 Good morning. Thank you for joining us at the RTA. My name's Beck and I'm here with my colleague Leah. Good morning everyone. We're both from the web services project team and we're here to talk to you a little bit about what's going on with the web services project at the RTA and most importantly to talk to you about some of the enhancements that we've introduced to the web services this week. So Leah do you want to talk us through a little bit of the history of the web services project? Yeah absolutely. So back in June of 2019 the RTA launched our bond lodgement web service enabling anyone looking to lodge and pay a single bond whether they were a tenant property owner or manager to do so digitally on any device anywhere anytime. In recent months we've been focusing on a new suite of web services to really streamline the essential customer transactions around ending a tenancy. These are for bond refunds, bond disputes and updating your details. With more than one third of Queensland households renting and the average length of tenancies sitting at 17.5 months it's vital that RTA customers find it easy to do business with the RTA particularly when beginning and ending tenancies. Yeah that's absolutely right because those can be really quite stressful times for everyone so we want to make sure it's as easy as possible. So let's talk about this I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of today's sessions. So yesterday the RTA introduced a series of enhancements to the web services and these particularly focused on improving our online bond lodgements. Now these upgrades have all been made in response to customer feedback and they will make processing these transactions online even faster and easier. So a few things that these enhancements are going to do they're going to make it faster for property managers and agents to lodge a single bond online. They're going to enable customers to increase their bond online quickly and easily via the bond lodgement web service so we've now introduced a dedicated bond increase option to that service and they're going to improve matching and validation of property addresses and this is going to help customers to ensure that their details are correct in a consistent format and that's just going to save time for everyone and minimize manual rework. Okay so we're also going to give you a little bit of an update today on what's happening with with the RTA in general and of course we're going to answer any questions you might have. Now please note that we do tend to receive a lot of questions and we're going to endeavor to answer as many of them as possible. If your question isn't answered at the end of this and it's urgent please call our contact center and they will be able to help you and just to note that we do have a question session at the end so if you're asking questions during the presentation and we're not answering we're not ignoring you we're just here I have that session at the end so I'd like to find out a little bit more about who's with us today so we're just going to launch a poll and can you just tell us which group in the rental sector you belong to. All right you'll see that poll it's a blue box on your screen it's going to give you a bit of time so what have we got there Leah? So we've got a majority of our listeners today are property manager agents we've got a few landlords community support organizations and tenants and residents as well. Brilliant okay so we're just going to close that poll so a little bit more information about the web services journey so far so we've processed over 50,000 bond lodgements and more than 12,000 bond refunds through our web services already which seeing as there haven't been live for long is a huge amount would you say Leah? Absolutely it is. So already web services account for 40% of bond lodgements at over 60% of bond refunds which is really great so 90% of customers who fed back to us about the bond refund rated their experience as positive 75% of customers who rated their experience of launching a bond through the web services rated it as positive so it's a little bit lower and if you're wondering where that feedback came from at the end of our web services when we introduced the latest round so that was the refund update your details service dispute bond dispute service we put a little enhancement on the end of the form where customers could provide feedback using that thumbs up thumbs down button you'll see it on the right hand bottom side of your screen and underneath that there's actually a free text box so if you are using the web services and you see something that you're like oh that would be really helpful if they could just improve that you can put that free text into the box and click submit we really appreciate that feedback we do read every piece of it so please do help us to make our web services even better by doing that. Okay now we're going to launch a poll just to find out how many of you have used the web services before so you might be a new user you might have used them you might be using them every day or you might be about you might be about to use them for the first time so just tell us what what it is for you that polls now up on your screen it's the blue box again. So we're getting some really fantastic results here we're seeing at least 75 percent of our listeners are already using our web services which is really fantastic. Well excellent well while most of you are already using the web services just a little note for the few of you about how to access the RTA web services. So we've taken you through that process on the screen so you'll start off at the RTA website where you'll be able to say what you want to do through web services so for example you might want to launch a bond refund a bond update your details so you click on start now and that takes you to the RTA's terms and conditions have a read through those and if you're happy with those agree to them and proceed and then you'll be taken to the QGov page. Now the QGov registration page basically is a digital identity verification service from the Queensland government it is your substitute to a signature on a paper form so what you need to verify your identity there is a hundred points of ID and a unique email address please note that it does need to be a unique not a shared email address QGov will not accept it if it's if that email address has already been taken by another customer. So property manager's just a little note for you that you'll need to log in with for one of the better words your personal work email address so for example that would be like Rebecca at ljhooker.com but once you have logged in and verified your identity through