Adopting Technology in the Property Sector

Last month, we were delighted to be appointed as the preferred partner to work with another Property company, in order to help roll out a new system that will be implemented regionally.

This builds on the teams’ long and detailed history working on technology projects and their impact on companies in that sector so we thought it would be worthwhile to reflect on the many ways technology is now utilised within property today.

It is a welcomed challenge at Simplify Change, to provide consistency across different industries, however, we always adhere to our simple and agile approach when assisting a client adopt new technologies.

So, is technology really all that daunting to colleagues?

To answer this, it’s imperative to understand three main points as they relate to the Property Sector and people in particular:

The rate of staff turnover in the sector and the associated demographic change
The rate of technology change as new applications are introduced, and existing ones are enhanced.
Changes in the regulatory and legal environment.

Property companies on average have a staff turnover rate of roughly 12% (Ref. 1) with the average age of staff falling rapidly. Typically new entrants to the Property Sector are younger, resulting in new members of staff being more comfortable with technology, and requiring different, more modern ways of working to attract the best staff.

Secondly the property sector has long been a laggard in terms of technology compared to most other sectors, with many legacy systems still in place. This is now changing with the Cloud boom, introduction of new technologies that whilst provide efficiency and compliancy savings are also shaking the Property Sector up. In addition, older products are implementing changes to bring them up to speed with their competitors. (Ref 2)

Lastly, regulatory changes, some just recently proposed (Ref 3) will have a lasting impact along with others which some companies are still coming to terms with GDPR, privacy and others to name a few.

All these points are creating waves of change for companies to take advantage of and they are struggling to cope with them given the tightening of budgets, and the overall feel that technology is still not widely central to companies’ transformation and modernisation strategies. To quickly understand where your companies’ priorities are, ask yourself who does your Head of IT report directly to (Ref 4). Given the impact of technology on every aspect of a business shouldn’t it be your CEO?

Finally, the rate of change in technology and its impact is only increasing (Ref 5) with some upcoming transformative technologies which will have a huge impact on the sector being automation, Big Data, and co-working (Expected to reach 30% of all office space by 2030 (Ref 6)) to name a few. For example, think of the trends implicit in replacing cashiers with computers, forecasting of sales allowing daily changes to operations to improve performance, and reduced office space requirements allowing smaller office footprints, and more flexibility to companies.

These will make already struggling property companies strain under the pressure (73% of organisations were nearing, at or past the point of change saturation (Ref 7)), with some companies who already well understand the changes required being clear leaders in the field, taking advantage of new opportunities easily, while other legacy companies will potentially struggle.

What is clear now is that technology is involved in every single aspect of a property company, so how familiar are you with your technology products and how they are used?

What’s another thing that’s clear across all of this? Change of course. How are you facilitating it?

References:

1: From a recent survey by XpertHR

2: How is technology disrupting the property sector

3: All Change: new regulator, licensing and qualifications proposed for agents

4: Who’s the boss? Trends in CIO reporting structure

5: Real Estate as a Service, all change, all change

6: Co-working expected to reach 30% of office market by 2030

7: Prosci’s annual survey of the change management industry.