Collaborative partnerships lead to rapid growth
Niesten says Microsoft has been instrumental in the growth and success of Bricks and Agent.
“We’ve had five great years, and Microsoft has been a great partner for us, always happy to work with us and work with us,” he says.
“Microsoft’s suite of managed services is a great competitive differentiator because we don’t have to worry about patching our infrastructure and can focus on development.
“Working with Microsoft made it easy for us to go PaaS first. No other vendor can match the ease of deploying these managed services. increase [like] AI and machine learning. “
In 2018 Bricks and Agent was selected to participate in the Microsoft ScaleUp program. According to Niesten, this has saved the company significant infrastructure costs and enabled proof-of-concept validation.
“We have a tight budget when we start up, so we have been able to try new things that we wouldn’t have been able to try otherwise.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdowns restricted contractors from completing maintenance requests, Bricks and Agent took advantage of the downturn in activity to rebuild the entire platform to make it easier for customers .
“We had all these great features and options, but the more we built, the more complex the platform became, given we had a high turnover of property managers with over 30% leaving. And it became more difficult to use: the industry,” explains Niesten.
“We needed to make it as simple as possible, so we focused on using Microsoft’s machine learning and AI capabilities to do a lot of the heavy lifting for our users and make their lives easier. We basically rewrote the entire platform from scratch, and it paid off big.”
Bricks and Agent achieved 185% revenue growth in a difficult fiscal year due to multiple lockdowns and Covid, and now has over 1.300,000 users across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. and tripled from last year.
The company was recently named Most Innovative Scale-Up in the Property and Facilities Management category at the Proptech Association Australia’s 2022 Proptech Awards.
According to Niesten, Bricks and Agent processes tens of thousands of maintenance requests each week and has created an online marketplace for over 50,000 transactions through its A$9 million partnership with hipages.
The startup’s clients currently include major real estate and property management companies such as Belle Property, First National, Harcourts, Jones Lang LaSalle, LJ Hooker, Meriton, Raine & Horne.
Bricks and Agent has integrated its platform with that of other property management and inspection software providers, including MRI Software’s Property Tree, Palace (NZ), Property Me, Console Cloud, VaultRe, Reapit and Inspection Manager.
“We would love to work with other integration partners in similar areas,” says Niesten. “It’s about adding extra value and not creating all these silos because there are so many different pieces in the kit that they don’t interact with each other.
“Of course, Microsoft releases new technologies and features all the time, so we will look to take advantage of them as they become available.”
