2019 class new calendar year greetingGetty
At the start of December, I chaired a PropTech event for Women in Property. Five game-changing startups presented their disruptive solutions for the CRE space to a rapt audience. Needless to say, I had to cut questions short, every time! However, I made sure to ask each speaker one key thing.
Looking back at 2018, what are the key takeaways with regards to tech advancement in your area of expertise and what are the opportunities for 2019?
The answers I got were as diverse as the startups giving them, but some key themes emerged throughout. Here are the thoughts on 2018 and predictions for 2019 from five PropTech game changers.
It is clear that 2018 marked a fundamental shift in the sentiment for tech amongst real estate players. Though implementation in many cases has not matched up, this is on course to happen in 2019.
Hannah Prideaux, business development director at District Technologies, which delivers a smart building app enabling landlords and large occupiers to create seamless and unique building experiences for their end users, concurs. She told me that, “Though there have been a lot of tech advancements in 2018, the real change has been in terms of the mindset”. In her role as BD director, Prideauxspeaks to multiple stakeholders in the space, from landlords to occupiers to investors, and sentiment has been rapidly shifting in favor of PropTech amongst these real estate stakeholders, particularly in recent months. One of the interesting changes she has seen is that new roles are being created within traditional property firms that reflect this change in mindset, such as ‘wellness leads’ or ‘customer experience managers’.
Olly Freedman, UK sales director at Datscha, a platform which reveals the ultimate owners of commercial property through comprehensive data sources, pointed out that when he started at the firm in 2014 (a year and a half before it went live in the UK) nobody had even heard of proptech, let alone Datscha! Since then, sentiment has shifted, but the biggest change has been so far this year, and it can only be expected to escalate.
Dr. Chump Chatkupt, the founder of Placemake.io, is a mathematician and deep tech expert who built an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform which has been described as the ‘Google for location and mobility’. According to Chatkupt, “New algorithms (such as capsule networks), improved hardware, greater computational power, and more data have led to significant advances in AI. At the same time, enterprises have begun to operationalize AI and integrate it into core processes, such as warehouse automation.” Another big breakthrough for 2018 is the transport revolution driven not just by ride-sharing but by autonomous vehicles, micro transit, and other last-mile transport modes that will transform the real estate and retail industries, redefine urban boundaries, upend pricing dynamics, and alter our definition of prime real estate.
Peter Bredthauer, co-founder of Proda, which owns a machine learning driven software for the standardization of excel based real estate data, told me that, “At Proda, we have talked to a lot of companies throughout 2018, and they are all aware that they need to utilize tech. Some have already started implementing a strategy, whilst others are still scouting the market. Implementation will continue to grow in 2019, with more companies formalizing their strategy and starting to really integrate new technologies into their workflows.”
AI and machine learning are the standout winners of the ‘tech to watch in 2019’ prize.
The starting point for these ‘deep’ technologies is, of course, data. As Bredthauer pointed out, “This year’s KPMG Global PropTech survey identified data and automation as the areas expected to generate the most change in the property industry”, which is where Proda is positioning itself.
Michael Romero, UK country manager for Dalux, a construction tech platform that digitalizes the process all the way from design through to facilities management, told me that after their 2018 release of an augmented reality, mobile-based BIM viewer, they are working on robotics and drone programs to execute site scans more precisely and efficiently in 2019. Dalux’s mobile-based platform will allow for exponential growth in usage in the coming year, as in construction it’s all about solutions that are easy to use on site.
Quoting celebrated AI scientist Andrew Ng, Chatkupt observed that, “AI is the new electricity.” He believes that AI will become increasingly foundational, transformative, and pervasive, and recommends that PropTech firms and their clients adopt an ‘AI first’ attitude, thinking of it as fundamental rather than supplemental and promoting data sharing and strategic partnerships in the field. He cautioned that we are underestimating the rate of change in AI, which will bring accelerating returns to those who are effectively leveraging it and will create an ever-widening gap for those who fail to take advantage of this technology. Chatkuptechoed Bredthauerin saying that the biggest problem in the field of AI – and therefore in the advancement of real estate technologies – is lack of standardization and opaqueness of data. As a consequence, progress in this space will be defined more by cooperation and collaboration than by competition between stakeholders.
In a predictions piece for Property Week last year, I wrote that 2018 would be the year PropTech comes of age. It is evident that, though we may have reached that mark in terms of awareness, we will have to look to 2019 and beyond to witness the real estate industry really putting its money where its mouth is in terms of implementation. Data will continue to be key, and the creation of a common data standard as recommended by the BPF can make a crucial difference to deep tech innovation in real estate. This is particularly important as deep technologies such as AI will be those that deliver an exponential value-add that could cause a seismic shift in the way the industry operates. Bring on 2019!