KPMG: efficiency and decision-making improvements trump revenue generation in tech adoption
Companies’ main objective in adopting digital is to improve efficiencies and decision-making. This is confirmed by proptech respondents, who claim they’re normally brought in to do the following: improve efficiencies (65% of the time), reduce costs (47%) and improve decision-making (44%), according to the survey.
Past investment in IT, digital or proptech collaboration was also intended to improve efficiencies and decision-making. This is consistent across three of the property life cycles KPMG has explored in more detail:
- development (design and planning; construction; demolition and remediation);
- asset/property management (fitout and refurbishment; sales and leasing; property management); and
- investment & financing (asset acquisition and disposal; valuations; financing).
The differences between types of organisation are significant. Brokers and advisors seem to be leading the way over owner or developers and property investors in almost all aspects of digital transformation. These include employing digital experts to lead their transformation, having an enterprise-wide digital strategy in place, using proptech solutions and adopting data strategies. Again, this result was backed up by the proptech responses.
When proptech were asked which companies they saw as the most innovative in the market, two of the largest global brokers received the highest number of unprompted mentions. These were closely followed by companies such as VTS and WeWork. This lead is most likely explained by the highly competitive nature of the real estate advisory industry. To maintain their competitive edge, companies are increasingly using technology to differentiate themselves.
They have started to invest in integrated systems, cloud-based solutions, smart-building technology and the automation of the more manual aspects of their businesses to free up their teams to focus on value creation and client service following: improve efficiencies (65% of the time), reduce costs (47%) and improve decision-making (44%), the survey shows.
