For long, the real estate market was stuck in old-age practices. However, the digital revolution of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has disrupted the landscape bringing along a new breed of tech start-ups with creative solutions and the results are nothing short of amazing.
Although there are proactive real estate companies that have acquired these solutions, many are yet to clear the path for the disruption that is yet to come. Modern real estate companies know how valuable online presence is. Besides, building a custom website is no longer as complicated and expensive as it once was – professional full stack developers do this in no time. While a website is almost a must-have, some companies do far more than that and manage to use cutting-edge technologies to improve their business.
According to a 2018 report by Grand View Research, the global Real estate market holds the lion share of the asset class, more than stocks and bonds combined. The same report indicates that this market is expected to hit $4,263.7 billion in revenues by the year 2025.
With such huge stakes, the opportunity for tech-oriented firms to compete in this landscape will continue to be driven by limited innovation and slow adoption of technology.
Here are three tech startups that already have boots on the ground in trying to make the real estate world a better place.
Bowery
Whether you are buying or selling a house, an appraisal is one of the most important aspects of this process. It helps you establish the true market value of the property which essentially means you buy at the or sell at the current market price. Moreover, if you are looking to finance the acquisition through a mortgage loan, the lender requires an appraisal as security for the mortgage.
Bowery is a tech company redefining how real estate appraisals are done thanks to their apt and cutting-edge technology in big data. In realizing valuation and appraisal processes need to keep up with changing technology, they have developed cloud-based software that automates and optimizes the appraisals writing process compared to manually doing it.
Instead of using antiquated methods, Bowery’s intuitive software utilizes passive databasing to automatically pull data in public record data meaning the appraisers don’t need to spend countless hours mining for the data on the internet. Moreover, sales and rental and sales statistics are stored in the database and can be easily lifted through a map-based search.
Another excellent attribute of the Bowery property listing tool is the deployment of natural language generation. Essentially, it reduces the turn-around time by helping the appraisers generate clients’ reports easily without having to manually write everything.
In 2018, the start-up plugged in additional resources in form of seed funding campaign which has allowed them to create a mobile app that allows real estate appraisers to tick off items in boxes, rather than note everything down.
Atlant
On the mention of the word blockchain, the first thing that comes to mind is Bitcoins. What most people don’t know is that this is a technology upon which Bitcoin and other synonymous cryptocurrencies are built on.
In 2017, Michael Arrington was the first person to use an Ethereum smart contractto buy real estate. Since then, it has been a hot topic in the real estate circles and start-ups like Atlant are starting to leverage the technology to build a business around it by creating a decentralized marketplace.
Given the overly fragmented real estate market, it’s very difficult for investors to acquire a piece of real estate property in a timely and secure manner. Atlant is trying to change this through P2P rentals and tokenized ownership.
Tokenization of real estate market eliminates liquidity problems as investors are able to convert the value of real estate assets into “tokens” to represent that asset and trade them at any moment in time. Moreover, the secretive operation in terms of property prices, lease rental rates, and valuations has left many investors on the losing edge. The Atlant blockchain system has brought transparency in all the transactions by availing them to the public.
Enertiv
Although real estate data is the driving force behind the whole industry, it’s one of the areas that has persistently continued to resist disruption. This is because most real estate companies keep data stashed away in locker rooms or spread across regional databases in the case of the US.
Driven by the hunger for this data, a real estate tech start-up by the name Enertiv utilizes data analytics to improve building commercial real estate projects operations.
The tech savvies go beyond BMS data visualization to tracking critical components of a building to individual pieces of equipment like air conditioners. As a result, they are able to deliver targeted insights into a building offering real-time comfort for tenants. The level of transparency in their software makes buildings operations and management easier, increasing profitability.
As you can see, there are real estate tech companies already making an impact in the real world. If you are looking to start a company in the same niche, here are the common mistakes to avoid.
