Each month, Proptech Association Australia hosts a panel discussion via webinar, inviting three expert guests to speak on a specific topic or theme.

The topic for March’s panel was “Proptech+Legaltech Liaisons: Leaning into the Intersections,” and, in the spirit of International Women’s Day, it featured an all-female line-up.

There are always plenty of legal documents required whenever you buy or sell a residential property! Conveyancing also involves multiple stakeholders, processes and tasks, which means there are plenty of good opportunities in there for technology to help.

The participating panellists were: 

• Rukshana Sashankan, General Manager - Practitioners at PEXA
• Judith Hammerschlag, Co-Founder at Contrax Australia
• Lara Paholski, CEO at thelawstore.com.au and livesign

The panel was introduced by Kylie Dillon, who chairs the Association’s WA and SA Committee, and the discussion was moderated by the Association’s Vice President, Jennifer Harrison.

The panellists spoke about a wide range of topics that included addressing the inefficiency within the property settlement process, preventing fraud, keeping pace with the fast-moving residential property market and adopting digital signatures plus verification of identity. 

Here are the highlights.

As described by Rukshana Sashankan:

• PEXA is the world’s first online platform that facilitates the lodging of registry documents and financial settlements and some 85% of property transactions in Australia take place on its platform.
• Born out of the need to address the inefficiency within the settlement process, PEXA enables parties to lodge documents, exchange funds, and complete transactions electronically in real time.
• To minimise cyber fraud and email phishing, PEXA has built its very own technology called PEXA Key that allows its customers to communicate bank account details securely.

Speaking about the product roadmap, Rukshana said: “One of our major focuses this year is giving our customers the ability to directly integrate with PEXA and do their work from their own systems, rather than logging into our web portal… Another focus that I’m really excited about is that we will be looking at delivering mobile signing. We want to move away from the cumbersome hard tokens being used today to digitally sign documents and financials, without compromising our high level of security.” 

As described by Judith Hammerschlag: 

• Contrax Australia are a group of legal practitioners that utilise their own built technology to offer a 24-hour turnaround on reviews of NSW and ACT sale & purchase contracts and they have plans to expand into the other states and territories
• In a hot market, a buyer may be evaluating several properties at the same time, so a fast and fixed price contract review service offers a big benefit for lawyers, conveyancers and consumers alike, and
• The team at Contrax are all qualified lawyers who use technology to pinpoint and hyperlink clauses for further review, especially focusing on risks to the buyer.

Speaking about the market's response to Contrax, Judith said: “People are shocked that we have tackled this really hard legal nitty-gritty of the industry and the process, because it's just so high risk, but we’ve got an amazing team of lawyers and we’ve seen a huge amount of contracts come through our system… we feel confident that we can really tackle the bad clauses and technical parts of buying a property.”

As described by Lara Paholski:

• livesign addresses the need to bring back the fundamental aspect of witnessing the signature of legal documents.
• livesign has built a technology that offers real time identity verification at the time of signing.
• In an extra step to provide data security and minimise data hacks for their customers, livesign removes the need for lawyers to store this personal information, moreover livesign redacts any personally identifiable information within their reports.

Speaking about upcoming new features on the livesign platform, Lara said: “We’ve got some specific use cases that we’ve already built out for the mortgage industry and we’re looking to build that out for other industries too. We’re also looking into expanding beyond the shores of Australia.”

The video replay of the full panel discussion is available to watch here. 

The Proptech Panel is a free event open to the public hosted by Proptech Association Australia with the help of its event partner Stone & Chalk. 

Registration information is made available via the “Events” tab on the Association’s website and is also shared in the newsletter and social media channels.

The panel is normally scheduled for 12pm Sydney time on the fourth (or final) Tuesday of the month, however, due to the ANZAC Day holiday, April’s panel will take place on Wednesday 26th April. 

Entries are now open for this year’s bigger and better Australian Proptech Awards 2023!