MIPIM 2017: Know a chief executive of a property company who doesn’t have a plan for engaging with the next generation of property technology? Short their stock.
That was the message from Aaron N Block, co-founder and managing director of New York-based technology accelerator MetaProp at the EG panel: “We get tech. But where is the value?”
“I would challenge the chief executives of all of these companies today to ask them, what is your plan for engaging with the next generation of property technology? Tell me what your plan is. And the ones who don’t have an answer, short their stock, right now,” Block says.
However, Eddie Holmes, chairman of the UK PropTech Association, offered a word of warning for companies entering the proptech sphere, citing Countrywide as a company whose profits fell significantly last year while undergoing a digital transformation. “Undertaking transformation by going digital is incredibly risky,” he says. “It’s important for us to be cognisant of those risks being undertaken by institutional companies.”
Rachel Kisler, chief executive and founder and Kensee, said that sophisticated investors needed to harness the power of artificial intelligence to get the relevant information from the overwhelming data flow.
Is all the hype about proptech disrupting the industry overblown? “I think actually, we’re probably underestimating not overestimating the dramatic effect technology is going to have on how we build properties, how we manage our leasing and asset businesses, and how we create a tenant experience,” says Brandon Weber, co-founder and chief product officer at leasing and asset management platform VTS.
“I think right now we’re at this interesting point where it’s captured the imagination and I think over the next 12 months, we’ve got to see major institutional owners and major agencies driving significant competitive advantage using this technology or any one of those things that we would consider proptech under that umbrella.”
Panellists
■ Brandon Weber, co-founder and chief product officer, VTS
■ Eddie Holmes, chairman, UK PropTech Association
■ Aaron N. Block, co-Founder and managing director, MetaProp NYC
■ Rachel Kisler, chief executive and founder, Kensee
■ Tamara Brisk, France director, Wiredscore
Audience question: Is proptech making life easier for agents?
“Some proptech is,” says Brandon Weber, co-founder and chief product officer of VTS. “What VTS is focused on is making owners and agents more effective at what they do, so there’s just so much lonely fruit on that tree – from putting your business on your mobile device, to making it easier to match my inventory to the requirements that are on the market. We as a company are kind of on a mission to do that, and there are going to be a lot of companies that build solutions directly for the agent. And I think that’s a good thing.”
Eddie Holmes, chairman, UK PropTech Association says: “Agents that embrace those tools in the next 3-5 years will create a competitive advantage for themselves. Because the proptech that we’re talking about now is almost all about working with the current property value chain. True technological disruption comes when value chains get attacked, and when that happens you don’t have some competitive advantage as an agent or any other participant in the market, your livelihood will be under threat.”
Tamara Brisk, France director, WiredScore, talks to EG about launching the first internet connectivity certification in Paris this month.
“Paris is actually the third-biggest office market in the world, after New York and Tokyo. So if you reason just in terms of market size we should have probably even gone to Paris before London. But it is also a market that is having a development boom right now. It’s really effervescent and the French love WiredScore.
“I think in France we are seeing the same thing that we saw in New York and London, which is that some developers are already building to a WiredScore specification without even knowing that they’re doing it. What we’re allowing them to do is give a commercial value to all that hard engineering work so that tenants actually see it and know what they’re getting.
“On the other end of the spectrum there are always people who are late to the party and in France, just as we saw in London and New York, there are some owners who just haven’t even considered that technology is an asset.”
To send feedback, e-mail Louisa.Clarence-Smith@egi.co.uk or tweet @LouisaClarence or @estatesgazette
