Breaking Property News – 05/01/24
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
Free Visitor Registrations now open for London Proptech Show 2024 Feb 27-28
Using this LINK you can now register for fee to be part of the annual two-day London Proptech show, held on the 27-28 February, 2024 at ExCeL London. Delegates will be able to immerse themselves in the cutting-edge world of Proptech, discover groundbreaking innovations, and network with industry pioneers.
By booking today, you are guaranteeing to be part of the platform where real estate meets innovation & technology. This year looks to be a much bigger and better version of the inaugural London Proptech Show last year.
Last year I was lucky enough to be the official Host and MC and I know there were over 240 Proptech companies and affiliated organisations who attended with over forty speakers, and a huge amount of knowledge and networking took place. To see who took part last year last year use this LINK.
As you can see it was a lively and fun event as well as being highly educational and thought provoking. In the photograph below is myself Andrew Stanton as Host/Moderator and the panel including Dharmesh Mistry, Matthew Black and Dr Oladarin discussing the topic of De-carbonisation – ‘Becoming sustainable with the latest in Proptech.’
Will Green Technology Investment be in the red if Labour sweep to power?
Only four days into 2024, and the potential new Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer seems to be scaling back expectations regarding the whole green agenda which until recently was a big part of what a Labour Government would be delivering.
As reported in The Times today by Matt Dathan, Home Affairs Editor, ‘Labour’s plan to borrow up to £28 billion a year for green investment could be scaled back further, Sir Keir Starmer has said. The Labour leader said the pledge will depend on economic conditions when the party is in power. He said the policy to spend £28 billion a year on technology and jobs would come from borrowing and conceded that if the finances were insufficient the party will “borrow less”.
Asked whether the money would be raised by taxes or borrowing, Starmer: “We have set out how that will be funded, the money that is needed for the investment, which is undoubtedly needed … that the £28 billion will be ramped up in the second half of the parliament, that it will be subject of course to any money that the government is already putting in.’
Trying to tease out the messaging from the rhetoric is difficult, is Labour for the acceleration of green technologies and all that flows from it, the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) agenda or is it more around new jobs being created, a rallying cry for workers.
One in three residential property sales cancels – can technology fix this problem?
For some time a large number of property technology companies in the UK and globally have been trying to build the definitive service that prevents the 28% to 31% of property sales from falling through each year. For the enterprise who hits upon the answer a huge financial reward beckons. But despite many millions having been put into development as yet there seems to be no end to the problem.
At present we have companies focusing on ‘upfront information’ the hope being that early clarity regarding all the usual problems that usually become teased out as a property is conveyanced, will staunch buyer’s remorse and keep more transactions in play. Others focus on the need to apply for local authority searches and instructing conveyancers and solicitors to move forward at an earlier stage.
Sticking points in the transfer of title from one party to the other revolve around the need for many stakeholders to interact and communicate, the agent, solicitor, broker, surveyor, lender etc all go about their specific work each time a sale is agreed, and many companies are now focusing on how the communication between all parties can be speeded up using modern technology.
In the past seven-years I have engaged and discussed with and looked at over a hundred different property technology businesses who have been grasping with the complexities of the usual 216 stages that a typical UK sale goes through. Some of them monitor the state of play, others hurry along certain aspects. In my head as we are now in 2024 and there has been a huge explosion around the wonders of Generative AI, as though it is the cure for everything (we shall see), but I do think that it is opening stakeholders eyes to the fact that useful data and digital technology will be the way this thorny and nebulous problem is solved.
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