Israeli-founded AI-powered commercial auto insurance company Fairmatic announced on Thursday that it has raised $46 million in new funding, six months after its Series A, bringing its total financing to $88 million. The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from current investors. Its Series A included Foundation Capital, Aquiline Technology Growth and insurtech, fintech and technology investors, including Jerry Yang, Oren Zeev, and Bill Tai.
Founded in 2017 by CEO Jonathan Matus, who helped launch Android and Facebook mobile, Fairmatic is aiming to transform commercial auto insurance.
Fairmatic, which employs 75 people, has developed an AI-driven underwriting approach that unlocks continuous savings opportunities for fleets. By providing an easy way to monitor driving events and offering actionable improvement tips, Fairmatic is giving fleets more proactive control over their risk management approach.
“New developments in AI, combined with troves of proprietary driving insights, have allowed Fairmatic to unlock a completely new approach to addressing the most critical questions in commercial auto insurance: which drivers are safe and which aren’t; how can insurers help drivers improve safety and reduce risk,” said Matus. “With this powerful new technology for improving driver behavior, there’s a massive opportunity to reframe the problem and solution from first principles. This new funding strengthens Fairmatic’s lead in AI innovation geared towards meaningfully improved road safety and profitability.”
As part of its Series B, Fairmatic is scaling its AI and data-science capabilities by opening a new R&D hub in Israel led by former NASA researcher, Guy Shaviv, who serves as the Head of Engineering in Israel. “Israel has some of the world’s finest talent for both Insurtech and mobility. Folks here are creative, smart, and aggressive – exactly what a startup at our stage needs,” said Shaviv, who built mobile at Nexar, a fleet dash cam company for fleet management, and was employee No. 1 at Houzz.
If you are an estate agency, lettings agency or industry supplier you can enter your team.
Plus, you do not need to be super-fit because this is about having an enjoyable day of fundraising on the water for Agents Giving.
Teams signed up so far include, TDS, RAN, National Home Move, Acaboom and friends, Drivers & Norris, Street Group, Thomas Morris, J P Gardner & Associates, Dawsons, Simply Conveyancing, Kerfuffle, Propertymark, Genmar IT, Exp UK, LSL and last year’s winners – Caplen Estates battling to retain their winners’ title.
David Newnes chairman of Agents Giving, said: “We are excited to return to the water this year, this is such a fun and memorable charity event, one that you won’t want to miss”.
The event is being held on Sunday 7 May at Fairlop Waters in Ilford, Essex.
Each team can have up to 17 crew on the boat, including “a drummer”, no fitness capabilities required, you must be able to hold a paddle and sit upright in a boat.
You will race in three/four heats, each being around 250m, with the winners going through to the final race.
Boats must be pre booked, secure your boat space today before the boats sell out: https://agentsgiving.org/event/dragon-boat-race.
Barratt David Wilson: Housebuilder Barratt David Wilson North Thames is celebrating a year of fundraising success for its charity of the year, CHAT Children’s Respite.
Staff raised £82,057.98 throughout 2022 following a range of fundraising events from a virtual racing night, golf day and a gala dinner, which will be used to provide much needed respite care for families with children with special needs.
The housebuilder kicked off fundraising with a donation of £10,000, with the final funds handed over to CHAT Children’s Respite on 27 February 2023.
Located nearby to the housebuilder’s Kingsbrook development in Aylesbury, the charity helps families with children who have special needs, providing grants for those in need of a carer. The charity believes all families should be able to take a break from their caring role, with the comfort of knowing their child is being safely looked after.
Anthea Cass, charity fundraiser at CHAT Children’s Respite, said: “As a small charity, a donation of this scale will go a long way to support families across Buckinghamshire with children who have special needs.
“This amazing funding will enable CHAT to explore different forms of respite care aside from funding a carer. As a result of the donation, we will now be able to pay for after school one to one activities these children wouldn’t usually have the chance to try, such as drumming lessons, fitness classes and clubs during the school holidays.
“We are currently working with school nurses and other organisations to see what other respite services we can offer which will benefit both the families and their children, none of which would be possible without Barratt David Wilson Homes support.”
Marc Woolfe, head of sales for Barratt David Wilson North Thames, added: “The support CHAT Children’s Respite offers to the families of children who have special needs is second-to-none, and I’m so proud of the amount we’ve been able to raise this year for such a worthy cause. “We initially selected CHAT as our charity of the year for 2022, as they were a small, local charity with a fairly low annual income meaning our donation would make a real difference, but I never envisaged then that we would raise anywhere near this amount, so I’m very grateful to everyone who has contributed. I hope we can go on to raise the same amount, if not more, for our 2023 chosen charity.”
