Breaking Property News – 08/11/2023
Daily bite-sized proptech and property news in partnership with Proptech-X.
PriceHubble acquires Urbanease, pursuing its ambitious growth plan in France and Europe
PriceHubble, a leader in performance data solutions for real estate and finance, announces the acquisition of French company Urbanease, a leader in land sourcing and urban planning data solutions, highly complementary to PriceHubble. This strategic step enables PriceHubble to further bolster its strong presence in the French market while expanding its product offering.
Following Dataloft and WhenFresh in the UK this year, this third acquisition in only a few months reaffirms PriceHubble’s ambitious growth strategy in Europe and its mission to provide its clients with the best performance data solutions for the real estate and finance industries.
Founded in 2019, Urbanease is a French B2B SaaS company providing real estate professionals with unique urban data analytics and prospecting solutions. With a user base of over 12,000, Urbanease has proven the quality and scalability of its technology, showcasing its ability to meet the growing demands of the real estate and financial industries over the years.
The acquisition of Urbanease strengthens PriceHubble’s strong ongoing growth, doubling down on one of its core markets. It is also a proactive response to its customers’ strong interest in further integrating hyperlocal data and qualitative land analysis.
Urbanease’s proprietary datasets and solutions, already used by industry leaders, perfectly complete PriceHubble’s offering, unlocking new use cases for its customers in France, like the sourcing of new development opportunities and real estate prospecting.
“We are delighted to have the Urbanease team join us, a team we know well and with whom we already share strategic customers. We have been very impressed by the deep local expertise and the quality of the technology Urbanease has developed, and we look forward to writing the next chapter of PriceHubble together,” explains Alexis Radjabi, Chief Sales Officer for Western Europe at PriceHubble.
“Today, Urbanease embarks on a new, exciting, and international journey aiming to leverage the expertise and technology of each other to better serve our current and future customers. We are delighted to be joining forces with PriceHubble,” added Valentin Peersman, CEO of Urbanease.
About PriceHubble – it is a European B2B company that builds innovative digital solutions for the real estate and financial industries based on property valuations and market insights. Leveraging big data, innovative analytics and great visualization, the product suite brings a new level of transparency in the market.
Enabling their customers to make real estate and investment decisions based on the most accurate data-driven insights (such as valuations, market analyses, value forecasts or building simulations) and enhance the dialogue with end consumers.
PriceHubble’s digital solutions are designed to help all players across the entire real estate value chain (banks, asset managers, developers, property managers and real estate agents). PriceHubble is already active in ten countries (Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria, Japan, Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom) and employs more than two hundred people worldwide.
About Urbanease – founded in 2019, Urbanease is a group developing innovative urban data analytics and prospecting solutions for professionals in the sector. The company’s mission is to cater to a fundamental challenge common to many real estate professionals: finding opportunities. Urbanease is also the name of their flagship prospecting mapping application, which brings together the fundamentals of real estate data to help professionals find deals and analyze opportunities. The best of data and CRM for effective prospecting strategies.
Are Estate Agents Jobs Safe from the AI Takeover?
In a new episode of The Home Stretch podcast, Ben Sellers, Co-Founder of Starberry and Brand Director at nurtur tech, joined CEO of The Guild of Property Professionals, Iain McKenzie, and his co-host, Holly Hibbett, to discuss the benefits of utilising AI in estate agency as well as addressing hesitations from the industry.
Full disclosure in my other daytime job I am also a NED for a related company to nurtur tech, but the inclusion of this piece is that Ben & Iain are articulating some of the most important themes circulating residential agency in the UK. For a decade we have been talking about Proptech, bolting on property technology services to grow efficiences, now all of a sudden advances in AI look like making ‘work’ for humans redundant.
‘Hibbett opens the conversation by commenting, “Iain and I were keen to get you on to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning because some agents are a little bit worried about it, while some agents want to learn more, and other agents know nothing at all about it. I went on a webinar recently and one of the quotes that stuck with me was ‘AI won’t take your job but someone who knows how to use it might.’ So, the overarching thing for me is that we all need to learn how to use it a little bit. So, Ben, what’s been your experience lately with AI?”
Ben Sellers responds by referencing recent news from Elon Musk, in which he exclaimed that in the future AI will create a situation where no job is needed, “obviously, there’s a bunch of news going on over the past week with the AI Safety Summit, and a certain Mr. Musk, but I think in reality they’re great tools and it is all about the data you put in. We are the humans who are putting in the data for the foreseeable future. It reminds me of the internet. My brother and I were selling it in 1994 and no one knew what email was. AI is sort of a bit like that except for it’s like a rocket ship!”
With Musk unveiling Grok, an AI chatbot to rival ChapGPT, this week, and OpenAI introducing the option to create custom versions of ChatGPT without any coding required, Sellers went on to discuss the benefits of implementing a strategy to utilise the software to improve efficiencies in business. “ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 and within five days it had a million downloads. It took two and a half years for Netflix to get a million customers – that just gives you an idea of the speed. We’re now at around 150 million users of just ChatGPT,” Sellers comments. “I do think there’s this sort of nervousness that everyone has this. Am I cheating? Should I use this? Shouldn’t I use this? Is it accurate? There are so many questions.”
Hibbett goes on to ask how agents can implement the technology day-to-day. Sellers responds saying, “AI can start writing their listings. It does a fantastic job. You put in some detail around the listing, create your prompts, which is literally bullet points of information, and then say, can you write me a really upbeat, informative piece of content to describe this property. And before you know it, it’s done. Let’s remember descriptions are a great one, but it doesn’t really stop there. If you want to write an email, if you want to write a brochure, if you want to write social posts, if you want to write some SEO – it’s literally pretty well anything that you would like.”
Iain McKenzie joins the conversation by asking what all this means for listeners of The Home Stretch podcast, stating “there will be some listeners saying, I get it and am already using it, and there’ll be other listeners that’ll be saying, I’m not so good at emails, let alone thinking about AI. What’s the message to those that aren’t using it? How do they start? Do they need to start?”
Sellers responds “technology has that hurdle. I would just recommend anyone to just start typing something, start asking a few questions, anything of interest whatsoever. It is better than writing an email and it is far more exciting and far more immediate.” Sellers concludes by proclaiming his excitement for the future of AI, “we should be excited, this, in my mind, is bigger than the internet.”
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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