Property technology or PropTech, which is the industry acronym, has come into its own in the post-pandemic world. The demand for digital solutions – be it financing a real estate investment or virtually viewing a possible investment, is increasingly being offered as a default option to interested parties. The two-year long restrictions imposed by governments across most countries has energized PropTech in two ways – forcing those resisting digitization to acknowledge it as the way forward, while accelerating the adoption of newer technology by those who see and understand the benefits being offered by various PropTech platforms in the market.

In the MENA region, the UAE market is seeing a spurt in PropTech activity from start-up scale-ups to acquisitions, whereas markets like the U.S., and Australia are seeing the maturing of these platforms. A virtual event hosted by Stone & Chalk, an Australian non-profit accelerator, with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, discussed the evolution and adoption of PropTech platforms in commercial property management in the country.

The heads of Re-Leased, Facilio, and Cirrus8 formed the Stone & Chalk PropTech panel which looked at various opportunities and challenges facing commercial real estate management sector in Australia.

While the genesis of the PropTech sector cannot be pinned at any particular point in time over the past decade, Tom Wallace, CEO of Re-leased Property Software opined that many PropTech platforms have been created from “personal painful experiences”, and are being built to “address obvious gaps in the market”. He outlined the evolution of PropTech platforms that had to cope with and deliver during the pandemic as the needs of the market changed overnight. PropTech platforms like Re-leased had to adapt to customers’ needs such as they not receiving rents on time as businesses shut down, as well as deal with an increasingly paperless tenancy system. Wallace said the future for property management technology is to deliver technology that does manual work and allows teams to do more meaningful work. “New business model is flexibility, reducing manual labour, increasing efficiency in dealing with tenant issues,” said Wallace.

Re-leased is a cloud-based commercial property management software that streamlines property management from the leasing stage to automating administrative tasks during maintenance, and managing operational efficiency. Wallace said that his firm has been deployed to manage a mix of assets, including commercial projects. Re-leased currently operates in the Australian, New Zealand, UK, and US markets, as per the company’s website.

How are proptech companies operating in the international market?

Another global player in the Australian PropTech market is SaaS-based property operations platform Facilio. Headquartered in New York City, Facilio has offices in Dubai, Chennai, Australia & Singapore.  Prabhu Ramachandran, Founder and CEO, Facilio spoke about the company’s client base in the Australian market, and the changing customer expectations from PropTech companies.

Ramachandran said the two major trends dominating the property management space are – customers looking to remotely manage properties, and sustainability – reducing a building’s carbon footprint. He said Facilio operated with the principle of, “How do we enable customers to manage one building to multi-buildings, through data points.” He explained that Facilio uses IoT to aggregate building data, optimize performance, and control portfolio operations - all from one place.

The Facilio CEO then explained that the firm was moving towards sustainability in building management by making operations more efficient through data points and reducing energy-wastage by providing mobile apps which allow for control on a per-minute basis of the facility’s HVAC. Ramachandran said that Facilio has integrated with third party apps such as energy star in Australia to make everybody part of the sustainability cycle. He also said that data points allowed for pro-active action that would save energy such as alerting facilities managers when HVAC systems needed to be upgraded/ retrofitted.

Ramachandran described the Australian market as among the firm’s top three markets in terms of revenue and also called it a mature market for PropTech platforms as the predictably of an outcome was a cycle of 12 months. He said, “About 12 months is all it takes to understand whether the opportunity is a win or a loss for us.” 

That the Australian PropTech scene is a mature one is underlined by the growth arc that Cirrus8 software has traversed over the past decade. Steve Carulli, Co-founder of Cirrus8 and former joint managing director of Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) said that his PropTech platform was borne out of frustration with the then suite of property management tools for commercial property, and has since then rapidly grown to command a market share among some of commercial real estate’s biggest brands. He said that PropTech platforms are thriving as commercial property managers are taking the management of facilities inhouse which then leads to acquiring and deploying PropTech platforms.

He highlighted that the post-pandemic world has proven beyond doubt that those who are not technologically competitive are then unable to produce what market expects. The adage, ‘You are as good as your last deal,’ has never been truer from the property management perspective, said Carulli.

Carulli also said with Proptech platforms being deployed by commercial property managers across jurisdictions, time-zone deliverables have to be worked on and the process needs to be seamless.

While the past decade saw the rise of FinTech, the post-pandemic world is bringing increasing attention to the PropTech sector as focus shifts to technology solving many of the world’s urgent problems – from energy utilization and management in facilities to tracking greenhouse gas emissions during construction and operations, and reducing dependency on mundane manual tasks. With global communications more online than ever, the PropTech market is just coming into its own on the international stage.