Bradley Hall: Full-service property specialist Bradley Hall has raised and donated £300,000 for local charities including Marie Curie Newcastle’s Hospice, Heel & Toe Children’s Charity and NE Youth.
The firm has also supported more than 30 different regional charities and sporting groups including Daft as a Brush, Bright Red, Morpeth Rugby Club, ABF The Soldier’s Charity, Glendale Agricultural Society, as well as local food and toy banks across the region.
Neil Hart, Bradley Hall’s group chief executive, said: “I would like to thank everyone that has attended and donated at each of our events to help us raise and donate £300,000 so far to local charities.
“We’re looking forward to continuing our support of deserving local organisations, charities, and our communities across the North. Our vision is to work together with key organisations and people to make the North a consistently better place to live, work, and socialise- which is at the heart of our community efforts.
“As a company that was founded in the North East, we are very proud to be able to support the charities and their service users who need it most. Most of the charities and community organisation which we work with aren’t supported by Government and rely solely on donations and fundraising activity, so it’s very important for us to do all we can to ensure their services continue.”
LandAid: Almost 1,300 property professional from across the UK have joined for industry charity LandAid’s biggest ever SleepOut.
The annual event raised more than £500,000 to support young people experiencing homelessness.
On Thursday 2 March hundreds braved the cold overnight across seven different city locations including Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, London, and Manchester.
Each region has been raising funds that will support a local project, having huge impact on its community. These include St Basils in Birmingham, 1625 Independent People in Bristol, YMCA Trinity in Cambridge, LATCH in Leeds and the Salford Foyer in Manchester.
These projects will look to provide accommodation, employment opportunities and wider peer to peer support for young people who are currently homeless or at risk of homelessness in the future, who have nowhere else to turn.
The LandAid SleepOut has been supported by headline sponsor Knight Frank, alongside regional sponsors, Prologis in Birmingham, TFT in Bristol, Bidwells in Cambridge, Hollis in Glasgow, HBD in Leeds, and Addleshaw Goddard in Manchester.
Venues across the country were donated by venue sponsors, Birmingham City Council, La Salle Investment Management in Bristol, Cambridge University Rugby Football Club, Landsec in Glasgow and Leeds, British Land in London, and Sale Rugby Football Club in Salford.
The event also received cardboard boxes from Crown Workspace for everyone to sleep on, and Hunter Ops kindly provided the signage required for each venue.
Paul Morrish, chief executive of LandAid, said: “Thank you so much to everyone who braved the freezing cold and slept out during the biggest LandAid SleepOut ever.
“It’s amazing to see the event grow year on year. The support we have received across the country has been incredible with seven locations, as well as those sleeping out at home, coming together for one very important cause.
“While the experience gives everyone a very good idea of how tough sleeping outside is, one night outside does not replicate the true reality of rough sleeping that faces thousands of young people all over the UK. Unfortunately, we know that this number is continuing to grow.
“With the efforts of hundreds from the property industry, we have raised enough funds to make a real difference by providing safe and secure places for young people who can now focus on building a brighter future, rather than worrying about their night-to-night sleeping spot.”
If you would like to support, donations are still being accepted for the 2023 SleepOut: https://join.landaid.org/event/sleepout-2023/donate
Preston Baker: Five colleagues from Preston Baker Estate Agents and land promoter Richard Roberts are taking part in a charity skydive in May, raising money for the Mental Health Foundation.
The colleagues are Hannah, from York, Charlotte Nicholson, from Church Fenton, Megan Griffiths, from Leeds, Hugh Roberts, from Harewood, and Susan Preston, from Pool-in-Wharefedale.
Hannah said: “As the day of the skydive gets closer we are starting to feel a little nervous, but also excited,” said one of the group members.”
Susan added: “A skydive is something outside all our comfort zones but it will be a special experience and one that will hopefully raise a good amount for a charity that does such great work.”
Find out more and donate: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Preston-Baker
2023 has been coined as ‘the year of AI adoption’, and with this technology trickling down to almost every sector, its place within the property industry is the topic on everyone’s mind.
While artificial intelligence has been around for many years, it has become highly accessible in the past year, gaining mass popularity and exposure. AI is helping businesses work smarter by analysing data much more efficiently, driving down the time it takes to complete complex tasks, and helping to make smarter decisions for better results.
