PropTech has raised $6 billion from VC globally and is aiming at raising $20 billion by 2020, according to Kpmg
P101 debuts into PropTech. It does so through tits Programma 102 fund, launched in May with a collection target of €120 million, of which 75 have already been raised. The fund invested over two million euros in the housing-as-a-service start-up Projects Co-living.
In detail, Projects Co-Living was founded in Germany in 2017 by two Italian entrepreneurs who aimed at rewriting the rules of housing according to three guidelines: beauty, simplicity and community. They are Luca Bovone, one of the the first managers of Dropbox Europe, and Giorgio Ciancaleoni, ex country manager of Homebell Italy. They started from one house in Berlin and today manage a co-living network that aims to expand beyond Germany and in particular to the Italian, French and Spanish markets. The start-up’s core business is a platform providing housing solutions for young professionals and making the selection and fruition processes more efficient and flexible. All the solutions are design ones and have been equipped with community services and options in order to make tenants with similar interests and needs meet and thus make their stay more pleasant.
If for Projects Co-living, which is already a European leader in its sector, this funding round represents a driver of future growth, for P101 this is the opening of a new frontier in one of the most promising and innovative industries of the near future.
Venture capital investments in PropTech have increased about 7 times from 2013 to 2017: over the past four years, more than $6 billion have been raised from over 800 PropTech & Real Estate start-ups, mainly in the UK and the US. According to a Kpmg study, PropTech could attract $20 billion by 2020 globally. And even if in Italy the impact of new technologies on real estate is just beginning (only 35 start-ups have been found working in this field, of which 11 were founded in 2016, according to the PropTech Monitor of the Milan Politecnico University), their potential is enormous: both because the Italian real estate market has monster dimensions, and for the dynamics of disruption that are going on along the entire value chain, even in adjacent industries such as finance and insurance.
AirBnB, Nest, WeWork, Zoopla: these well-known names are PropTech pioneers, each in a different sector, from short-term online rentals of private property to connected homes, from coworking up to databases for long-term rent and for property sale. In short, we are talking about something that is already a pervasive part of everyday life but that will unfold in a thousand different ways. From commercial buildings management, to long and short-term sale and rent, to insurance, to real estate crowdfunding. Up to marketplaces, to the housing management market that was born from short-term renting. Moreover, smart real estate platforms, active in facility management, home service, IoT home and construction management.
So far, commercial search engines and short- and long-term search engines have been receiving the largest VC funds on the world market. But the landscape is going to become more complex. Some trends will change the world of real estate again and are already unstoppable. In the next 5 years, big data, analytics and IoT will have the greatest impact on real estate: through these technologies, PropTech will contribute to the implementation and improvement of smart cities, which are based on smart, connected and optimized (in terms of management costs) buildings. Beyond technology, we will see an increasing osmosis between traditional operators, FinTech and PropTech. These will be win-win partnerships: on the one hand, using start-up created tools based on intelligent algorithms, traditional companies will have the possibility to carry out personalized and precise research, saving a lot of time and money. On the other hand, start-ups will have access to the experience and databases of a consolidated industry.