QGov we will send all of the correspondence to the main email address that your organisation has registered with the RTA so if you're wondering which email address is that just ask around in your organisation and say where is the RTA sending all our emails our acknowledgments of rental bonds etc you'll soon figure out that's the address you need and you can find out more about QGov or web service requirements on our website and if there's any problems with it you can give our contact centre a ring so the web service enhancements let's talk about what is new so this is the RTA ID film Leah would you say that's the most exciting thing this is really going to improve our customer's use of the form and make time much faster for them lodging their bond lodgements yeah absolutely um so we're introducing these enhancements in response to feedback from our customers and staff like I said earlier so basically what we heard from property managers and agents who were lodging multiple bonds through the RTA web service was that it was really frustrating and time-consuming that they had to put in their organisation's details every single time they wanted to lodge a bond online so we've listened to that and now as you'll see on the screen it's gone from this on the left hand side to this so all you need now to log in is your organisation's RTA ID and you just need to provide that main email address that we have on record for your organisation so like I said if you don't know what it is find out what the main email is that we're sending all the correspondence to that will be the that will be the one and a little note we're going to talk more about this but our joint lessons will also need an RTA ID all right and so where do you find your RTA ID well um firstly let's talk about who needs one so if you're an agent applying for a using the web services on behalf of an organisation you need an RTA ID joint lessons and tenant organisations also need an RTA ID single property owners and tenants and residents you don't need an RTA ID and one thing we're going to talk about bond increases in a second so if you're doing a bond increase just remember you're going to need your bond number that's the sort of the one piece of information that's different between a bond lodgeman and a bond increase um where can you find that RTA ID some of you might be wondering well good news we did a massive email out to everyone who needs one yesterday um it was titled important knowing your RTA ID and to access web services so check your inbox for that uh we did another email blast in uh november so you should have also received it then so do a select general organisation's main inbox for RTA ID and you should hopefully find it pretty quickly um what what do you do if you're a new organisation Leah so if you're a new organisation you haven't interacted with the RTA via the web services yet you can actually go online and select update your details to create a new RTA ID once we create that new RTA ID for you we will send you an email providing you with that ID brilliant so another thing that we've we've improved is we've just made our our address matching criteria a bit smarter so Leah can you tell us a bit more about that yeah sure so we've really improved the functionality of this uh address matching uh it's now a much more intuitive form and this is to help assist our customers entering their property addresses into the web services in the right format so this will really help avoid delays caused when our staff have to contact customers to confirm and manually fix the addresses we have prompters along the way a new fields for you to confirm trickier addresses for units and rooming tenancies you'll also see a little helpful hint at the top there uh just an example of how to enter in a unit number to assist with this um address matching brilliant so another thing that we've introduced is this new easy easier to find an edit functionality Leah why did we introduce that yeah so this is really great previously customers could edit their fields that they'd entered but they had to use a navigation bar on the left and it wasn't very obvious to our customers so we've introduced these edit buttons on the right hand side they'll take you directly back to the field that you want to edit once you've added to the field you can just click on summary to take you right back to the end that's brilliant and once you've done that it's really important that you check over your summary thoroughly before submitting uh like Leah said very easy to edit so once you once you're happy with it you'll scroll down to the bottom of the summary page click submit and then you'll end up on this little page that you can see in the bottom left hand corner of the page um and there it says um you'll see we've circled the print my summary button so if you click on that you'll be able to print the summary page you can it'll come up as a PDF so you can save it as a PDF or you can print it really recommend you do that so that you can keep that on record uh so increasing your bond using web services this is the other thing that's really exciting isn't it Leah yeah it really is so little few key points so a tenant or an agent can submit a bond increase uh you need a q-government registration just like you do to access any of our web services like we've discussed if you're an agent managing party joint lesser or a tenant organization you'll need to know your rta id most of you will probably already been using it for boundary funds anyway but like i said i've given you some hints on where you can find it um you um will need to have your bond number at the ready and just remember that it's only suitable for existing contributors so obviously you can't increase the bond if you haven't lodged a bond in the first place um one thing you'll need to do is confirm all tenants email addresses now leah correct me if i'm wrong that's only if we don't already have an email address yeah so if the contributor on the bond doesn't have a registered email with the rta you will need to provide one um and does that grow the same for property managers and agents no this is just for the tenants only okay um and then you also need the ability to make a payment via vpay or credit card just remember too that you have to make this as one full payment so say if you're a tenant on there and you're lodging a bond increase or or a my lodgement for that matter um and you'll you've got some housemates make sure you all sit down organized who's paying the bond transfer the money and then do it in a single payment so just about the importance of communication and making sure that you're all on the same page with that so leah's now going to talk us