Buying PropTech Is the Easy Bit with Taylor Coleman of Tapi

The property industry has never had more technology to choose from. CRMs, maintenance platforms, deposit solutions, referencing, inventories, AI tools, automation and an ever-growing collection of integrations all promise to make agents more efficient.So why do two agencies buy exactly the same piece of software and get completely different results from it?In this episode of The Viking Chats, Kristjan is joined by Taylor Coleman of Tapi, the property maintenance platform that started life in New Zealand, expanded into Australia and is now making its mark in the UK.Taylor's route into PropTech wasn't exactly conventional. Born in the US, a former university American football player and finance graduate, he headed to Wellington after university to join a startup accelerator. There he met his future business partner, whose experience of waiting six months for a huge hole in his kitchen ceiling to be repaired helped inspire the original idea behind Tapi.The pair initially thought they could sell maintenance technology directly to private landlords. That went about as well as anyone familiar with the sector might expect.So they started knocking on the doors of letting agencies instead.What they discovered was an operational problem that will be painfully familiar to property managers everywhere. Maintenance involved too much administration, too many different people, too much chasing and far too much friction between residents, landlords, contractors and agents.Ten years later, Tapi works with around 90% of estate agents in New Zealand, has established itself in Australia and is now rolling out across the UK and Ireland. But this conversation quickly moves beyond maintenance.Taylor and Kristjan get into one of the biggest challenges facing agents as the PropTech market matures: buying software doesn't transform a business. Using it properly might.Because signing up to a new platform is the easy bit.The harder part is integrating it with the rest of your technology, configuring it around the business, training the team properly, changing established processes and, crucially, getting people to stop doing things the old way.Kristjan shares The Depositary's experience of seeing dramatically different outcomes between clients using exactly the same platform. Some agencies properly implement the technology, integrate it with their existing suppliers, train their people and make the new workflow part of how the business operates. Within weeks, their teams are reporting huge reductions in workload.Others buy the same product but barely change anything. Integrations remain switched off, teams aren't properly trained, new starters don't know how the platform works and employees continue running old manual processes alongside the technology that's supposed to replace them. Six months later, management understandably wonders why the promised efficiency hasn't materialised. Taylor sees exactly the same thing with maintenance.Good technology shouldn't simply digitise an existing process. It should remove unnecessary work from it.That can be surprisingly uncomfortable for people who have spent years personally managing every stage of a workflow. If a property manager is accustomed to monitoring a repair from initial report through landlord approval, contractor instruction, appointment, completion, invoice and payment, being told they no longer need to manually oversee 80% of that journey can initially feel like a loss of control.The irony is that this is exactly what the technology was purchased to achieve.Taylor and Kristjan discuss why successful PropTech adoption therefore requires more than a software demo and a login. Businesses need to think about how roles, processes and even KPIs should change once technology starts removing administrative work.They also explore another area where PropTech frequently gets things wrong: user experience.An agent might be prepared to attend a training session for a new business platform. Their landlords, residents and contractors certainly aren't.Nobody wants another portal to remember, another password to reset or another app they have to download simply to approve a repair or report a dripping tap.Taylor explains why Tapi has deliberately designed its maintenance journey around the behaviour of each user. Contractors can continue emailing invoices from systems such as Xero while Tapi matches the information in the background. Landlords can approve works directly from communications rather than being forced into another portal. Residents can report maintenance through an agency's website or a QR code in the property without downloading another app. It's a philosophy Kristjan shares from building The Depositary: if technology crosses from the agency into the consumer experience, it has to be designed around the consumer rather than simply around what works for the agent.The pair also discuss the changing UK PropTech landscape and why integrations are finally becoming easier. Legacy systems and closed APIs historically made it difficult and expensive for emerging platforms to connect with agency CRMs. That is changing rapidly, with increasingly open ecosystems allowing specialist products to exchange data and enabling agents to build genuinely connected technology stacks rather than collections of isolated dashboards.For Taylor, that shift has helped Tapi arrive in the UK at an interesting moment. Having already proved its model in New Zealand and Australia, the business has been able to build integrations across several UK CRM platforms as it grows its presence here. There is also plenty of discussion about AI, although refreshingly little of the usual suggestion that artificial intelligence is about to make everybody in property redundant.Taylor's view is considerably more practical. Estate agency remains a human business. Technology should remove the repetitive administration that prevents good people from being consultative, knowledgeable and useful to their customers.That means the measure of good PropTech shouldn't be how impressive the technology sounds. It should be whether residents find it easy to use, whether landlords engage with it, whether contractors actually adopt it and whether frontline employees genuinely get time back.Because a platform can have every feature imaginable, but if the people involved in the process don't use it properly, very little changes.From a six-metre hole in a Wellington kitchen ceiling to building a platform used across New Zealand and Australia, Taylor has learned a fair bit about what makes property technology stick. This is a wide-ranging, occasionally sweary and very practical conversation about maintenance, integrations, AI, UX, implementation and why agents need to take more responsibility for extracting value from the technology they buy.Buying PropTech is the easy bit. Changing the way your business works is where the real transformation happens.Send us Fan Mail