 Cha慢慢 bqiy call the company. So, your background is in tech and then your background is in This is real estate. I have been there for the last 10 years and counting. So two great plants come together that's how Soko was created. So it' real estate and technical Tell us how you started. You actually explained to me just before the show began na kwa mwia niya, na na nimu zweza niya. Jkfuti niya, palweetat ya. Two endsuweza na kwa kwa niktia niye wande niya kwa ose uza kwa iiuninirita kwa iiuninirita kwa hwya kumingu trakura ko nilisika. miiwekia kutitekwa kawifali. Iko na pula hani, wakatawekia kamiبرiasu na nammi.HAm ماia ngawekia, wakatawekia wakatawekia kufatsu na maimia tata wa za kutia mwae, habu gyuna maisha, kutia tegi wa kutia wikiwekia, kutia kusia kutia uiwekia, wa kutia wikiwekia. B рuza wekia kuha na. Wakatawekia wikia wikiwekia bikia uiwekia kutia karkAh, before you actually go into the real estate space? One, how are you actually going to manage this unit? How are you going to get the tenants? How are you going to advertise this rental property? And most importantly, how are your tenants going to pay and how are you going to see all these payments? And for a long time, if you're not doing it yourself, you will either subcontract these services from professionals. These are either property management companies or agents, or you get a relative. And we all know how the story with relatives is. No, sure. Asubuwe, yeah. You're actually doing this for someone else. If you go the property management way, so these are corporate companies, and again, you'll not get that satisfaction. You'll not get that service, especially if you own one unit, let's say in Dandora or Madari, because their priority, truth be told, is killing money in the uptown market with people who have a thousand units. So where do you go as a new landlord? We have an answer for you today. Okay, we are looking forward to get to that answer. I believe Ronald will explain how now you're coming in with tech to help the sector. Yeah, so basically with the problems which my colleague Grandma has explained. We looked at the problems which are there in the market and we came up with a solution. With the background in IT, I was able to come up with a solution with ideas on how to solve the solution. And then in collaboration with the experience in the real estate sector, we came up with a solution whereby once you invest in the property, we give you technology. So we now bring technology to your unit. You're able to number one, get tenants into the platform, number two, manage the payments, manage to see the transactions, invoice them, build them automatically, see everything that is happening, get your money into the bank, give the tenant a receipt in real time and also at the same time advertise your units once they become vacant. Also we enhance the communication between the two. Remember one of the biggest conflicts between a landlord and tenant in communication. Because now in Yumba Imeja, what is next? You have to talk. You need to get your money, you need to pay. So the issue we are having is communication is very key. So you need to send a message to the landlord. Tell them, okay, what is leaking? What next? And you also need to track that issue. If you send him maybe he's in the matatu or he's in the office, what's up, he'll just forget about it. But if we have a tracker just to follow through the issues. So in a way we enhance now that relationship. Make it better. Make the landlord know who is in the houses, how much they are paying, how much they've paid, how much money they've made. We actually give him a transaction or report that he can take to a bank and end up atiwek alone. Kidogo. Okay, this is quite interesting. And now where does the Kiatika come in? You have come into the space and now we have a direct relationship, tenant landlord. Kiatika pakatikati wanyu na kujangafu gunga kwa milangu. Now what do they do now? Kiatika sasa, we just minimise their job. Make a job very easy. Their job is one, to make sure the premise is very clean. Number two, to make sure that when you pay your rent, they can explain to you the process in case you are a new tenant, in case you don't know. Also number three, what they also need to do is to also make sure that the place is clean and also when they come, security is there. So we just minimise their job to make sure just look at my apartment in case there's something happening, in case there are thugs coming, make sure you do that. But in terms of payments, in terms of relationship, in terms of communication, we are good to go. Okay, so basically they won't be knocking on your door to ask for a seat. Telling you what you were saying. Reminding you when you want to hama, reminding you you need to provide a seat for 2019, 2022. So now what problem, how would you say this is better from the system that we are used to? Okay, so again traditionally how we do it nowadays, pay your rent either via an agent or via an investor or you go to a bank queue and then now that payment slip, you take it back to your caretaker and then your issue will be a seat. So first off, we've transformed our caretakers to accountants and they stop their daily duties to now make sure that they know who has paid what, where, what time and there comes a challenge when people pay in installments like for instance you give him 5000 cash and then in case you pay 2000 via impesa and then after a week you give him, you know you deposit 3000 via bank. So it becomes a bit of a conflict for him to actually be able to consolidate all these payments. We are simplifying all this because now with our system these transactions are recorded on your statements both from the tenant side and from the landlord side and they are accessible to you at any given time. So we've made sure that we have developed the system in a way, anybody even using Molicamuizi you're able to access it via USSD you know the normal staff, 544, you know how we buy air time. So the other channel we have is a mobile app. So if you have a smartphone you download the app called Silkoo on Play Store and the other channel is a web so that is www.silku.com We are also, this brain here is also developing a telegram bot so you can actually chat with a bot and you pay your rent. Oh, please expand on the telegram bot. Sounds interesting. I don't know if you've used Safari Komzuri. So