through um what it looks like with a bit of a video uh leah's just going to talk us through it now thanks beck so my colleague beck has already talked you through what you'll need to log into q gov if you want more information about q gov check out our website for this demonstration though we're going to assume that you've already created a q gov account and logged in so once you've logged into the rta web services through q gov you'll then arrive on the bond lodgement web service that before you begin page where you'll be asked to provide information about the property and your role in the tenancy you'll need to confirm your details and provide a contact number for either yourself or the contact person for the lodgement there's also an option here to provide us with your preferred name if this is different from your legal name you'll then be asked what kind of bond lodgement you wish to complete for this demonstration we'll choose the bond increase option so now you'll enter the bond number for your tenancy if you're a joint vessel or you're lodging a bond on behalf of an organization you'll also need to enter your rta id you'll then be asked to confirm your tenancy details once you've done that you'll be asked to confirm if the bond contributors are still correct if they are you can proceed with the increase online if the contributors have changed you won't be able to continue online and you'll need to download a paper change of bond contributors form which you can post to the rta next you'll be asked to enter the new weekly rent amount and the new bond amount you'll see those helpful hints popping up as well you'll then need to confirm the tenant contribution amounts you can choose to either split the bond increase equally or delegate different amounts to each tenant you'll then be asked if the end date of your tenancy has changed if it has enter the new end date so at this stage you'll be asked to provide emails for any contributors who don't have an email registered with the rta remember all parties must provide a unique email address you can't use the same email address as another bond contributor at this stage you'll be asked to sorry after all contact details are complete you'll be taken to the summary page which shows you all the information you've entered read over this carefully to check that all details are correct and once you've confirmed the details click submit on the next page you'll be given a reference number which you should note down you can also use this page to print a summary of your bond increase and provide feedback on your web services experience you'll then proceed to the qgov payment page where you can pay your bond increase quickly and easily online either by debit credit card or vp okay so now we're just going to talk a little bit about tenancy legislation um so it's really important that you know your rights and responsibilities so the one of the main things so you make sure that you've discussed um make sure that you've discussed the agreements of your tenancy make sure you've discussed the rights and responsibilities the abilities with your tenants so do things to note so if you're increasing the rent you can only increase the rent um six months into a tenancy and after that you have to weigh an additional six months before you can do a second rent increase when it comes rent increase but every tenancy type is different and there's a lot of different information on our website about all the different types of legislation around the different tenancy types it's really important you read that before you increase a bond or a bond or you do a rental increase with your tenants okay so i'm going to do a little bit of an rta web services update now our services have changed dramatically over the past 12 months so this is just to give you a little bit of an update about what's happening there uh so as i've mentioned you can lodge a bond or increase a bond online unfortunately you can't lodge a bond with a dhpw loan by the web services but the good news is you can use the web services for a refund there both bond lodgements are currently not available um on web services but that is something that we're investigating now i think the bond refund part of the web services is the most exciting bit wouldn't you say Celia yeah absolutely this is making transactions really fast to do with refunds and we're seeing people receive their bonds quite quickly excellent and the other thing is that you can do an agreed bond refund or a disagree bond refund you can do the whole thing through web services so you can start with like the fast track then go to notice of claims and then go to disputing the bond amount so all of that can be done via our web services and the key thing to note is that web services are always the fastest option so a little update about what's happening with the rta i did with with the rta so the rta is working on additional web services so we're anticipating to have looked to be launching those in the months ahead um and these are to provide dedicated online channels um for a range of different services um so the existing upload facility for scan paper refunds was decommissioned on the 1st of february 2020 the good thing about that is that we are now seeing um a huge increase in the number of customers using our web services um and people are using those web services really quickly like i mentioned we've got that 90 positive feedback on the bond refund web service so people are really getting it which is really great to see um another thing that's happening which is a big win for customers is a possible expansion of q gov digital identity requirements so we've heard from customers that not um not everyone's been able to create a q government account because of their identity documents so q guys been listening we've been listening and we're looking at potentially q gov is looking at potentially expanding the list of digital identity documents that you can use to verify your identity so that's something coming in 2020 um and just a little note about the rta webinars they are all available online so once this webinar is finished um if you know somebody who you think might want to listen to it that hasn't been able to make it online today um just wait a couple of hours and it should be on our website and there's also webinars on all a lot of our other web services so if you want to find out more about refunds lodgements etc you can go on there and just a little note the next webinar we're going to be doing is on the 25th of February and it's all about water charging i'm going to be telling you a little bit more about that shortly so our rta is on the road so the rta is on the road we're going to do information