“Revolutionising” is a word to use carefully and not dramatically. But there is no doubt, proptech, or property technology, is indeed revolutionising the investment market, where the BTR market alone reached a record £5.2 billion from institutional investors in 2024.
By integrating advanced technologies like AI, big data, blockchain, and IoT, numerous innovations are streamlining property transactions, boosting market insights, and improving operational efficiency.
AI and big data alone are used to analyse market trends and identify lucrative investment opportunities, while blockchain ensures secure and transparent transactions.
But even with its advancement, proptech is still behind the curve compared with other tech and other industries.
This is due to the age of buildings and the cost of retrofitting. Integrating new technology into existing, far older buildings is challenging. However, most properties in the BTR market are new build, constructed with technology already installed.
This enables the BTR sector to be more focused on property management. Using virtual data rooms (VDRs), described as “high-tech, secure file cabinets,” we can enhance efficiency and restructure processes, that improve collaboration among stakeholders, while ensuring regulatory compliance.
For instance, LRG has implemented platforms for contract and supply base management, which allow for centralised storage and real-time updates of contracts.
Data rooms also provide a secure online platform that are used for buying and selling property, given that they can store and share sensitive documents during investment transactions. These are proving useful for due diligence processes, mergers, acquisitions, and other complex deals.
And recently, LRG moved to the Reapit platform, that allows better visibility, compliance, and strategic workload distribution. The technology platform is designed for estate and lettings agencies, and gives tools to manage the likes of lettings, sales, client accounts and property management.
LRG is also investing and building a virtual leasing platform to allow us to enhance our management of Multi and Single-family housing and this includes the integration of Residently for significantly enhanced resident engagement functionality and data analytics, while HubSpot CRM is running all LRG’s contact strategy within Portfolio Investment Sales.
Meanwhile, we are currently in discussions with companies that supply white appliances which possess significant purchasing power and can provide services at a high level, which means they can monitor the appliance and promptly replace the item if any issues arise.
The technology which sits behind it – the appliance, serial number, warranty unexpired, being able to inform the developer what’s better value for money, is all getting aggregated through AI.
Added to that, LRG is aiming to be more initiative-taking in the data lake space. We should be able to create significantly more insight with all the data we can collect across the group, as there’s a lot of information.
Up until this point, the information has been in silos and spread widely. But in today’s market, the dots must be connected on where and how this data lake will bring it all together and be able to provide much more insightful information for the marketplace.
What that means is more benefits for clients. Simply put, there’s so much going on in this space right now, which is why LRG is investing heavily in the technology that then assists clients who may not have the capability to manage these tasks independently.
Andy Jones is Group Director of Corporate Sales, Lettings & BTR at LRG
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