it's an automated feature where instead of talking to someone you're turning to the machine and it gives you commands. So it will ask you what you want it to do today. You want to pay your rent, you want to see your balances, you want to see your statements, you want to see your receipts for the last one year, you want to communicate to your landlord, you want to raise a ticket, you want to move out. Actually we give you the option to give a vacation notice. So you know you don't have to have an issue when you're vacating. Oh my deposit has not been refunded. Why? You see Kupiana notice we have a record. You give a notice at this specific time. We actually send you an official confirmation and also confirm with the owner that you're moving out. So all those things you can just chat with something, with the bot on the telegram when you're up and oof, you're going to go. So it's just making the process seamless. So everything which is available in the tech part bring it to the property part because there's been a huge gap between the two. Okay and what are some of the areas that also you are applying tech into your company to help the real estate sector? Asun we will be paying using blockchain technology. We are looking at making things like bitcoin, ethereum. All of them available on our platform where you can pay through any form of payment. So you don't have an excuse to give a land. And then we also give the opportunity to tenants to pay in bits. Lipa poli poli, especially after COVID. We noticed most people they lost their jobs. Most people in the jokali sector. These people they earn 500 a day. Say for example Raida. They make 500 shillings a day. Why can't they just pay 300 shillings for rent and they have 200 shillings at the end of the day. So one of the things it does it reduces default in terms of rent. We actually have a scenario where somebody was not able to pay rent because he was a daily customer who made money daily. So we told the landlord why don't you try out our solution and you can imagine within a month he had actually offset almost two months rent. Because the guy was getting 100 shillings anaika. 200 anaika. 300 anaika. Guess what? Then over a month 300 is 9000 a month. Wow. Amazing. And this guy is in a house of 4,000. So you're really helping the common man. So I'm believing that you're not just taking the high end customers you're also accommodating any any space. I don't know how to put it. You know, both the low income anas the middle level and the high end. Yeah, I think we're having a conversation earlier on. The solutions currently in the market would concentrate on the high end market. So any new investor with your one unit in Dandora well you have very limited options and you know you are inclined to actually go to what you call DIY. Do it yourself or self-land loading. So self-land loading is either you do it yourself. Everything we've mentioned this as a headache it comes to you directly. We wanted to build a solution that can actually accommodate any new landlord with one unit or even an established landlord or a property management company with a thousand or 10,000 units. I think we can handle as much as probably 10 million worth of transaction in a month and of course you know it could be higher. So the solution we are building will give you the same satisfaction whether you have one unit or 10,000 units and we actually built for the mass market so you know your Dandoras your Kibera we actually have units in all these areas. Kayole So if I come to your site and I check for a house I'll get a house in Dandora in Buruburu in Lovington in Ura. So we do have a marketplace in built in the website and the marketplace is where we showcase available units because in terms of value adds again we don't want to stop giving value from where you actually have paid your rent but then again you also want to move so what happens you either have to call a friend hey do you know someone who has a pickup who has a lory who can assist me move from A to B we want to also streamline that space as well. So what we are doing is we are we have very interesting conversations with other service providers you know your fundies movers moving companies electricians plumbers all these people that you would need as a tenant so what you need to do is your electricity is faulty fantastic just log in raise a ticket take a photo and then that communication is spread within a millisecond to the relevant people you get people responding to your inquiry so you'll actually get to see who is closest to you just like Uba how it works so you see a fundie you click on that fundie the profile will appear how many of the experiences is the company and then we will also so they come to see what's the problem do a quotation and then you advise them to proceed the same applies to also moving right so now before you talk on moving so after the fundie comes in who do you send the quotation to or you are the one to pay so what the fundie will do will come evaluate what the problem is and then now upload it on our backend what the quotation to fix this would be and then now we communicate to you so fixing this electricity is going to cost you 1,000 okay do we proceed yes or no so if it's a yes we give them a green light to proceed mm-hmm alright and the moving bit so the moving bit applies the same of course you want to move you're able to see a couple of movers that we've vetted in the system who've checked out who are credible and who are trustworthy so you say you want to move from point A to point B the people within that specific area will give a quotation of the same you get to choose who's the cheapest or who's your favorite now most importantly after they've delivered their services you as a tenant you get to rate them aha how we do it on Uber yes exactly so think of Uber in real estate in real estate quite interesting alright so now you've also said that you recommend or you market the property and then you get the clients coming in so how do you make sure you bring in the right people to this houses because maybe you can get someone who's not paying rent actually for the first two months he's helping me yes basically we do a kind of a credit scoring for them so we do identity verification for them remember you when you come into an apartment you give an ID that ID we are able to verify that it belongs to you okay