Proptech - the Fintech of the real-estate industry?

With 'proptech' becoming the new buzzword, we piled the ABC what's behind the trend and why real-estate is the next big industry to be turned around.

If you’re in the real estate or property industry, you’ve definitely heard the term “proptech” mentioned in the past year. But if not believe us, YOU WILL. Like many other traditional industries, the property industry is archaic and inefficient. With the current structure there are a multitude of manual processes; many offline touchpoints; large numbers of parties involved (at different stages) and overall lack of transparency. The industry has been waiting for a reinvention and that’s where propetech comes in - bridging the gap between property and technology to ultimately improve consumer and business needs.  

In the last year, two new accelerators were created to facilitate the growth of proptech - Pi Labs (Europe) and MOTIVE (United States). In addition, ProptechNews is a well populated source for industry information and the Future of Proptech conference brings together key industry players to discuss trends and support opportunities.  

So why was this new word coined and what’s its relevance? According to an article by the Harvard Business School, “real estate is the largest asset class in the world.” The Financial Times also recently reported that the “total value of the world’s property markets hit a record high of $13.6 trillion in 2014, up 4 percent year on year”. PWC also recently created a report Real Estate 2020: Building the Future, discussing key trends and insights, suggesting that “technology innovation and sustainability will be key drivers for value.”

As the real estate industry will continue with its economic importance, innovative solutions will follow, we are living in a very digital and increasingly data driven world after all.  

Focusing on the intersection of property and technology, companies are solving issues like:

• how people and companies can securely complete contracts

• how people and companies interact with the office space

• how people and companies move spaces

• how office space can be designed

• how to predict when people may require a new space

• how people in invest in property

• etc, etc, etc, etc...

The applications and technologies are endless, resulting in a boom in real estate tech startup investment. Statistics collected by startup tracker Crunchbase, investors globally put a record $1.4 billion into real estate tech startups in 2014. Since inception this year, our team at Setting has been on the forefront of the proptech movement, changing the way large companies, startups and freelancers use and acquire a place to work. Through our own experiences, we realized the need to create a solution to find office space that adapted to meet our modern work requirements. And so, Setting is working on redefining the commericial property industry in many ways, one of which is a flexible turnkey solution to finding office space - with a few clicks, companies and freelancers have the ability to move into a new space, the next day.

So as Fintech in the last couple years has been challenging and redesigning the banking industry, proptech is on route to do the same for the property industry. Consumers and businesses alike should be excited for more one click solutions, creating more opportunities, saving time and money.