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It’s been a while since the last #StartupLife column. In the previous instalment of this series, we looked at the ugly side of being a startupper, as founders shared the biggest barriers they encountered when setting up and scaling their businesses. Today’s article will have a much more positive tone. I asked a pool of founders to share what they believe to be the greatest opportunities in PropTech.
Here are 10 of the most interesting answers.
Streamiling Through PropTech
FixFlo is a London based repair reporting software for letting agents. Founder Rajeev Nayyar has noticed that integration and open ecosystems are finally coming to the fore in the property sector. This will allow each property company to build the tech stack it wants to deliver on its own business drivers and allow a wider range of solutions to gain traction and deliver value. “I believe that there isn’t a best tech stack in isolation, just the best for a particular company at a particular point in time,” he says.
Lucinda Kelly, founder of Dublin-based short-term retail real estate rental platform Popertee believes that the most exciting thing is how AI evolves and will improve the whole sector. She told me, “Some of the advancements in AI are insane! I especially like what is being done in the facial recognition space – this will hit all areas of ‘property’ over the coming years.”
Construction
Gavriel Marado is the founder of London-based startup Realyse, which provides Big Data analytics for residential real estate development and investment. He sees a lot of potential in construction, though it’s not in his area of direct expertise, both onsite through robotics, and through offsite manufacturing. Going one step further, he told me, “I’m looking forward to seeing self-building buildings in the future.”
Hussain Hill, founder of construction site waste-collection app Skrap has three points to share. He sees the most exciting PropTech opportunities in mobile apps to create automation across the entire property lifecycle, robotics on construction sites, and blockchain for government land registries worldwide.
Smart Everything
Anabode is a London-based property management app. Founder Rakesh Thrakar thinks the greatest opportunity in the PropTech space is in the realm of the smart built environment. The interaction between personal smart devices, smart sensors, and the built environment will bring about a connectivity revolution, as big data fuelled and AI-powered servers will become the beating hearts of buildings. According to Thrakar, “smart built environments will help create communities by connecting neighbours, whilst the buildings themselves will come to react to an individual’s presence as he or she passes through it.”
Robert Cooper is co-founder at Boston-based Embue, a building intelligence platform that senses and automates every apartment to deliver the best multi-residential experience while lowering operating costs. He thinks we are only just scratching the surface of the possibilities for IoT devices in buildings as, despite the dramatic reduction in cost and increase in performance, these are still installed post construction. He sees a near future in which they’ll be embedded in the building components during manufacture, and buildings will become self-diagnosing, self-healing, and much more responsive to their occupants.
Sensgreen is an Ankara-based energy efficiency tool for commercial real estate. Co-founder Hasan Basri Tosun is another believer in smart cities. “It is not enough to connect people with the buildings they are in; buildings need to be connected with the cities they are in. The more connected buildings are, the better and more efficient decisions could be made by public authorities to improve overall efficiency and quality within the city,” he says.
Max Verteletskyi, CEO of Prague-based commercial real estate management app Spaceti believes that the greatest opportunity lies in modernizing and digitizing older office buildings by retrofitting them with Building IoT Technology (BIoT). According to Verteletskyi, this “enables flexibility and insights within any building, including spaces, parking, or hot-desking.”
Investments
Miguel Linera Alperi is CEO and cofounder of AREX Real Estate, a Madrid-based real estate exchange. Linera Alperi believes strongly in introducing liquidity and standardization to the asset class, in a similar fashion to what happened in capital markets in the last century. “Capital markets got digitalized, shares could be traded instantly and the decision process for the investor became much simpler. Now we want to do the same with the Real Estate market,” he says.
CapitalRise is a London-based property investment platform. Co-founder and CEO Uma Rajah reckons that the opportunities for upstarts in property finance and investments are plentiful. The dynamics of financial services, where nimble technology firms captured market share from the incumbents that were held back by old legacy systems and large bureaucratic organisations, are replicable. He says, “It is so exciting as a relative outsider to now work in the property sector and see huge opportunities to create that same wave of innovation that started a decade ago in financial services.”