so number two what we do is once we give them we can check with the databases of guys like the government we access actually we can access direct link to check through IPRS just to make sure that this is a genuine guy we also do something called a scoring for them when you pay late the system automatically did that to your score tells you this is not a good guy based on their history we are also looking at checking your CRB records just for okay for the comfort of the landlord just to be able to tell them okay this guy has defaulted ten loads do you think he's a good guy to be in your house so the system has an algorithm actually we put a bit of machine learning here just to be able to understand what kind of a character you are once we link something we look at you we can actually look at the social media and tell you a lot about you what kind of a character you are okay we are trying to bring in the aspect of machine learning in a bit of AI and AI to make sure that we understand your characters from the point of payment from the point of relationships in terms of how you are relating with the with that tenants how you are relating with your landlord in terms of your complaints all those things they come up as modules into the platform to be able to give you a score what kind of a person you are and based on that score we can actually tell this is a good person or this is a bad person another thing we are also looking at your age also tells us a lot in terms of your character the age how old does age tell about the character how the older you become the better your character becomes the more mature you are so basically if you have the young generation of 20s you're going to have a bit of issues in terms of money but that's why we add more features into looking at the score so that we don't just judge you based on your age because you have people who are young who are very good so we also put a lot of modules in terms of learning you as a character and giving this landlord something to rely on and then when you vacate you also allow now the owner or the manager the manager of the property to rate you and give a review so that you don't just move out and break everything and then you go to the next unit so the person you're going to next will just look at your reviews and you cannot delete the reviews okay it's a permanent record ya this is a very dirty tenant so it will just move with you across and then they give you a score based from 0 to 10 if you are very good you get 10 stars if you are bad you get 1 star okay so now I'm getting that you're getting a lot of data of the tenants data so how are you complying with data protection policy actually our data is encrypted we make sure that it's encrypted and then we also use keys which you can never find out who data belongs to but we make sure we adhere to our privacy policies based on the government because number one you have to accept your terms and conditions in terms of giving us the data and then number two we make sure that we don't share this data with anyone our policy states that this data belongs only to the owner we can only see for the purposes of seeing but we cannot share this with the third party in terms of selling the data or doing anything so we adhere 100% to our policies okay alright so there was a story Brahm was telling me earlier on of I don't know which one between you two had oh it's actually who had stayed in a house for like a year before the landlord realized that you were living for free not for free as in your pink and not the money was not getting to him yes right so I think when I moved into my current unit I got someone you know when you get to the gate security will take you to an office then you're told okay these are the units you can choose one so I got one and then I paid actually you pay your deposit and rent so I paid and I moved in the following month first four a year later I have a knock on the door hi how wunafanya ni ni apai kansikuna kati what are you doing here anashangai ni wunafaka waka I'm like I've been here for the last one year have you been paying your rent yes I have all the receipts here they are then the guy is just dumbfounded there he is just wondering what's happening here I've been playing in my own exactly then I don't know next he is telling me get me a receipt of all the receipts you've been paying and then it was Manu then so I had some of them ni me tupa kwa dust been some of them I don't remember now it's back to me how to prove that I paid wow so now those are some of the problems that you aim to solve actually we saw this gentleman some few months back on national television who was arranged in court who was sending the landlord and we do know we do know someone who does that today it will not mention them with national television I'll take what you want so the landlord has a kapochon bill somewhere the landlord is also selling some motorbike somewhere and all these funds are going into one account so jamaa kakwa smart so he sends a landlord afeku and pesa and the landlord never checks because cash is trickling in wow and to date so this guy was arranged in court having paid fake money for 12 months for 12 aholye for aholye I'm trying to understand how does the landlord not know if you're not paying rent well think of it this way if you have multiple sources of income going to one account it's very hard for you to go and find out one transaction and the resources available now if you go to Safariko asking for a statement they'll give you a whole lot of statements from last year and to find that one transaction will take hours and with our system it's as easy as actually going to the date range that specific date that you know your tenant has said I paid that specific time you can narrow it down to a very very specific time so if the transaction was done at 2 you can actually choose and just to add on that imagine you know the amount of money that you paid and you pay for aholye and then you see when you pay for aholye it's like a thousand transactions a day so if somebody pays to your account for you to ever find out who paid what it's like next to impossible so they take advantage of that another thing you find someone has a hundred units someone pays day to one another one pays day to 26 you never find out unless you spend I think 20 days in the month trying to figure out who pays what yeah