 |
| John Schnobrich/Unsplash |
Without doubt, the pandemic has left a lasting effect on how we transact, use and manage real estate.
As the clouds clear, real estate tech can be seen filling certain big gaps already. Here are the top 4 that caught our eye:
↔ Going Contactless: While home sales have been first off the grid to adopt remote showing and presentation tech, hospitality and commercial real estate are adopting contactless and remote management tech rapidly. Tech is being deployed increasingly to manage properties, from access control such as biometrics and facial recognition hardware to software for remote check-in and management.
↔ Making Workflows Efficient: Real estate and construction are infamous for complex workflows, but real estate tech is helping the industry digitize and thereby drive down costs and speed up projects. On the finance side of construction, tech is now powering underwriting and origination of construction loans. This lets general contractors pay subcontractors faster, keeping project timelines intact.
↔ Investing For All: With interest rates at record lows and the stock market volatile, more are investing in property. With tech enabled services, individual investors can buy homes as investments, or they can buy fractional real estate through REITs. Such offerings were earlier only available to high-net-worth investors in real estate funds, but thanks to tech, investing is now open for everyone.
↔ Monetizing Properties: The pandemic has created house rich, cash poor and cash rich, house poor people. For the house rich, real estate tech, along with fintech, is opening up possibilities to sell fractional equity in the property to raise cash effortlessly. On the house poor side, tech is making the rent to own model available to the common homebuyer.