Round table report: What’s next for proptech and what role will AI play?

While the term ‘proptech’ is still relatively new, the UK is already home to over 900 companies in the sector.

From scale-ups to start-ups, innovative new solutions are being developed everyday to tackle inefficiencies across the sector.Despite its potential, questions remain around how willing various demographics are to embrace this new – and sometimes futuristic – technology. Concerns around usability and data security remain high, and in order to achieve mass adoption these needs to be addressed.Our panel was:

• James McArthur, director at NG Chartered Surveyors
• Daniel Barker, senior director, real estate at NODE Technologies
• Suzanne Luscombe, strategic growth director at resicentral
• Izzy Rhodes, founding director, Swain Architecture
• Gareth Parker, chief technology officer at Naismiths

The roundtable hosted in partnership with digital marketing and PR agency, Tank, kicked off by asking which sectors were most willing to adopt proptech solutions.

Suzanne Luscombe, strategic growth director at resicentral, highlighted how this has traditionally varied between the residential building and the student, urban, co and senior-living sectors. Suzanne added: “More recently, we’ve seen residential and estate management businesses adopting proptech solutions, due to the efficiency savings and the fact that AI can collate and analyse vast sets of data. Those who haven’t adopted proptech are still paying teams of people to do this.”

When looking at how each profession is navigating the rise of proptech, James McArthur, director at NG Chartered Surveyors emphasised how weighing up the cost versus benefit is still a hurdle, however, adoption rates are increasing, with new buildings they’re taking on: “For me, it’s a case of visiting a client and being able to clearly showcase what proptech is available to them, what it can do and the challenges it helps them to overcome.”

Educating the market and industry peers remains a key priority, with Izzy Rhodes, founding director, Swain Architecture, discussing how despite AI and new technologies clearly having a place, they will never replace creativity: “You still need the idea and initial inspiration. AI can help with identifying conservation areas, planning regulations – it’s tasks like this that drain time.”When asked about the main considerations for those adopting proptech solutions, Gareth Parker, chief technology officer at Naismiths highlighted a principle called Jakob’s Law, which is focused on the usability of technology: “Users expect websites to work in the same way as other websites they already know. The same can be applied to proptech. We need to be making technology as intuitive as possible if we are to fuel wider adoption.”

The discussion concluded with final thoughts about the next big thing, with Daniel Barker, senior director, real estate at NODE Technologies sharing his thoughts on the future: “I was at a conference recently and it’s clear that there isn’t a shortfall in the number of proptech solutions out there. We have the platforms and the integrators, everything just needs to become rationalised in terms of what the end-user wants. Any tech around ESG and carbon reduction will be big over the next few years in the retrofit market.”

Read a full summary of the discussion here: https://tank.co.uk/the-impact-of-ai-in-property/