sessions for property managers and owners that will be held over 16 locations between February and June these sessions are 90 minutes each um and they're going to be presented in a range of locations excitingly we're doing our first road show this afternoon and next week we're going to be going to to wumber and roma uh over the months ahead we're going to be going to morton bay the sunshine coast loben and the gold coast it swits redlands townsville cans mackaya rockhampton and more um so if you want to find out more about those sessions in your area register for our newsroom um you'll find that on the rta website and then you'll get all the latest and greatest news about where we're going with our regional road show we'd really love to see you there in person so please do come along new podcast alert so this is very exciting so uh this week we've launched talking tenancies it's um it's our new podcast um i've had a listen it's sounding great leo have you had a chance yet i haven't had a chance yet it's definitely on the to-do list to-do list but podcasts are a really quick and easy way to get information absolutely so the first um episode that we did this week was the first time renters and a little sneaky peek for you that next week we're going to be doing a uh podcast on where does your bond money go so tune in for that if you're wondering where you can get talking tenancies it's on spotify apple podcast google podcast or your favorite podcast app now we've got some questions yeah so we've had people asking us about whether you can pay your bonded installments using the bond increase option um the answer to that is that um yes you can the bond increase option does allow you to do that um where possible always if you can great to lodge the bond in one payment um but if if that's not possible you can be using that for you can be using the bond increase service of bonded storements so both uploads we know that this is something that our customers have been asking us about um yeah we can see quite a few questions in there so that is something that we're currently investigating and we really are hoping they're going to have an update for you quite soon as soon as we know more we will let you know um however some of the advantages right now is that because of the rta id field that we've put into the launchments service it's now a lot faster you don't have to put in your organization's details every time um you just have to enter the rta id and that email address so that should hopefully really speed things up for you another thing to note is that with the web services it's now a lot easier to get your tenants to be proactive and and launch their own lodgements so that's another another thing that you can look at encouraging them to do so we've had a few questions around organizations updating their agency bank account details and who can do this so anyone authorized on behalf of the organization can do this but they must have access to the registered email address that we have with the rta the existing registered email address this is because there's a two step authentication process when updating the organization's details and you'll receive a verification number that you must enter into our system within 10 minutes it does expire after 10 minutes once you receive this and enter it you can then go forth and update any details for the organization so we've had a few questions about form 2c's so bond loan bond lodgements with the department of housing and public works so at this stage we cannot do these through the web services platform these will need to be posted into us or emailed just as they are now okay and we've also had quite a few general questions about refunds and how the refund web service works so um you can go on to our website and we have a huge list of FAQs on there and our bond refund web service that you can answer you can also watch a video online which will give you more information and we did do a webinar as well about bond refunds so it might be good to go back and have a look at that so we've had a few questions here about what if the tenant doesn't have an email address thick yeah so the important thing to remember is firstly if the tenant doesn't have an email address because it may be because they just haven't provided you with one so firstly give them a ring and just make sure that it is the case that they definitely don't have a unique email address if they don't this is one of the big reasons we've kept those paid for forms so you can still and you'll always be able to print off those forms fill them in and post them to us so we have make sure we've got options for those tenants who don't have email addresses but like I said really important that as a first step you check with them because you might just find they haven't provided you with one and just a reminder to um to check your emails for the RTARD if you find that you can't find that RTARD in your email address do give us a call but like I said we sent an email to every we should have sent an email to everyone who needs one yesterday it was another one sent out in November um and like Leah said if you're a new organization you can update your details and get the RTARD through that but that's only for new organizations so we've had some questions as well about how do I know or who do I know who the contributors are on the bond so if you are currently registered through e-services as an agent you still have access to login through e-services to view those details this will then help you going forth and doing the bond increase and online so I think that that is that's all the questions that we've got time for for now like I said if we weren't able to get to your question and you feel like it's urgent please do give our contact center a ring thank you so much for tuning in today everyone there's just one final slide before we before we go so for further information on the rta's web services remember that you can visit our website and you can call us on the number on the screen um if this is and if you and a quick survey is going to pop up on your screen once we close this webinar we'd really appreciate you completing it before you close the window so this is about our next webinar the topic is water charges we really want you guys to help inform um how we're doing our webinar so we're going to put up three different case studies and we really like you to choose the one that's most relevant for you you can do it that if you could do that for us that will really help us and that will inform um how we take our next webinar forward again thank you for your attendance we appreciate your time thanks everyone for joining us today the webinar will now close