Rundl brings the digital sophistication of social media to professional services.
Australia’s first and fast growing online property network, Rundl, has its origins in the needs of lawlab, a national property law firm that began in the small town of Nyngan, New South Wales.
“It started in 2000 when we acquired a local country practice in central New South Wales, in the town of Nyngan in the Bogan Shire,” said Richard Bootle, Director of Lawlab. “It was a pretty traditional practice and what we found was that we were trapped in a small market with price pressure from undercutting by conveyancers in the Blue Mountains. Our idea was to build a technology solution that engaged city people and removed geographical barriers to growing the business.”
By 2008, the firm launched a residential conveyancing service using an early version of Rundl as the platform to make the sale and purchase process easier for clients, but at that time, Bootle says there was a real barrier to doing actual transfers and real transactions online. “Online banking and simple buy sell platforms like eBay had only just started and no-one was contemplating transferring serious assets like a house online,” he said. “There was a fear of fraud and a need for security, really an unfamiliarity with the digital environment. What we built because of geographic isolation has turned out to be the cutting edge new technology, a multi-sided platform that delivers secure online collaborative business processes.”
Lawlab is now a national conveyancing service which has delivered over $3.5 billion of property transactions and has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin, employing a legal delivery team with 40 staff. Rundl has 14 developers based in Melbourne. Bootle describes Rundl as “Facebook for business” giving those involved in the conveyancing process, from sellers and buyers to professionals such as lawyers, bankers, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and surveyors (to name a few), access to a digital network and toolkit that provides customer project management, real time communication and document sharing.
As of January this year Rundl 2.0 has approximately 5000 current users, of which over 800 are multiple users. “Once a finance broker or real estate agent uses it they tend to keep using it. It’s mostly residential property at the moment, that’s very much our template, the residential process,” says Bootle. “You sign up and you invite anyone who will help your client at that point, be it the conveyancer, the broker or a bank. It’s about both customer service and business efficiency from sharing documents and activity in a Facebook-style activity feed so that everyone knows where they’re up to.”
"Seeing the type of buyer and seller interactions now happening in Rundl shows that consumers now demand these type of messaging and apps from their lawyers, real estate agents and finance providers," said Bootle. "We saw the opportunity to improve the way property is transacted without disintermediating the industry. Rundl delivers for the first time the digital sophistication of our customer’s social lives to their consumption of professional services.”
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