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Real estate companies embrace digital
Research - NOVEMBER 12, 2019

Real estate companies embrace digital

by Andrea Zander

Real estate companies are increasingly embracing digital, according to the annual KPMG Global PropTech survey. About 58 percent of respondents have a digital strategy in place, up from 52 percent in both 2018 and 2017.

Other key survey finding include:

  • 95 percent of real estate companies have someone responsible for leading digital transformation and innovation. In 62 percent of cases this is a senior employee at a C-suite level or equivalent.
  • Investment in digital, IT and PropTech collaboration is driven by a need for improved efficiencies (65 percent), cost-reduction (47 percent) and enhanced decision-making (44 percent), rather than increased revenues.
  • Barriers to further digitalization include unclear ROI (40 percent); digital not a priority (40 percent); lack of a designated person to drive the strategy (34 percent); and lack of appropriate in-house talent (27 percent)
  • More likely than not (65 percent of cases), it isn’t a digital or technology specialist leading digital transformation. 40 percent of digital leaders come from a real estate, construction or finance background.
  • 7 in 10 respondents are confident in the cyber security readiness of their organization.
  • Digital strategies rarely incorporate data management or a data strategy. Only 25 percent of respondents have a well-established data strategy that enables the capture and analysis of the right datasets. A third have no data strategy at all.
  • Levels of system integration are low – overall, respondents rate themselves as average, 5.4  out of  10
  • 64 percent  of real estate companies have some form of Property as a Service across their portfolio and 13 percent are considering it. Property as a Service still a small proportion of overall space.
  • Asset management is the area most likely (64 percent of respondents) to benefit from investment in IT, digital technology or PropTech collaboration over the next 12 months.

To read the full report, click here.

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