DISCLAIMER : Major Disruptions For Real Estate Industry COMING SOON!
Even a few decades back, real estate and technology were like two mismatched puzzle pieces, the thought of making those two ends meet wasn’t nurtured much either- leave alone active efforts.
However, evolution in the technology sector has been turning the ‘impossible’s to ‘possible’s (and how!) since time immemorial...and that has resized those so-called mismatched puzzle pieces over the years to fit side-by-side, enhancing the entire picture of the real estate industry.
From curbing the difficulty in arranging property tours (read, agents’ schedule check + agent allocation + coping up with scheduled tours where clients didn’t turn up..) to including & excluding properties in the listings and much much more, real estate technologies have swept the industry off its feet with convenience galore.
There’s no denying that real estate will never stop being a "people" industry but the contemporary truth is, the industry smarties are increasingly turning to real estate business automation to improve the way relationships were made in the non-tech era.
Like every other industry in today’s date, technology isn’t an essential for a business operating in the real estate industry as well, but it is an absolute must-have if a business foresees competitive advantage on the cards, like you do (the reason you’re here!) .
Without further ado, let’s explore what’s hot in this space & how adopting to those trends can (or can’t) help you build a reputation in the real estate industry.
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Planning to weigh the pros and cons & maybe, adding in?
5 Hot Proptech Trends And How Your Business Can Benefit From Those!
Before wasting any of your time or mine, let’s do a quick fact check :
No matter what’s the context, ‘real estate software’ or ‘real estate app’ is a myth!
Why?
Because, you already know, real estate is like a Lego box set - where each ‘block’ is important but totally varies from one another. Given that, even if a few businesses are planned around the same block or combination of blocks, how their processes run are hardly ever the same!
Thus, their requirements from a software perspective are also different.
Confusing? Let’s look at some of those ‘blocks’.
Talking about commercial real estate - Listing , Construction, Leasing management, Property Marketplaces, Real estate Investment, Evaluation & analytics, Mortgage, Brokerage, Property Management etc. are some of the examples and the list goes on & on. For example, a Listing Software / App can’t do full justice to a Construction business.
Your next question probably is, how do the Off-The-Shelf (OTS) Real Estate Software work then?
Simple - they squeeze EVERY TYPE OF REAL ESTATE BUSINESS into a generic structure, making few modules work to a limited extent, leaving others existing as a set of defunct junk features cluttering the workflow further.
So, simply throwing heavy names like ‘Big Data’ , ‘AR & VR’ and other such debutants in the tech block is probably not going to help you. Instead, presenting the increasingly ‘tried & tested’ trends along with the ways your business can reap benefits off them! Did you know..? :
Automation Is Sharing The Same Priority As The ‘Mason’
Be it ‘paperwork’ or ‘property tours’, ‘construction team’s attendance tracking’ or ‘calculating next date of property maintenance’..the list of tasks that go on a loop inside a real estate business is huge!
Handling all those manually kills chances of betterment in the core aspects and putting them on excel doesn’t help much, either. Think of how many times you have wished you could have some more time for networking, digging up leads from social media, or maybe working on your USP? You’ve lost count, I bet! Real Estate automation fulfills that long awaited wish by freeing your time from the redundant tasks while ensuring minimized error in those executions. In case you are wondering what to automate and what not, the answer is, “anything that runs on a loop following a firm logic and requires utmost precision to ensure foolproof quality outcome”.
Blockchain Is The New Lock-and-Key
Blockchain isn’t a newbie in the tech space, but real estate has been comparatively late to have the goodness onboard. If you are wondering in which areas of real estate blockchain can bear fruits, the answer won’t come easy as the possibilities are limitless, literally ! Let’s look at the top benefits of blockchain in real estate industry:
- With tokenization, the landlords can make the most of blockchain to sell fractional ownership of their properties
- The buyers and sellers can have secured real estate contracts with end-to-end encryption along with inbuilt legitimacy checks
- Storage of property titles can be more secure and convenient with blockchain ledgers
- Blockchain can significantly reduce operating costs by removing intermediary requirements out of the decentralized system & transaction process, making the relations - be it ‘landlord & tenants’ or ‘buyer & seller’ - more direct
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Walking Through Is Best Done From The Comfort Of Couch
Talking about proptech trends, customer satisfaction happens to be an aspect that can’t be missed! Being one of the prime driving forces of any business, customer engagement is where every business is working on more or less, making the competition harder, churning out newer ways to capture and hold customers. For a traditional industry like real estate that focused on physical communication for a long time, virtual property tours came as a breather for both the parties - the agents and the buyers. Enabling 360-degree property tours where the buyers can be there without literally being there, exploring the nooks & corners of the property, these virtual walkthroughs seem to be here to stay. Here are the reasons that make this trend a ‘fab’ & not a ‘fad’:
- Virtual property tours intensify the interest in property listings as customers get more detailed information on their selected properties without having to step outside. Thus, sales soar up with faster and more convenient decision making.
- Virtual tours are not tied to time constraints or agent availability and hence, can attend multiple clients with equal efficiency under much lesser budget
- Doing what not many in similar businesses are doing sharpens your competitive edge and what better way to excel than deploying interactive panorama rich virtual walkthroughs!
Guts Are From The Past, Intelligent ROI Analysis Is The Present (& Future!)
Time is one of the most crucial factors of a business and where the deciding brains choose to invest their time, directly affects the growth of the business. In the case of the real estate industry, property investors and agents’ time is the key factor, and technology has immense potential in optimizing their time. With advancements in big data and ML algorithms, gaining deeper understanding of the ROI of each transaction involved is made a breeze. That implies more accurate predictions for the properties' sell-worthiness, profitability, expected commission amount, factual comparison amidst real estate deals etc., finally leading to smarter choices in the business front catering to minimize losses.
Personalization Is That Thin Line Between Ordinary & Extraordinary
#1 “You’re now subscribed to receive info about new listings in North Carolina”
#2 “Hey John! You will be the first one to know, when the next property with 2 Bedrooms + 1 patio with central heating system pops up in North Carolina within a budget of $400K - $600K !!”
If I ask you which one made an instant impact, the answer will be #2, hands off, courtesy personalization!
No one likes yet another generic text dumped in the inbox but just with a little effort into personalization, you can draw the ball in your court.
Personalization has mostly been an unexplored avenue in the real estate industry for quite long but now, the smart agents have started adding personal touch to their recommendation taking clients’ needs under consideration - preferred location, number of members to name a few.
However, that’s only scratching the surface, but the future lies in uber intelligent property recommendations. So the faster you jump to the advanced level of intelligence harnessing the power of AI, creating recommendations based on as much client details as your system stores, the better you’ll be able to get the pulse of the leads and easier conversion to clients will follow.
Trends Are Variable, Your Needs Are Not - Sync Both!
These proptech trends can be viewed as a blueprint of the future picture of the real estate industry scenario. But for a fact, to what extent these real estate technologies enhance your business processes or even bring adverse effects - depends entirely upon the development team youhand over the responsibilities to. Just how a wonderful architecture can come off as a complete disappointment when left to wrong hands!
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