In fact, AI has become so refined that it has real potential to transform the way people work and run their businesses – including agents.
In a recent study, the UK’s leading instruction generation, Spectre, found that agents utilising AI as part of their prospecting strategy are 25% more successful in securing instructions than those who didn’t.
So how can you implement AI within your strategy?
The potential to utilise AI within estate agency is vast and this technology has been around in Spectre for some time now. It is giving users the ability to be laser-focused when prospecting potential vendors by instantly identifying properties that are most likely to come to the market.
Spectre’s machine learning model has analysed billions of data points over many years to accurately predict a property’s propensity to sell. Doing this level of research without such intelligent software would be practically impossible, but with AI, it is done instantly. In fact, agents taking advantage of AI are able to optimise their marketing spend, resulting in a 240% increase in their ROI.
The importance of using AI-powered sold-in-your-area campaigns was further exemplified when the same study found that agents who sent these campaigns alongside on-market letters achieved a 67% higher success rate than those who solely sent on-market letters.
Another incredible use case of artificial intelligence is within estate agency marketing. AI copywriting is helping to generate mind-blowing content for all sorts of media, from direct mail and blogs to emails and social posts.
Free of charge for all users, Spectre’s very own AI Content Generator understands the terminology of the property industry and what elements contribute to a successful campaign.
Plus, with the ability to input tone of voice preferences and unique selling points, agents can create personalised and tailored content for each on-market time trigger, all at the click of a button.
Of course, AI isn’t here to replace agents, it’s simply here to help. Sometimes, new innovations come with pitfalls but, as the statistics show us, the benefits of embracing this technology will massively outweigh any associated risk.
AI is only going to get smarter and better with time… and early adopters will reap rewards both now and in the future. So, ask yourself the question: is it time to embrace change and leverage the vast capabilities of AI?
Rightmove has reported its second highest year for average revenue per advertiser (ARPA) despite agency branch membership dipping slightly.
The portal revealed in its 2022 annual results released this morning that its ARPA was up 11% annually to £1,314 per month.
Total membership remained relatively flat at 19,014, with agency branches down 178 and new homes up 223.
It also reported continued uptake of its premium Optimiser 2020 package, with 34% of independent agents now subscribing, up from 21% in December 2021.
Peter Brooks-Johnson, who will be repalce as chief executive of Rightmove by Johan Svanstrom this month, said: “The year’s changing housing market conditions demonstrated our customers’ resilience and ability to adapt and to continue to succeed.
“The softening from the covid-induced frenetic market towards a more normal market earlier in the year was disrupted in the final few months by the unexpected rapid mortgage rate increases.
“The strength of our results is a reminder of how effective and integral our new and existing products and services are in helping our customers in both faster and slower markets.
“Rightmove continues to be the place that people turn to and return to first, with an average of over 1.35bn minutes spent on our platform every month in 2022.
“The continuing love home movers have for Rightmove is testament to the team’s focus on providing an easy to use leading edge platform, enhanced with innovation which home movers want. This is exemplified by the ability to create Property Lists which we launched in 2022. Over one million lists, and counting, have been created since launch.
“There’s much more to come and exciting plans ahead for Rightmove. As a company that will always be close to my heart, and as a shareholder, I look forward to watching Rightmove’s ongoing progress as it continues to make home moving easier.”
Financial highlights:
The property industry’s self-destructive, point-scoring way of working just doesn’t cut it.
When low stock means low cash flow low, agents and lawyers (mostly small businesses) are at real risk of closing. Don’t be one of the 25% of small businesses the BBC has reported as planning to shut or scale back due to falling profits.
Agents and conveyancers will close forever unless they stop having a go at each other.
No more in-fighting, please. We’re not kids.
Estate agents and conveyancers know their common cause; to move the client, so get on with each other and get on with the job in hand.
We all know what to do: talk more, collaborate more, and be more proactive. It’s common sense and it should be a no-brainer. But do we all do it? On the whole, sadly, not! The hidden jealousy and resentment between conveyancers and estate agents and between conveyancer and conveyancer has to end now. We have to find the passion, motivation, and engagement to get the client moved faster. Then we can be paid faster.
Speed, focus, and collaboration will make the job easier and reduce delays. It’s a fact that the longer a case goes on, the more chance of it going abortive – one third fall through. Thats one third of clients that don’t get to move and one third of the estate agents potential profit they lose out on.
Keep it simple.
