When Simon Berglund joined Reapit as General Manager for Australia and New Zealand six months ago, he arrived with a rather unusual CV for a proptech executive. He started out as a scientist, quickly realised he was far too gregarious for a life in the laboratory, pivoted into medical sales, and eventually found himself running platform companies for private equity — integrating disparate, acquisition-heavy tech stacks into something coherent.

The construction industry in Australia is truly broken. It is the slow, grinding, productivity-going-backwards-for-a-decade or more way broken. It’s far more dangerous than a sudden crash, because we've all just accepted it as normal, while we all complain about the lack of new housing.

Property buyers are the most underserved people in the real estate ecosystem. Agents have their CRMs. Developers have their feasibility tools. Mortgage brokers have their aggregation platforms. But buyers? They get portals, PDFs, and a whole lot of "good luck with that."