Remember when you needed a key to unlock your apartment door? Or had to call the maintenance supervisor to fix a leaky faucet? Quaint days, right?
Today, apartment residents want to access their communities through key fobs and smartphones and make maintenance requests 24/7. They want to pay rent and renew leases via convenient apps. And we in the multifamily property business want to make that and more available through the expanding world of proptech.
Proptech, or property technology, encompasses the digital tools we use to buy, sell, market, and manage real estate. It’s a $24 billion industry, according to Statista, and growing. By 2032, proptech could be an $86.5 billion industry.
Some estimates place the number of proptech companies and startups at 10,000, and I feel like they’ve all pitched us. That’s been going on for five years but has intensified over the last two, as proptech firms bring more cool stuff online.
AI, cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) are making multifamily properties more frictionless for operators and residents, improving experiences for all parties. And there’s more to come. Here’s what intrigues me about proptech in 2023.
The expanding promise of data
Robust market data is essential to operate a thriving multifamily complex. We subscribe to industry-leading providers that deliver a broad range of data, from average rents and occupancy levels to year-over-year rent growth and availability levels.
That data is growing more detailed and more local. Good data providers can extract research from regional markets and sub-markets, allowing us to drill into the local experience. We’re also able to build custom data reports based on geography, structure types, rents, and many other…
