For PropTech, UAE is a natural proponent
The real estate industry of the UAE has always been an outperformer, exhibiting sustained growth year after year. The coming years are not going to be any different. Small wonder then that the PropTech segment, which is an emerging segment in the real estate sector, is also on the right trajectory. The rapid adoption of property technology comes as no surprise in a country where all stakeholders — the government, the real estate industry, tech companies, buyers, and sellers — have embraced innovation and cutting-edge tech.
What makes UAE so receptive to PropTech?
With global and domestic investors and buyers evincing keen interest in properties, both residential and commercial, it is natural for them to look for ways and means to make their purchase journey as easy and secure as possible. PropTech enables them to cut down on the time needed to look up a property, evaluate it, do their due diligence, initiate the payment process, and so forth.
It all starts right at the enquiry level. ProTech makes a simple visit to a website a much more fulfilling process, enabling prospective buyers to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted services and virtual reality tours to filter out many properties and narrow them down to a few potential ones. It also allows them to report any issues and get a better understanding of rent payments.
For buyers, PropTech is no less useful. At the click of a button, they can get all the information they need about the latest real estate developments, changes in rules and regulations, sales happening in other geographies, data about rent, properties on offer, and so forth. The convergence of various technologies, such as AI-led bots and cloud computing, is driving digital transformation on a massive scale, thus giving a major boost to the real estate sector.
In fact, PropTech has shown results in the UAE: Increased efficiency, personalised property management, reduction in costs involved in transactions, and tangible savings. Everyone stands to gain something from adopting technology in the property market.
Breakdown of the PropTech market
The PropTech market of the UAE can be categorized based on solutions, applications, deployment, end users, and geography. It provides numerous benefits, such as real estate search, business intelligence, data-driven portfolio, facility, and asset management, efficient enterprise resource planning, and the like. All of these are compelling reasons to start a PropTech business in the UAE, leave alone invest in it.
Consider the data: PropTech startups across the UAE have raised more than $100 million in funding over the past five years. During the pandemic period alone, as much as $16 million was invested in PropTech companies.
From all indications, the going will only get better in the coming years. Already, the UAE is home to more than 55% of the about 200 PropTech startups in the MENA region. These numbers will grow rapidly as more and more companies enter the sector, which is likely given its robust ecosystem in the UAE.
Add to this a progressive government which understands the need for digital transformation, tech-savvy residents, and buyers and sellers who are always on the lookout for innovative solutions to make their life easy, and you have all the reasons to be exposed to the UAE’s PropTech market.
