Historically, real estate and property management have operated in a slow transition, separated from a fast-pacing digital turnaround & market innovation. However, COVID-19 kickstarted digital transformation with significant productivity, affordability, virtual sustainability & customer experience enhancements for both property managers and homeowners. Thus, the PropTech boom made a massive impact on the multifamily real-estate industry in how we search, buy, lease, and manage properties in this “new normal”.
According to a survey by a US-based PropTech firm, 85% out of 701 multifamily personnel wanted advanced tech insights for better property profits & growth. Thus, digital transformation through automation, AI, VR, IT, IoT (we can go on) in the multi-family real estate industry can impact both property owners/managers, landlords with efficient asset management as well as residents, tenants, and apartment buildings with automated software solutions improving on data collection, security access, and operational costs.
How PropTech is Transforming the Multifamily Space
The term “PropTech” signifies one small part of wider technology-driven innovation of property buildings & cities in the real-estate industry. However, at its core, PropTech virtually applies smart property automation to meet the growing consumer demand from smart search and leasing processes to advanced tech-enabled amenities across properties and smart home tech solutions like digital lights, locks, devices, etc.
According to The Center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation report, $32 billion was invested in PropTech/RETech companies in 2021, a 31.2% spike from the previous two years. With this advent of PropTech amid the pandemic, communities have taken the automation route to tour properties virtually through VR or AR or digitize all community activities from the resident angle and facilitate growth and demand in the multifamily space. As per an ADDA report, 95% of residents have reduced multifamily operational costs by raising helpdesk tickets, checking live visitor status, maintaining assets, and checking live invoice details among other activities through the online portal.
Best PropTech Practices to the Multifamily Business
Multifamily management businesses must identify the technological tools with their target audience i.e., by tracking the metrics of current and prospective residents. Property technology adds value to multifamily operations upon integrating smart facility solutions into the existing software. It’s time property managers eliminate inefficient pen-paper processes, giving access to data & digital ecosystem with the measures listed below –
- Live Communication Portal: A technologically sound property management solution must implement a live chat or social messaging platform to ensure private homeowner communication, top-class chatbox support, and promotion of new marketplace listings to boost apartment revenue.
- Integrating Virtual Interactions into Operations: Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) tech enables both residents & property managers with key PropTech solutions like virtual tours, virtual home leasing, two-way video conferencing, and e-deliveries, etc. These solutions will massively help in troubleshooting the parcel or visitor management interface even for tenants, front-desk, or lobby staff to create a seamlessly fast facility experience.
- IoT for Digital Estate Management: Building managers, agents, and homeowners can make use of IoT integrated with AI by smart sensors, vehicle ANPR, cloud-based security portal, HVAC systems, device adjustments, door functions, contactless visitor management system, etc to monitor tasks remotely. The scalability of such digital & smartphone integrated solutions has helped admins to eliminate apartment contamination during the COVID as well as tackle security breaches, service interruptions & overhead costs post-pandemic.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: 8 out of 10 CRE firms spend at least 15-25% of their time organizing & incorporating real-time data for property management. A dedicated CRM that streamlines internal operations & external sources into one unified platform has helped multifamily real-estate businesses to synchronize real-time changes, minimize routine operations & store deeper insights & records across the portfolio.
Challenges of PropTech Implementation
Multifamily real-estate ventures are facing challenges owing to the new solutions being implemented. While these ventures are skilled at developing multifamily assets and increase on investment value, without a performance plan or the technical back-end skillset, any big or small real-estate business will be unable to reap the benefits of PropTech entirely. Some of the major challenges are –
- The imbalance in resident utility & awareness among urban & tier-2/3 cities still poses a problem to the modern PropTech spectrum.
- Apartments & communities must evaluate technology first and then integrate it into their existing software solutions. Without proper integration, user efficiency will be compromised in the long run.
- Retaining leasing staff and vendors can be challenging with complex PropTech solutions. Therefore, it should be even easy to use so that existing staff can learn fast and even onboard new resources hassle-free.
The Future of Multifamily Real Estate
Residential real estate’s future will be more than simply about asset appreciation. When you utilize a technology-based customer service that overdrives on the overall tenant, residential, and commercial asset, the real value of the asset will emerge.
Without a question, one of the most significant differentiators in the multifamily real estate business will be sustainable community management technology. On one hand, PropTech solutions will be expected to automate housing tasks & amenities, determine shifting renter values, and dilute Enterprise workload, and leverage environmentally-friendly tech solutions on the other. No wonder why top players will go further by integrating SaaS, AI, and ML with sustainable business assets to fuel digital transformation exponentially among homeowners, renters, and investors alike.
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