The Power of Trust & Transparency

Sally: Hi everyone, welcome back to The Realtime 5. This is where we ask business owners, industry leaders and of course our customers questions about what's going on in their businesses, industry and of course their experience with Realtime.

My name is Sally Hamilton, GM of Customer, and today I'm with Team Leader at Eckermann, Carmela Cricelli.

Welcome.

Carmela: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Sally: Now, Carmela Cricelli has a lot of experience in the industry across conveyancing and of course, team operations. So it was obvious that I was going to come and talk to you today and ask you our questions as part of our series.

So first off, Carmela, you've been with Eckermann for some time now.

Carmela: Yes.

Sally: And you lead a very large and busy team across multiple offices. What's a few things you prioritise to keep your team motivated, happy and engaged?

Carmela: I think it stems down to a few things. So obviously having such a large team, there are many different personalities and different people that we deal with. So I think it's really important to be quite personable and relatable with your team. Knowing that they can come to you, they can trust you and that they can sort of greet you with no judgment and just that welcoming nature. I think communication is really important and also adapting to different communication styles that different people have. So again, not that one communication style is the answer for everyone, and just knowing your team, knowing their personalities and also active listening. I think that's also really important.

Sally: Beautiful. I'll join your team.

Now we know the South Australia market is moving at rapid speed at the moment. What are you seeing as some of the challenges faced in today's landscape, today's environment?

Carmela: I definitely think the number one challenge is supply. So housing supply and demand is huge at the moment. Obviously with that though comes affordability. That supply, that demand, it does increase costs and that competitiveness around the state or the region essentially. So I think supply, demand, affordability—then that also comes in turn with interest rates and cost of living challenges. So I think it's just a combination of a few different things, but definitely supply, demand, living, interest rates, cost of living, all that sort of stuff.

Sally: It's a perfect storm, definitely.

Carmela: It definitely is. It's a challenge.

Sally: And so Eckermann was one of our early adopters of Realtime. So you've been on the journey with us. What were you hoping at the time to improve or streamline in your business?

Carmela: In all honesty, everything. We came from a system that was quite outdated, quite clunky, quite slow. We had no integrations previously, so that world of integration was so foreign to us, but also so exciting. And that's definitely something that we wanted with the next practice management system that we implemented to our business. So, everything.

Sally: Excellent.

Carmela: Yeah, everything.

Sally: And now that you've had your time with Realtime, what differences from previous software to ours are you feeling in your business now across the team?

Carmela: Again, so much. Just the seamless integrations from PEXA, even Stuart Tidal, Moving Harbin, ScanTech, and all those third-party platforms that we use—those integrations through that. Your financial auto balancing and auto financing system is absolutely out of this world in the essence of we just came from doing everything so manually and also so backward. Like the way we used to do things did not make sense. We would have new team members start and we would tell them our process and they would be like, “But that doesn't make sense.” And we're like, “We know. But that's how we have to do it because we don't know how to do it any other way.” From start to finish, there's so much in that platform that it's just helped us, helped our team, put us a step ahead of the game, enabled us to really see what our future looks like. It's just so much.

Sally: Amazing. I love that feedback. And I just wanted to touch on quickly—and we may be over our 5 minutes—your team is also using the Realtime Pathway to Settlement app.

Carmela: We are, yeah.

Sally: And this is an app giving consumers, real estate agents, and brokers more insight over their settlement and more transparency, but also controlled by the conveyancer that's using the app. What kind of efficiency gains or benefits are you feeling in your business with Pathway?

Carmela: We feel like it really sets us apart from our competitors. We definitely feel like it sets us apart. It's an added feature for our clients, which is incredible. Having a tracker where they can see straight away where their settlements are. Having the ability to just take a photo of some sort of document that we need and uploading it into the app to then straight away come across to us in our matter. I think the biggest thing though is your financial aspect to the app and having a secure location for our clients to be able to upload their financial details to then stem across to our platform and our clients’ matter, knowing that they have been in full control of doing that. And also it's a risk management thing for us as well. It definitely enables us to reduce our risk in getting those bank account details wrong if they were to just provide them to us via another method.

Sally: And it's consumer expectation now as well, isn't it? They want the control in the palm of their hand—you touch on the low control—they want to know things are secure, and they want the transparency. I mean, you book an Uber now, you don't call a cab because you want it in the palm of your hand, even if the cab's at the corner of the street.

So I think it's just a way forward and it's the way the world is going.

Thank you so much, Carmela, for your time today. Feel free—I'm sure I'll dob her in—to reach out to Carmela if you want to find out any more about Realtime Pathway to Settlement, and I'm sure she'd be more than happy to have the conversation.

But thank you everyone.