Estate agents must stop trying to have a dig at the conveyancer – that’s not to say to let up on slower lawyers who don’t communicate, but recognise they are under pressure.
And conveyancers, don’t be so negative, so condescending to the estate agent. You both want the same thing, Don’t keep them in the dark. They can often broker a deadlock between the clients.
Believe you can
Believe you can be the difference. We already know we can do more in an emergency. We did it during the stamp duty deadline frenzy. So can it be done again in this 2023 recession year?
Ask yourselves a few why’s
You’ll then see that collaboration, communication, and speed has to be key to unlocking profit but also to meet your client’s overriding goal of moving.
Take the challenge. Pop quiz! Ask yourselves:
Why should the client have to wait five months (almost half a year!) for the conveyancing (and upwards of a year if you consider the months of finding the right buyer for the right property at the right price)? It’s unacceptable. And why do a third end up being aborted, with less profits and more risk of closure?
Why don’t you talk more to agents?
Why not issue the contract pack on day one, not week two?
Why not sort out AML early on, not before exchange?
Why let additional enquires drag on for weeks, sometimes months?
Why don’t more lawyers pick up the phone to sort out issues in minutes when emails can take weeks?
Why not allow clients to use virtual signatures to speed things up?
Why not report on your portal?
Why not order your office copies on a purchase? Its pennies against the weeks of delay lost in waiting for office copies to arrive from the seller’s lawyers. Will your buyer client really thank you when they have hundreds of thousands riding in the deal or losing their ideal move?
Why not take payment for searches on day one and order on the same day rather than waiting days or weeks? Why argue over additional enquiries for weeks, sometimes months, knowing often it comes down to sorting it out legally or with indemnity?
Why wait weeks to order the management pack? Why not chase them?
Why not chase green chain?
Why not embrace technology more? Why not let the mundane stuff be done by systems leaving you to get on the phone more and sort out solutions more?
Why not spend more time and money in supporting your team? Why not give them lower file numbers to give them more time to get involved more, push more, complete on more cases, make profit and give you more chance of coming out of this recession in one piece?
Want to discuss more?
Contact Angelo Piccirillo, Co-founder, Solicitor, ex-estate agent and joint CEO of AVRillo Conveyancing
Since it was revealed last August that Adam Neumann had raised $350 million for the Flow real estate venture from Andreessen Horowitz, very little has been reported about the new company.
Neumann rarely gives interviews to the media after the WeWork saga and has chosen to remain relatively silent. But last week, the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz released an hour-long interview that Neumann gave at the company’s conference in November, where he and Marc Andreessen, one of the company’s founders, revealed their vision for the broken American housing market through the new company Flow. “The housing crisis is one of the biggest crises the country is in,” Neumann said. “But the reason it’s really difficult to solve it is because the solution is between five years to a decade in the future. I think we have the right team to try.”
In at least one thing, Neumann is right – the housing crisis in the U.S. is one of the worst it has ever known. The number of houses available for purchase is 40% lower than in the period before the pandemic, rent has soared to an all-time high, and mortgage interest payments are also at an all-time high. One in four renters, about 11 million people, spend more than half of their income on housing, a situation that appears to be a product of the pandemic, inflation and rising interest rates.
But the American housing market has been broken for more than 20 years. House prices fell continuously from 2006 to 2012, which led to a sharp drop in construction, and the last decade was crowned as the worst in American history in terms of house construction per capita. In exactly the same decade, the millennials reached the age when people usually purchase homes. But then the pandemic hit, and the little construction that was taking place froze due to the economic uncertainty. During this freeze and shift to working from home, the white-collar workforce pushed to improve their living conditions, driving demand for homes.
Neumann and Andreessen also identified this starting point – where white-collar workers drive demand for houses in a time of a deep supply problem, combined with skyrocketing interest rates on mortgages. Indeed, the conditions in this market are difficult. When you agree that this is the way things are, the solution or the political response seems really obvious: building houses. However, in practice, Andreessen explains, cities are slow to move and run by homeowners, which prevents them from changing.
“There is an established system with political powers of local homeowners. The system almost seems deterministic,” Andreessen explained, while referring to the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) phenomenon, in which “local homeowners, no matter what their political background, prevent the construction of new houses. It’s a real trap.”
Andreessen, who did not mention that he and his wife are NIMBYs themselves and are working to stop the construction of affordable housing units in their neighborhood, went on to explain how the cities are now ripe for disruption, and that the disruption will come from within.
