What is #PropTech and how does it work?
It is not some geeky language that is shared by school leavers sat up in their bedrooms sharing special digits and codes and neither is it some high tech marketing skill that goes way above your head when presented to you (well the build of it may be complicated, but how it is presented certainly isn’t).
Proptech is the change we are seeing within our industry that are making our lives easier and much more rewarding when it comes to finding new valuations and selling / renting property in the UK. There is no challenge for Estate Agents to embrace Proptech and it is in fact more a challenge for the guys behind the Proptech brands to get in front of agencies to showcase what their products and services can do.
“Proptech: Breaking the industry into smaller sectors and having the ability to drive more and more of a target audience to each of them meaning that results are better, so there is a very big tick in the ROI box.” Christopher Walkey.
The internet will never catch on was once a famous saying and since that time we have adopted it to such an extent that it is more important to some than communication channels such as radio, telephone and television. In recent years we have had the explosion of social media and being one of the first within our industry to embrace it, I know that it was never really seen as a potential marketing channel in the early days for the property industry… I believe that it is no where near where it can be just yet, so much more to come and nowadays many estate agencies spend a lot of time and their budgets on the likes of Twitter and Facebook etc.
Savills and Proptech Cities? http://www.savills.co.uk/tech-cities/index.html#intro
Innovation (Proptech) we have recently seen enter our industry now automates nearly every step of the UK property buying and selling process eliminating time wasting elements and delivering more precise results by being able to understand each and every client’s needs. How consumers are interacted with such as when, on which device and in which tone, in how much detail and what language can all be defined with advancements in PropTech. We can not (yet) eliminate the need for human driven actions within the industry, but PropTech is learning very quickly how it can deliver results in helping to work alongside people (both industry and consumer) to save valuable time, efforts and money.
You just want to acquire new valuations for your portfolio and sell / rent them out as quickly a possible right? This part of Estate Agency will never change, but Proptech is now filtering into the industry and breaking it all down into parts allowing estate agents to pick and chose the best ‘components’ to help them to drive better results and market share locally.
You may not think that Proptech is actually anything to take note of yet, but London is now seen as one of the central hubs for this new section of the industry and just like those who didn’t take note of the internet or social media, it will creep up behind you and your business will embrace it at some point so just like anything in business, as per the early bird with the worm, being first at something can prove the difference to success and failure or achieving market dominance.