This needs to change.
In 2026, we will be working to pivot our business model into a new structure that represents the true value that Proptech Australia offers, especially to larger players.
Our goal is to deliver funding that will support a full time CEO and part time policy officer to make us more professional, accountable and responsive. Our goal is to genuinely influence government policy on energy efficiency, housing affordability, buying, selling and ownership experiences and housing supply and to represent and create opportunity for proptechs of every size and structure.
To do this - like I mentioned before - we need to dig a bit deeper in our current form. As such we need a board that has a greater depth of experience and that represents our industry at every level - in terms of proptech types, geographical spread and diversity. And we cannot do that with just 7 directors.
It is for this reason that we are moving the Special Resolution at today’s meeting to change the constitution to allow us up to 12 directors. We are not going immediately to 12 but have already had some excellent new candidates nominated this year. I urge you to support this motion - it is essential for our future - and I look forward to working with the new board in 2026.
Thank you to the 2025 Board and our Advisory Board
To wrap up, I’d like to thank our current board members for their diligence, support, vision and humour across the year. When a new board comes together there is always a period of settling in. The hallmark of the 2025 board has been its collaborative nature and willingness to get stuck in.
John Minns - Vice President
The NSW government’s loss has been Proptech Australia’s gain this year and we were honoured to have John step into the role of Vice President this year. John, in his normal quiet style, has been meeting key stakeholders this year, working to build our connection with major players and the strata industry and providing sage advice on the best way to manage conversations with government and insights into the tender process which were invaluable. He has been a key driver of our strategy to re-position Proptech Australia with established supplier members so if he hasn’t knocked on your door yet, expect a call in early 2026.
Chris Mason - Treasurer & Secretary
When the former chair of the Mobile Muster and a PWC accountant joins your board and agrees to become your treasurer and secretary, you know you need to listen to his advice. Chris has spent hundreds of hours dissecting our membership structure and financial reporting this year and is driving our strategy for automated and transparent membership and accounting. He is also a talented MC and knows exactly when to pop a glass of wine into your hand. Chris for everything you have done this year, we genuinely cannot thank you enough.
Erik Tveitnes
Erik has made a huge contribution in his first year on the board, bringing enthusiasm and a can-do attitude to every interaction. He has been responsible for bringing REA into the association in a big way, helping the association to navigate behind the scenes to connect with the right people and demonstrate by example the opportunities that Proptech Australia has to offer big players. The success of our live events this year - including the Satellite events - were largely due to Erik and his recommendations for speakers at the forum were some of the highlights of the event. We are sad to lose Erik this year but wish him and his partner well with their new arrival next year and know he will make an excellent Dad.
AJ Chand
AJ has been a long time member of the board as our Startup/Scaleup representative and is one of the first to reach out to new members and hear their story. This year he adapted the RESO platform to allow us to host the charitable auction on it and in doing so, we raised $9100 for charity - a record amount.
Hedy Ivanovski
Now with Milk Chocolate but formerly, Google, Hedy brought structured data thinking to the board this year providing a simple but robust structure to how we captured data within our CRM - and the Proptech Map - at a time when we risked disappearing down rabbit holes. She is also brilliantly connected and we’re grateful to her for bringing Tim Duggan to the Proptech Forum as our keynote.
Chris Havill
As our resident AI expert, Chris was an important sounding board and sanity checker for our narrative about AI, and has provided an important commercial proptech lens to the board. We tested his resolve this year asking him to host a panel at the forum - his first time public speaking on stage and he smashed it out of the park. He was also a key support to our commercial event hosted at JLL and has been influential at connecting us within the company.
Advisors
Sev Thomassian - Board Advisor
Sev’s role as Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Operations at Domain and his past experience McKinsey and Ashurst brought some serious firepower to Proptech Australia this year and we were grateful for clarity and robustness of his thinking. Even with the CoStar purchase of Domain happening in the background (!) he was generous with his time and connecting us deeply across the Domain business. We look forward to welcoming him to the board proper in 2026.
Carolyn Trickett - Commercial Proptech Committee
Our head of the Commercial Committee did not let a globetrotting job stop her enthusiasm for championing the interests of commercial proptech within the association. The Commercial Proptech Workshop was a fantastic event that created a great template for future meetups and we’re grateful for her involvement again this year.
Cecille Weldon - Energy Efficiency Committee
There are truly no words to describe the energy, passion and commitment that Cecille Weldon has put into the proptech sector over the past three years as she has worked to realise a vision for energy efficiency that stands to benefit every proptech and puts us as a sector at the centre of helping home owners understand both the comfort and running costs of their homes.
This year has been her biggest to date - not only launching the Proptech Energy Efficiency Data Standard, but leveraging the robust thinking behind it to make it a cornerstone of government policy and a key element to the forthcoming residential Home Energy Ratings.
Cecille’s work has constantly pushed the envelope for Proptech Australia - this year we won our first paid government consultancy demonstrating the value of the work that has been done to date, and opening up new opportunities for us. Cecille - I am constantly in awe - if sometimes a little overwhelmed - at how your brain works and the generosity of the big picture inside your head. I am grateful for everything you have done for Proptech Australia and for showing us what is possible even when it is uncomfortable. I am excited to be working with you on the Home Energy Rating work with both Federal and State government and very proud to call you my friend.
Thank you to our behind the scenes supporters
Proptech Australia would not have existed this year without the hard work of some very dedicated people behind the scenes. To my partner in life, love, and business - Mark Hollands - who used his extensive experience running industry associations to take much of the heavy lifting off my shoulders this year, onboarding Patricia Louise and managing both the Proptech Awards and Proptech Forum preparation with an iron fist, donating months of consulting hours. To Jen Escudero who took the new branding of Proptech Australia, completely owned it and made it pop. I apologise in advance for the work that is coming your way with the Proptech Map. And to Jill Escudero, my central source of assumed knowledge, who did a lot of the heavy lifting around the website and has managed our team in the Philippines supporting KC Rodriguez when she was in the seat and now Pat, in interpreting my brain dumps and turning them into coherent briefs. Thank you.
Thank you to our members
Finally, the association would not exist without the engagement of our members.
To everyone who signs up, shows up, buys a ticket, sends an email, enters the awards, sends in a news item to our website, attends a webinar, participates on a panel, kicks in with a sponsorship, hugs me at the awards or the forum - thank you!
You are the reason we exist and every year we receive hundreds of datapoints that confirm that setting up Proptech Australia has been one of the most important things we’ve done.
It has been an honour to serve as president in 2025 and I look forward to one more year in 2026.
Kylie Davis
President
Proptech Australia
