When Richard entered Real Estate in 1966 there were no computers such that all accounting work was done manually. Receipts were handwritten in duplicate of triplicate; there was a manual office record of rents received. The Cash Book & Ledger were also manually entered. Lease and other documents & letters were typed up on a typewriter.
Monthly Bank Reconciliations were very laboriously manually carried out. The Bronte office, which at that time had about 800 tenants, used to take about 2 days to complete! Now with computers it is self-balanced every day at the push of a button.
Two or three days a week there would be a “rent run” where the rent collector would call door to door, collect the rent & issue a manual receipt. The money collected would be reconciled upon return to the office. You certainly got to know very quickly if a tenant was having difficulty in paying their rent.
Technology evolved such that Richard attended the first real estate technology conference at the University of New England in Armidale where he was introduced to the first use of computer hardware and software in the real estate industry. It involved instructions in how to enter pre-determined numbers for receipts and payments for tenants, owners and creditors on to paper templated pages. These pages were then batched up and manually delivered, usually daily, to a centralized computer processor for the printouts to then be manually returned to the office. Richard was very thankful when computers advanced to the stage where this whole process could be carried out “in-house” without all the paperwork.