The mutual understanding between Andreessen and Neumann, according to which the housing market and the cities themselves are ripe for disruption, created an extraordinary partnership between the two. Andreessen’s investment in Neumann’s venture was the largest single investment in a startup in the history of the veteran and prestigious venture capital fund. The fact that the young project includes from the first stage a lot of money and a lot of housing units (already over 3,000 units, in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta and Nashville), has led to great public attention and an examination of what their part will be in fixing the broken housing market, and whether the solution they offer really intends to solve the crisis. “It’s very challenging to reimagine cities when they’re already built,” said Neumann, “we can imagine what’s happening inside.”
Neumann and Andreessen, however, do not really seek to disrupt the housing market, but to build a new elite product for tenants who are defined by Andreessen as “upper-middle class, highly educated people who work with a keyboard and not with their hands.” This sector already rents apartments at relatively high prices, in buildings that offer advanced services such as a gym and a pool.
According to Neumann, these renters spend 35% of their salary on housing and “do not get a good deal, neither in price nor in experience.” According to him, “You move into a building and a lot of people lead sad lives. In very simple terms, we want to elevate the tenant’s experience. We want to share with the tenant some of the value they create. It’s hard work, but the bar is very low.” With the data presented by Neumann, the segment of the population which he is targeting becomes even more refined.
Neumann’s company has four pillars: a management company that manages the buildings through an app, a brokerage agency that owns the properties, a financial services company, and a “mechanism for sharing value with the value creators.” According to a Bloomberg report, the financial services company is expected to include a digital wallet for cryptocurrencies. What is the value that they will share with the tenants? This section is not clear. But this division is supposed, according to Neumann, to create a sense of simulated ownership for the tenants in their properties and to keep them there for a longer period of time. If they live for a longer period, Neumann explained, the yield they will generate will grow even more, according to the flywheel principle. “If we create a better experience in the building, then the building performs better and generates a higher NOI (net operating income). If the building generates a higher NOI, we can raise more money and buy more buildings. If we buy more buildings, we can manage more buildings and have more users using these buildings, and these users will start using our financial services,” he explained.
The problem that Neumann does not address is that the purchase of houses by private real estate funds is one of the causes of the housing crisis in the U.S. According to a 2022 investigation by ProPublica, in 2011 one-third of all housing units in the U.S. were held by private funds as an investment vehicle. Today, more than half of the housing units are held by private funds, with the top 35 funds owning a total of approximately one million apartments. These are not simple landlords, in fact, they use sophisticated models to find homes that will be profitable as rental properties, and offer to purchase these properties for cash, sometimes minutes after they enter the market. This way they take over entire areas, become a de facto monopoly of landlords in entire neighborhoods, and then raise the rent. ProPublica even found that landlords of this type used to coordinate the amount of rent between themselves and prevent prices from falling, even if this meant leaving properties empty for many months.
Nevertheless, Neumann remains true to his ways and explains how his value distribution mechanism as the owner of multiple properties will affect the tenants. “When you rent an apartment in an apartment building and your toilet clogs, you call the ‘super’ (the person responsible for the building’s maintenance). But if you’re in an apartment you own and your toilet clogs, you use a pump. It’s the difference between feeling like you own something and feeling like you’re renting. between being part of a mechanism of exchange and being part of a community.” Flow’s goal, Neumann explained, is to “find a way to share with the tenant some of the value it creates.” This value “will make them feel ownership,” he noted, but immediately noted that “ownership is a very complex word.”
More than 3m of shares have been placed in a dedicated facility established by OnTheMarket (OTM) after its initial public offering (IPO) lock-in period ended this month.
At the time of its IPO, agent shareholders were restricted from selling their shares for five years and that lock-in period ends on 9 February 2023.
OTM said in December that it has created a facility for a one-off sale, without which it is claimed that “the market price achievable by selling agent shareholders may be impacted.”
The portal announced this morning that shareholders intend to sell in aggregate 3,130,675 ordinary shares of 0.2p each in the company at 76p ordinary share.
Management shareholder Morgan Ross will be selling the placing shares via Intertrust Employee Benefit Trustee Limited, the trustee of the company’s employee benefit trust.
The placing shares represent approximately 4.1% of the issued share capital of OnTheMarket.
The shares are place in a dematerialised custody service called the OTM Corporate Sponsored Nominee (OTM CSN).
The shares are still owned by the agent, but the agents will be able to opt to have their shares put up for sale in a one-off placing anticipated to be carried out in February 2023.
