PropTech Forum: Technology in the Real Estate Sector, different experts in the industry convened by Quiero Casa talked about the most recent technologies that are transforming the industry.
Proptech or technology applied in the real estate sector is revolutionizing the industry, today, properties are searched for, purchased, rented, or administered in a different way.
As part of PropTech Forum: Technology in the Real Estate Sector, different experts in the industry convened by Quiero Casa talked about the most recent technologies that are transforming the industry. Talking about real estate technology covers endless possibilities that range from real estate websites to Real Estate Development or Virtual Reality technologies that allow for transforming the user’s purchase experience.
According to the management of Vivanuncios, eBay’s real estate website in Mexico, from 2018 to 2019, 70 million real estate searches were done online, which represents a growth of 27% with respect to the previous year.
Nonetheless, these numbers are very low if it is compared with other countries, for example, in the United Kingdom the market penetration is 60% and in the United States 55%, while in Mexico we are just close to 8% of Internet users that look for a house or apartment online.
The concept of real estate just has a national penetration of 7 million monthly users online, and the issue is that, according to Guillermo Carrillo, associate director of Marketing for Quiero Casa, although each day more people are willing to buy online, in the case of a house, people prefer the experience of seeing and feeling the space that they will live in before buying it; this is why real estate sales companies must focus their efforts on what is known as ROPO (Research Online and Purchase Offline) to guarantee an experience of comfort and trust by doing the search online, but always having personalized treatment and special purchase experiences in the points of sale or display apartments.
On the other hand, in the Real Estate Development area, for architects, designers, and visual artists, 3D modeling or BIM (Building Information Modeling) has turned into an essential tool, not only for representation of a proposal or product, but as a methodology that helps or enables the business’s intelligence by concentrating all the internal information on the building, including data on structural engineering, mechanics, electrical, and even interior design and sustainability, which allows for punctual follow-up on the project’s advance, early evaluation of potential risks, prevents delays and additional costs, and allows for seeing simultaneous changes, to improve the project’s organization and follow-up.
Technology in the sector has also reached financing, seeking to streamline the documentation’s approval and sending process, without having to go to a bank branch. It is enough to just have an income of MXN $35,000 for each million of financing and a DTI (Debt to Income) or indebtedness level maximum 45% to request your credit online.
Nonetheless, the mortgage of the future aims toward a 100% digital process; Gonzalo Palafox, Joint Managing Director of Business Development at ION Financiera, claimed that in a few years it will be possible to have a credit approval just by showing your INE, this will be thanks to the digital footprint that we all leave on the cloud, each day without realizing, the majority of people leave a digital footprint or photograph of their life online, allowing financing companies to know their background, import information on income automatically via connection with the SAT, level of indebtedness through the Credit Bureau, and lifestyle thanks to social networks, with this, it will be possible to know who has the real ability to pay, and the issue is that, even if two people have the same wage, their debt capacity may be different depending on factors like if they pay other loans or if they have family that depends on their income.
Definitively, artificial intelligence or Business Intelligence has allowed the real estate sector to evolve in an important way in the recent years, and the trend is aimed toward it continuing in constant advance, Mateo Turanzas, Director of Technology at Sidehouse, reported that it has been able to implement 4D virtual reality for Quiero Casa, in which the users may experience an apartment under construction from their cell phone, desktop and cardboards, and at the business level, thanks to the connection via CRM, it is possible to observe in real time how the sales evolve for each development, it is possible to measure the level of searches, views, and sales for each floor and/or apartment prototype, and therefore evaluate which apartments have the greatest sales potential, they allow you to control the price increases according to the demand reported by development and recently they implemented as a “Digital Gift,” a real estate administration app, to all real estate clients, which allows those who live in a Quiero Casa development to administer common areas, payments, and stay in touch among one another, but which also will serve to obtain information on how the projects are lived, if the common areas, parking, etc. are used or not; in order to obtain information on how the developments of the future must be.
In conclusion, Guillermo Carrillo, pointed out that technology must be at the users’ service, and made an invitation to take advantage of market conditions to purchase a home, with the ease of being able to look for and experience your apartment digitally. He reminded that in Mexico City, 46% of the homes is not owner of the house that they live in, creating a housing lag of 1.2 million homes and where just 20,000 are built and sold each year, making the prices resume their upward trend.