okay interesting so is this where you see real estate going the future of real estate basically what we are looking at what we are seeing now is most people are looking into the enhancement of technology remember now with things like Google Google have come up with technologies which can tell you like now when we are coming that there is traffic so based on their models movement of cars so they look at the movement of cars using satellites and being able to predict that there is a traffic jam so it will tell you to avoid that traffic so we are also looking at bringing technology to the real estate you come tell us I want an apart two bedroom apartment with open kitchen with ABCD the system automatically such as through the photos available in the system and tells you these are possible matches for you these are things which might interest you based on your preferences your settings so we look we will see most people going into technology better ways to make your life easier speaking of house hunting I knew there is VR technology where you can just wear the VR set and then tour around the house is this something that you you are open to incorporating I mean definitely we don't also have very good stories with available agents there are so many people that have been called, paid for this house and you go find kumbata, how you exist exactly so if we can bring that technology to the comfort of your office or even in a studio just log in get to walk into a bedroom virtually virtually, yes and then after you've seen the house now we can actually connect you to the landlord directly again using technology so in terms of payments one it becomes very secured it's more or less like an escrow paying through our system so someone is held accountable and you have the satisfaction of I'm actually I can trust these guys you know that's where Silk wants to to go with what we are doing and we also you know we want to change this mindset of investors who want to come into the real estate space so it's very difficult for them to actually get that trusted partner because even families you know we have stories what happens when you invest in real estate and you're in the diaspora yeah you know I'll let you know that's a whole show that's a whole show in the morning yeah and it becomes very difficult for you to find that person that you can actually trust so we do have so many landlords in the diaspora by the way and they get to monitor everything if a tenant moves in right now the system automatically tells you because you're able to monitor occupancy and everything is in real time everything is in real time occupancy you get a notification you can actually predict your revenue for the next 3, 4, 5 months and we do have a few landlords who as we are speaking right now are doing a foundation for new building why? because you've made it easier for them made it easier because this guy is already doing over 100% collection there's a new building how so? you've said over 100% collection and I had you say in another interview that previously landlords were having 50% yes so how you know I'm thinking it's a big difference alright how does that come about? so before I answer that let's look at the reasons why you're doing 50% you know you've put your rent as 20,000 right and you found tenants and what's happening right now the cost of living is extremely high so you have good tenants who probably have been paying consistently for the last 4, 5 years but for the few months back they are unable to pay their rent and you are asking for the same 20,000 now now so pay now or move out what we are doing with our system is and he's mentioned this it enables these people to actually lipendits lipendits and it's making it easier for the tenant because remember this is a guy probably who's in the informal sector he's getting his 1,000 daily or 5,000 chillings daily so now it's easier for him to continue paying his rent in bits at the end of the month he's already paid his 20,000 what that will do it will increase the collections for the landlord because as a landlord you don't want to be chasing people and locking people and auctioning people every now and then that's not your job your job is to collect your money simply right I think there's a quote we use is you've spent so much in building this apartment why are you spending so much in collecting it with all the threads all in the kuzimia steam and the kuzimia majidakumia so yeah the collections move and we actually give a landlord certain amount of 3 months and the least apartment the least house you're collecting is almost at 80-90% there are some we surpassed to 110% okay quite interesting now as we come to a close you can remind us Ronald where people can find you and your website our website is www.silku.com our email is info at silku.com you can actually call us at 0717 888828 you can also find us on social media we are on Facebook we are on Twitter we are on LinkedIn we are on TikTok ah okay Instagram so it's silku official I'm a silku for some so you can always call us any time during the day or night you can WhatsApp us you can find all the details from our website alright finally not for Ronald Bramwell you can have the final say for maybe an innovator a young innovator who has an idea so any encouragement to them this is your camera ah just start okay you have an idea an idea will always be an idea until you start start trembling start with your legs shaking but start there are so many opportunities but it's so easy you have to consistently put in the effort you have to consistently put in the work however just start and you know work with the end goal and I think one of the things that we are also doing is empower your team let your team see the vision let your team see the dream so that you work together and of course you're going to be successful amazing just start that is my take home from it just start thank you but of course you have a character development but just start but just start okay thank you very much for coming on board and sharing some of the things that are happening in the real estate in terms of tech advancement so that has been Brownwell and Ronald talking to us about second real estate they are co-founders of Silku you can find that on the social social pages as they have mentioned now we take a short break and then Valentine will be back with some great entertainment