New Property Marketplaces: Learnings across cases
New Marketplaces is a series of 3 blogs published during, before, and after our member event: New Markedplaces held on April 2nd 2020.
We might be doing better than we think when it comes to real estate’s readiness to partner up. And even among the most automation-positive entrepreneurs, human interaction keeps playing an important role. We look back on the past few weeks of exploring New Property Marketplaces.
1. A collaborative culture in progress
Real estate players share an openness to partnerships. This is easy to spot, as we take one step back and look across the past weeks, where we have dived into New Property Marketplaces at Proptech Denmark. The marketplace startups that shared their learnings with us displayed a partnership willingness in multiple ways. For the crowdlending platform Kameo it has strengthened their credibility to team up with the investment bank ABG Sundal Collier, which is Kameo’s main owner. It has been as vital for Brickshare to identify industry ambassadors for their investment platform, rather than being “the new noisy boy in the classroom”, as CEO Thomas Midtgaard put it. Prop.Exchange, the marketplace focusing on speeding up the sales cycle within commercial real estate, also employs a partnership philosophy. They want to use local ambassadors to promote Prop.Exchange during their scaling in Europe, and they consider distributing their tool to brokers. It is a move favoring collaboration over replacement, because Prop.Exchange takes the broker’s traditional function of bridging seller and buyer.
Another partner example comes from Jasper that reaches out to property management companies, while Jasper grows their investment platform for commercial real estate. Their team makes it clear: You are good at managing properties, so you do that. We just want to connect your properties with a wider group of investors. Approaches like these serve as a useful reminder: Partnership-driven innovation can happen from the ground up and within existing processes. This is a necessary lane of development, alongside projects that are defined from scratch as partnership mobilizers. There is still value in the latter category: From the explorative program, where participating startups and industry leaders work on new directions for industry-wide challenges, spanning to startup-corporate ventures, where the resources invested are equal together with the risk. But we need the less splashy kind of partnering too, the one that happens day by day, as informal acts of reaching out.
2. The insistence on the human touchpoint
Just as notable as the partnership value, our marketplace entrepreneurs agreed that the user needs a human at one point in the transactional experience. Easy and frictionless onboarding and communication flows cannot replace a personal phone call. Prop.Exchange’s team, for instance, calls every new buyer or seller that registers on their platform (“we keep it old school that way,” says founder Allan Kehlet Rieck). Kameo’s Managing Director in Denmark, Jesper Johansen, does not stray away either from visiting a property location tied to an online loan request from a developer. Because people put their own personal assets as caution, and it is the respectful thing to do. Holding on to the human meeting within the user experience can also feel logical, when it reflects an organization, where not everything is automated. Kameo might pull automatic credit reports on companies that seek a loan through their platform, but their human industry committee plays a major role in deciding whether an application is eligible or not. And while the investment platform Jasper is building a data engine that collects data and creates insights, it is only a supporting aid for their team to select the investment properties that will give the best returns.
In the customer meeting however, Jasper is no doubt experimenting with how a marketplace can feel present and available for the user through other elements than face-to-face-interaction. One way they do it, is trusting that the user can handle a high degree of complexity. If you are an investor on Jasper, you will be empowered with access to a range of documents related to your investment, including in-depth quarterly and annual tax reports. You will receive updates from a human asset manager, but the vision seems to educate the user, so there is less need for constant guidance. Here Jasper is challenging old expectations of how available an investment advisor should be. The question is whether they can get a hold of a younger generation of investors that will be just fine with it.
3. Questions to explore further
On our collaborative culture: We need each other to get real estate’s innovation moving. So how to make partnerships, where we make room for each other's respective strengths?-On the human touchpoint: It is ingrained among industry players as well as entrepreneurs. How do we ensure that the human is there because it adds value to the user experience and not out of sheer habit?
