While industries such as finance and healthcare have embraced digital technologies to streamline processes and improve customer experience, the real estate industry has been slow on the uptake. Why? Several reasons are likely.

Firstly, apart from a handful of large firms, the real estate business looks more like a cottage industry than a mature industry. It is highly fragmented, with many small players and little in the way of standardized practices, policies and procedures. It lacks a killer solution.

When the personal computer was first introduced, that industry faced a similar challenge. There was no standardized operating system. For a very short time, developers of operating systems competed for the winning spot. Microsoft eventually won because it tied its fortune to the winning hardware vendor (IBM, with its PC). IBM’s marketing power and strong, trusted brand identity, along with its existing relationships with corporate technology chiefs in corporations arou