Building your own personal property buddy with Landlord Studio

Charles Chan, CEO and co-founder of Landlord Studio, was living and working in London when he started looking into investing in his first rental property back home in NZ. At the same time, he started shopping around for a tech solution to manage his future investments; what he quickly realised was there weren’t any.

Landlord Studio’s mission is to become the world’s most used and most loved platform for landlords and tenants. “Our aim is to provide the tools to help DIY landlords streamline the management of their properties”, says Charles. Because of this we received an opportunity to participate in ASB’s start-up incubator, ASB Edge, agreed by both parties to be for innovation, not integration."

“I noticed that there weren’t any good mobile first products around. The ones I tried were just not suitable. I had too much going on, with a full-time job and the move back home, I just wanted a simple product to help manage the property that I was looking at purchasing.”

So, what’s a budding rental property investor to do?

Charles set about developing his own solution, and, along with Llewelyn Fernandes and Logan Ransley, built and founded the company that would eventually become Landlord Studio. The app quickly started gaining organic traction. It seemed Charles wasn’t alone, people from all over the world needed an easy and mobile way to manage their properties.

“It just happened that way, organically. From there, I got feedback from real-life users that had jumped on board. They then started requesting new features, and I started building them, completely based on what these real DIY landlords were asking for.”

Initially, the product was only for iPhone, but feedback from customers showed an overwhelming demand for desktop and Android. In response to this the team made the decision to switch Landlord Studio to a cloud system, making it possible to serve all three channels.

“The product took on a life of its own and our user base expanded. Now, what we're looking at doing is bank feed integration. Instead of a user having to login to their online banking to find out if the rent has come in, we'll be able to tell them. And if it hasn't, then we'll chase up the tenant for you.”

However, all this success and innovation didn’t come without its challenges. When Charles first started building the software, then called Property Buddy, he was juggling full time employment with late nights working on the app. This was manageable in the early days, but as the software’s popularity grew it became harder to keep on top of development requests and customer support.

“We’re now full time on the project, and we have a small but efficient team. The challenge now lies in trying to prioritize our development tasks and refine what our business offering really is.”

Since coming back to New Zealand, the Landlord Studio team has teamed up with ASB. This gives the start-up the ability to distribute their product with a large well-known brand behind them, and ASB another useful tool they can provide customers to help them achieve their financial goals.

“I thought it was going to be quite difficult working with ASB, but they jumped on board. Exploring ASB, exploring partnerships with insurance agencies and affiliates – that’s the next stage. But whatever we do, whether that’s joining forces with other organisations or adding more automation through improved software, the goal is to just give back time to the landlord..”

“We got more out of it than we could have hoped for and continue to do so.  Recently ASB created and ran an electronic marketing campaign promoting Landlord Studio to a group of ASB residential investors. We got a strong response with hundreds of ASB customers taking up the offer”

“We’ve really valued partnering up with Landlord Studio as it affords us the opportunity to promote a highly relevant, convenient, free service to a group of our home loan customers” says Mark Petty, Senior Manager, Home Loans at ASB.

ASB Edge gives start-ups an opportunity to discover possible areas for collaboration and innovation.

Landlord Studio is investigating ways to further enhance their product offering and is looking at taking advantage of new Open Banking APIs to save landlord’s even more time.

Keen to learn more about Landlord Studio? Visit their website. If you’d like to know how ASB can help you own your investment property, get in touch or apply online.