The first price worth noticing in Rhys Rogers’s story is $19. That was what Before You Bid cost as a domain name. The name he and his brother Jordan actually wanted, Before You Buy, came with an $18,000 asking price. For two people putting together a business around the unnecessary expense of buying property, it would have been an awkward opening purchase.
They bought the cheaper name. Rogers later explained that the alternative would have swallowed roughly a third of their initial budget. There was a business to test, and the business might fail. An accountant can appreciate a pleasing name while remaining quite unmoved by its invoice.
Behind that small decision sat a larger irritation. Buyers interested in one property were paying for essentially the same information, separately. Only one could end up owning the place. The others could leave with an inspection bill and a fresh appointment somewhere else. Rogers thought the information could travel further than that.
The same house, the same question
Before becoming a founder, Rogers worked in accounting and restructuring. His public professional history includes study at Macquarie University from 2003 to 2007 and a Chartered Accountant credential issued in December 2010. The career put him near the expensive, practical business of finding out what a property was really like.
His account of the company’s beginnings centres on the duplication he saw: different interested buyers purchasing substantially the same report. Building inspections were useful. Making each prospective purchaser commission another investigation of the same property was a costly way to distribute the findings.
Rhys and Jordan founded the company in 2015. The shared-cost approach allowed several prospective purchasers to access a report, with the original purchaser receiving money back as others bought it. People could compete for a house without each paying the full price of investigating it. Cooperation had found a place in a transaction otherwise rather keen on competition.
By October 2016, a partnership with buyMyplace described the mechanism in plain terms: an upfront independent report, discounted access for subsequent purchasers, and a rebate to the person who had paid first. The saving came from spreading the cost of the information.
That distinction matters to the kind of business Rogers was building. A cheaper route to a report still depends on someone doing a competent inspection. The efficiency belongs in the distribution; the findings still have to be worth reading.
A name worth waiting for
Quality was part of Rogers’s early argument. In a 2015 account of the service, he described checking providers’ qualifications and insurance, and collecting customer ratings. He also recalled encountering an inspector whose website displayed a fake builder’s licence number. Access to information was only useful if the person producing it deserved the buyer’s confidence.
“We are exclusively buy-side focused.”
Rhys Rogers, describing the early service in 2015
That early positioning gave the company a specific job. Buyers needed a dependable view of a property, including the parts that might complicate their enthusiasm. A listing could introduce the possibility of a home. An inspection could introduce the roof.
The original name, meanwhile, kept causing a different sort of trouble. Before You Bid sounded as though it belonged exclusively to auctions. Rogers said buyers, sellers and agents sometimes made that assumption. The wording had become an explanation the business had to keep correcting.
In 2024, Before You Bid became Before You Buy. Rogers announced the change with a joke about his acting and an Academy Award. A video enlisted property-industry figures including Vivien Yap, Josh Phegan, Leanne Pilkington, Damien Cooley and Tom Panos. The brothers finally had the name they had wanted at the business-plan stage.
The practical reason was broader service, rather than a sudden dislike of three letters. The company already worked with people buying outside the auction room. The new name gave those customers a little less decoding to do.
Getting into the ordinary machinery
A sensible idea still has to turn up where people work. In August 2017, Before You Bid integrated with REINSW’s REI Forms Live. Property reports could sit closer to the agreements and forms agents were already handling. The convenience was modest to describe and consequential to daily use: one fewer separate task to remember.
John Cunningham, the estate-agency leader who worked with Rogers, later described the importance of those connections. He said the business had filled a gap his agency recognised but had struggled to address effectively. Integration into its technology made the benefit easier for clients to understand. Trust grew through a service fitting into the job.
By 2019, Rogers was talking about reports arriving earlier in the selling process. A seller could address a problem before going to market. An agent could understand a property before a negotiation became tangled in an unexpected finding. Buyers could decide whether they wanted to proceed.
One example was memorable. McGrath Hornsby agent Adam Gillbanks described a buyer who, on the day before an auction, lacked time to arrange an inspection. The buyer purchased an available report that night and bought the property the next day. Gillbanks credited their participation with a $220,000 difference for his vendor. It was an agent’s account of one auction, rather than a promise about the next one.
The underbidders had spent $49 each to view the report. For Rogers’s original proposition, that quieter number was particularly relevant. They had still missed out on the house. At least the homework had cost less.
When he appeared on Mike Mortlock’s property podcast in May 2023, the conversation returned to sharing inspection costs and understanding the reports themselves. A report could inform the price someone was willing to pay, as well as the decision to proceed. Paying attention could have more than one useful outcome.
The appeal of those examples is practical. No one needs to pretend that a report can make a competitive property purchase pleasant in every respect. There can still be another bidder with more money. The service concerns a part of the process that can be organised differently: who pays for the information, when it becomes available, and how easily the next interested person can find it.
The founders cannot approve everything
For the Rogers brothers, building the service also meant changing their own jobs. Jordan, whose background included Commonwealth Bank and UBS, joined operationally in 2020. Today, his remit covers operations and finance; Rhys owns the product vision. The division gives the family partnership distinct responsibilities.
In a DAYZERO conversation, Rhys described how closely the founders had once held the decisions. He and Jordan were involved in everything. He recognised the limit: as the business grew, decisions could not keep passing through the same two people. Developing leaders inside the company became part of the work.
When chief revenue officer Jon McConkey announced his departure after five years, Rogers credited him with helping the company move from startup to scale-up. He also mentioned a nine-minute staff farewell video. That is a reasonably substantial film for colleagues to make about someone leaving; clearly, there was material.
Rogers’s response gave space to the shared experience, including the difficult stretches and the good ones. It also looked forward to having a work lunch together again. The relationship would continue after the job description ended.
The year the brothers began.
2026Eleven years into the same underlying problem: helping people understand a property before committing to it.
The buyer leaves a trail
Another product began with someone else’s frustration. Rogers recounts an agent at a conference complaining about repetitive conversations, rejection and the difficulty of reaching people who actually wanted contact. The response was a straightforward questionnaire after an open home, helping buyers indicate what they needed next.
Rogers later put the resulting activity at more than 1.5 million text messages a year. The company said BYBAssist had reached 600 offices. Those were reported milestones, but the origin remained agreeably ordinary: an agent describing an irritating working day, and someone listening carefully enough to build around it.
The company’s wider work now includes interpreting buyer activity. A person downloading a building report offers an agent a different clue from someone merely opening a listing. It is evidence of further research. It still needs a conversation to establish what that person intends to do.
In an August 2026 webinar with Reapit, Rogers discussed the changing timing of that research. The share of buyers downloading reports through partners before an inspection had risen from 13% to 37%. Information was arriving earlier in the journey, before a buyer necessarily stood in the hallway.
Rogers was also listed for Proptech Australia’s August 2026 panel on award-winning businesses. The conversations around him now include integrations, buyer behaviour and leadership. All are some distance from the first duplicated inspection bill, while remaining connected to it.
The progression also gives his role a continuing tension. The company needs to serve buyers who want to understand a property and agents who want to understand buyers. A report connects those interests at a specific moment. Keeping it useful to the person considering the purchase remains central to the proposition Rogers first described.
His story keeps returning to the moment before a decision. Before a purchase, someone needs the details. Before building a product, someone needs to hear the complaint. Before spending $18,000 on a domain, two brothers can decide that $19 will do for now. Rogers eventually got the name. First, he got on with the work.