{"id":46442,"date":"2022-08-18T20:40:29","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T10:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/?p=46442"},"modified":"2026-04-08T12:48:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T02:48:26","slug":"future-of-trust-accounting-property-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/blog\/future-of-trust-accounting-property-management\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of trust accounting software"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog post relates to Rockend, one of our previous brands. For more information please <\/strong> read the press release<\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n

As workplaces are becoming increasingly digitalised, trust accounting processes are becoming simpler and more streamlined. Most agencies have now turned to customised software \u2013 not only does it offer more efficient solutions, but agencies can also have better security and \u2018trust\u2019 in their trust accounting functions.<\/p>\n

Chief executive officer of REINSW Tim McKibbin shares some of his insights on how trust accounting is being positioned as the next likely candidate for disruption and change in real estate, particularly in the property management sector.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Trust accounting in real estate<\/h2>\n

Real estate agencies are required by law to retain their clients\u2019 money for a variety of purposes \u2013 rent collection and deposits on property sales being the most common. The logistics around how that money is managed are complex, but critical to the successful operation of the business.<\/p>\n

Trust accounting is more than just holding money for tenants and property owners; it requires meticulous bookkeeping, regular auditing and reporting, and a strict adherence to specific legislation around the agency\u2019s responsibilities. Most agencies will have designated staff \u2013 usually the finance person or people \u2013 who are responsible for their trust accounting. They monitor activity in the trust account and, as is still the case in a number of agencies, maintain manual processes around that activity.<\/p>\n

While software developers are presenting opportunities that continues to change the face of real estate and property technology, the future of traditional trust accounts \u2013 for property management specifically \u2013 has been in question for some time.<\/p>\n

Trust accounting software made for property management<\/h2>\n

With the enormous amount of transactions going through trust accounts for property management, and the legal requirements for an agency to have a trust account if they are receiving trust moneys, it is property management for which the disrupters are developing the technology.<\/p>\n

What is proposed moving forward, in the simplest of terms, is that where previously an agency only needed a trust account in circumstances where they were holding somebody else\u2019s money, in trust accounting\u2019s future, agencies would no longer hold the money at all.<\/p>\n

McKibbin puts in more details on how it would work. \u201cAn agency would have one trust account, but within their software have separate allocated \u2018trust accounts\u2019 for every person that they\u2019re acting for. When the money comes into the agency, it comes into their main single trust account. Instead of the money going into the hands of the agent, being received by the agent and processed manually, an alternative software design allows that the money never actually comes into the agent; it goes within the system to the landlord, then the software processes and records the activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Facing challenges<\/h2>\n

But how will this affect agencies specifically in the future? \u201cIt gets complicated because the technology is racing ahead of the regulatory environment,\u201d says McKibbin. \u201cSo much of the regulatory environment that we are working in today was introduced in 2002. So, the question is whether or not what these solutions are doing actually complies with the legislation and that\u2019s a question we\u2019ve asked the Office of Fair Trading.\u201d In short, either the legislation has to catch up to technological and industrial change or the industry has to fumble on in transition while the paper shufflers catch up.<\/p>\n

The challenges around trust accounting and its new generation of software will be more keenly felt by the regulators than the industry itself. \u201cThere are questions about the processes of these solutions and the reasons there are some questions is because the workflow is completely foreign to the regulations,\u201d explains McKibbin. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean they aren\u2019t compliant, similarly it doesn\u2019t mean that they are. This is why we need clarity around these questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Setting up the future of trust accounting<\/h2>\n

Most software developers are now focusing on adapting their products to evolve with the changes to trust accounting processes, but also to industry change at the legislative level. \u201cThe best way to view the property technology disruption to our industry is to look at the sorts of transactions on which the technology can focus. And if we stratify the total functions across an agency, some functions are repetitive. These high-volume functions, that require minimal human involvement, are a prime target for technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to get involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n

By digitising high-volume tasks that require little human interaction and streamlining data entry tasks, the industry will ideally become much more personalised. \u201cThe things that are going to survive are those where there is human to human interaction; transactions or functions that are unique, that a computer currently can\u2019t deliver in a bespoke way to a client. Computers can\u2019t empathise with the client\u2019s circumstances and they can\u2019t communicate in such a way as to have the client understand them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thriving through customer experiences<\/h2>\n

People fear the unknown and at the rapid pace technologies are being developed in real estate, it can be quite unsettling. For McKibbin, surviving the transition to new technologies is all about putting the focus back on the customer experience, and he is confident that the industry\u2019s roots of customer centricity will allow the real estate agency to thrive.<\/p>\n

He offers the disruption of the fintech industry as a good example of digital change, strengthening the service offering. \u201cWith increasing wages in Australia a number of years ago, the technology of the day made it attractive to take data entry functions to countries with cheaper labour. Because tech has taken its next step and AI is now making those people offshore redundant, the next wave of the local labour force can step up to new and more dynamic roles that capitalise on the human experience. It\u2019s certainly the case that technology right across the board is going to impact on all industries including ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking to make light work of property management? Try Property Tree<\/a>, Australia’s leading cloud based property management software. Book a free demo today<\/a>\u00a0and see the Rockend difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the world evolves to be increasingly more digitalised, it\u2019s starting to become natural for the majority of business leaders to use software on a day-to-day basis.
\nWhere before, we\u2019d write and send invoices by hand, now, third-party platforms like …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":46450,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46442"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78877,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46442\/revisions\/78877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrisoftware.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}