Property’s digitisation gathers pace but human touch still key

The real estate sector’s imperative to digitise was increased during the covid pandemic, according to Srikanth Ramachandran, president and CEO of California-headquartered proptech company  NTrust Infotech.

“The industry felt a big need for digitisation during that period because every landlord and every tenant was looking at various lease provisions,” Ramachandran told Real Asset Insight’s Richard Betts.

“They wanted to understand how those things are all defined in the lease so that they could make some changes,” he said. Property owners wanted to ensure they could maintain revenues and that tenants remained in the same premises which created “a need for quick data”.

NTrust Infotech was able to help customers and using artificial intelligence was able to annotate the key provisions and quickly to answer questions. Now, more clients need lease data to help navigate current market conditions.

 “With ESG and other compliance factors everybody is looking for a lot more granular data,” he said.

NTrust Infotech’s recent acquisition of Asian company Eximius adds to its resources in the AsiaPacific region too and the company now meets customers’ abstraction requirements in 40 different languages.

But Ramachandran emphasises that there is a limit to what technology can do. “Technology by itself is not going to solve the problems, you need humans in the loop, especially in the corporate real estate space.

Please click on the video above to watch the full interview or listen to the podcast below.