PropTech: Turning Real Estate Into a Data-Driven Market?

Acknowledgement: We would like to express sincere thanks to Unissu and Crunchbase for the provision of data. Moreover, we would also like to thank the founding donors to the Oxford Real Estate Initiative (Forbes Elworthy of Craigmore and The Centre for Studies in Property Valuation and Management Trust) plus Arcadis, BCLP, CBRE, EY, Grosvenor, Nuveen, Redevco, The Crown Estate and UBS for their nancial support. The real estate industry is traditionally a slow-moving asset class. The recent hype around real estate technology or ’PropTech’ stands in stark contrast to this traditional view on real estate. It has been argued by PropTech entrepreneurs, tech evangelists and scholars that this ’digital disruption’ of the industry leads to a digitalised global real estate market. These claims coincide with observations made in other markets that went through a process of digitalisation. Data-driven markets are often characterised by a winner-takes-all competition between rms that o er platform business models centrally focused on providing digital services for users, who ’pay’ in providing more user data. In this paper, we investigate whether PropTech is actually turning real esate into a data-driven market. The quantitative ndings from an analysis of more than 7,000 PropTech rms reveal that such trends are at work in PropTech. PropTech is indeed an increasingly important, global phenomenon, with data analytics technologies at the core of the network of property technologies. In this core sector, most acquisitions between PropTech rms occurred. The ndings presented here are important for users and owners of real estate. In order to bene t from the e ciency gains associated with the digitalisation of the market, they need to become aware of the business value of data they are generating in buying, renting, or managing real estate.