Six Proptech trends you should know about

Modular housing and constructions

You can’t speak about Proptech nowadays and not mention modular housing. The number of cataclysms happening globally is constantly increasing. This means that more and more people fall victim to them and lose their houses or get them heavily damaged. Apart from this, modular housing in general, is a convenient method — getting the house “assembled” in a month or a few is a favorable option for a lot of people and certain markets in the world.

That is why the list of investors in this niche includes top US and EU funds and other entities, like Goldman Sachs, who invested in TopHat Modular Housing startup from the UK. The other notable player in the niche and TopHat’s US rival is Blockable.

Niche living marketplaces

Generally, customization is a trend of a few recent years. Though, when it comes to one of the most complicated items to sell, customization is crucial. The number of different types of real estate is hilarious. That is why for most users the ability to choose the specialized online platform for their special needs becomes a preferred option. That is why a wide range of such marketplaces are popping all around the world. Some are oriented on student room-sharing platforms and others are more inclined towards local mid-term rental platforms for specific locations.

An example of a startup in these niche is the UK’s Student.com with its marketplace for students’ room sharing and a mid-term rental platform from Spain called Spot a Home.

AR/VR technologies

There is a whole suite of technologies used to create 3D tours around an object for users and Augmented reality objects which showcase the future look of the objects reviewed. Both Augmented reality and Virtual reality are used in Proptech in various applications. For example, every potential buyer of real estate would benefit and enjoy a 3D tour around their future property the way matterport is offering it.

Both AR and VR require outstanding coding abilities to be created properly. That is why mainly AR and VR projects both for PropTech and other industries are created by separate 3D design studios and agencies.

Choosing the right company for AR/VR solutions, which take part in Proptech is a tough task because there are already too many of them. Though, one of the most viable are Virtual APT, who are doing robots to create 360 footages of houses and other property and RealVision, a startup from Minneapolis with their 3D tours around real estate.

Smart tech and IoT

When people speak about IoT and Smart tech, they mostly picture Proptech in their minds. It’s understandable regarding the fact that most of the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Apple have come out with their voice assistant devices which are connected to other devices from their own network of brands and are widely used at homes, like smartphones, TV stations, air conditioners etc.

Among those, Amazon Alexa is the most notable. Alexa is remarkable because of the wider adoption in western countries, especially the USA. It can assist in many “useless” (apart of the obvious functions of controlling temperature, humidity, etc) things like finding the correct video, song and showing it on the TV screen nearby. In China and Asian countries, Xiaomi is by far the most developed IoT for Proptech. Xiaomi’s IoT for home has the biggest network of devices, including the majority of kitchen and bathroom appliances, self-transport and fitness devices, and many many others.

Crowd-investing

Obviously, all these new technological advancements in Proptech require big capital investments. Some innovation costs hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. That is why Proptech just like any other industry related to innovations and IT got used to the model of different sorts of raising capital. Very often, a newly developed company with a sound idea gets its first $50-$100 thousand dollars to create a MVP (Minimum viable product) from some Angel investor or VC and deliver the new product. Though, nowadays the fundraising process has gone even more simplified with the crowd-investing opportunities available to every person and startup.

Nowadays, it’s a common thing for a Proptech startup to go on platforms like Kickstarter or indiegogo and get the first most necessary money for the MVP. Very often, if the idea is really great, these type of investments become one of the most successful in the history for some investors.

At the same time, there is another source of crowdfunding, which was introduced just a few years ago. It is called ICO or Initial Token Offering. With the boom of cryptocurrencies, some of the developers realized that they can create trustworthy contracts on blockchains of some coins, which will distribute the so-called tokens and operate them with a certain logic, which is predefined by developers. There are many examples of Proptech companies that went through an ICO process to crowdfund themselves. Though, sadly most of them ended up not delivering the MVP or product, which is a global negative thing about ICO and cryptocurrency-related crowd investing.

Examples of ICO or post-ICO startups in PropTech are Bitrent and Etherty.

BIM, 3D modeling and construction software

The changes and impact of technological advancements in the real estate industry is visible not only for main users in the industry. The industry workers also got some exciting products and tools. One of the required skills for almost any designer or architect is to use BIM (Building information modeling). Its process supported by various tools and technologies allows users to create digital representations and models of almost any size and detail of any place.

Most importantly, inevitable design changes that need to be made will be incorporated into the one shared BIM model throughout the project. This reduces the need for re-work and speeds up the entire design phase of the project.

Apart from BIM, there exists a collection of other software developments for the PropTech and modeling industries like 3D MAX, ArchiCAD, and Unreal Engine. The last one was developed as a gaming engine, though, it is used by more and more teams for “real-life purposes”. This has become a viable thing after the case of Notre-Dame in Paris which will be restored from the precise model of it in the game Assassin’s Creed, which is built on Unreal Engine.

After such a rapid growth of the real estate tech industry, it’s hard to imagine any major new technology introductions in the following years but mostly new companies that built solutions on them. PropTech got 5x more investments during 2019 comparing to 5 years before. With this pace of growth in the industry, we will see a lot of future technological advancements in Proptech initiatives all over the world. Most certainly, new participants would look towards better UX (user experiences) and other interactive build experiences, as well as look for new models for raising funds for their projects, which is a must-have for the emerging industry: PropTech.