The idea is that the placing will look to identify buying demand to match aggregate selling demand and achieve the best result for selling shareholders.
If the shares don’t sell they can stay within the CSN and belong to the agent who can ask Link to try and sell them later on their behalf, or they can hold them or they can transfer them out of the CSN if they wish.
OpenEyes, an Israeli insurtech company serving commercial automotive fleets, announced that it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by global software investor Insight Partners and Pitango First, with participation by MoreVC, which led the Seed round together with Pitango First. To date, OpenEyes has raised a total of $23 million.
Co-founded by Yoav Oron (CEO), Dr. Omry Sendik (CTO) and Dan Charash (Chairman), OpenEyes currently employs 25 people in Israel and the U.S.
OpenEyes aims to offer commercial automotive insurance to fleets of all kinds at lower rates by reducing the frequency and severity of traffic accidents. Using OpenEyes’s technology, fleet managers and safety officers can identify the sources of risk in their fleet, enabling them to implement practices that reduce the frequency of accidents. In addition, OpenEyes enables precise underwriting and streamlines claims handling and prevention.
“We see a decrease in the frequency and severity of road accidents with our customers as a result of the use of our technology,” said Oron. “We are actually a technology company that sells insurance.
OpenEyes is already being used by fleets driving millions of kilometers in the U.S. The independently validated results demonstrate that OpenEyes has helped reduce the frequency of accidents by over 25.5%, and the severity of claims by over 30%.
“OpenEyes provides a novel one-stop-shop solution that enables fleets to truly understand their source of risk, from both the fleets’ as well as the insurers’ perspective. This precise understanding allows OpenEyes to power their underwriting, driver coaching and prevention, and claims handling,” said Daniel Aronovitz, Principal at Insight Partners.
“OpenEyes leverages cutting edge full stack technological solution to fundamentally alter the risk model of commercial fleets insurance. The integration between In-vehicle technology and insurance creates a new experience for fleet owners,” said Eyal Niv, Managing Partner at Pitango First, which co-led OpenEyes’ Seed round.
Major investment houses in Israel are beginning to feel the impact of concerns regarding the impending legal reform. Over the last two weeks, leading investment houses in Israel have been dealing with the desire of some clients to transfer part of their investments abroad, or to increase their exposure to world markets.
IBI CEO Dave Lubetzky told Calcalist that there is a department in the investment house where there is a clear increase in activity against the backdrop of the reform that Justice Minister Yariv Levin wants to pass: “There is an increased interest in the management of accounts in Switzerland which we offer. We have several billions we are currently working on.” Lubetzky did, however, stress that at the moment it is “a lot of conversations in the group’s family office, but I have not yet seen closings in Israel and openings abroad.”
Unlike Lubetzky, a senior executive at one of the largest investment houses in Israel, who does not want to be identified, said that the first signs of panic were felt last week. According to him, 5-10 calls are received every day regarding the status of the portfolio and the examination of its investment structure. Some clients demand to reduce the exposure to Israel. The investment house even held an emergency meeting last week on how to deal with those clients – whether to fulfill their wishes or alternatively try to convince them to examine things more deeply, for fear that the clients might cash out the investment portfolios.
The panicked rush of clients calling investment houses is mainly characterized by periods of crisis in the stock or bond markets. A manager of one of the leading investment houses in the market told Calcalist that “the banks know better how to identify in general what the volume of capital is flowing abroad these days. At the moment it is true that only a small number of customers are involved, but this is not something we have seen in recent years.”
The executive added: “This phenomenon mainly concerns the big customers, those who have a lot of power and money. It reminds me of the crisis of 2002.” There was a severe economic crisis in Israel 20 years ago following the second intifada and the explosion of the dot.com bubble. In the same year, negative growth was recorded in Israel at a rate of 0.7%, in contrast to the rest of the world which grew by 0.33%.
The three largest investment houses in Israel are Altshuler Shaham, Meitav, and Yelin Lapidot. The words of the executives at the investment houses are consistent with the words of Bank Hapoalim CEO Dov Kotler, who told the Prime Minister that in recent days there has been a withdrawal of funds by foreign investors, and not only from the high-tech sector.
The only certainty at the moment is that we are living in a period of uncertainty. The challenges facing the property industry are piling up, and a digital transformation project could be the last thing on many agents’ minds.
However, many of today’s challenges can be addressed with relationship building and customer loyalty, and this is where pairing technology with quality agent-driven customer experiences through digital transformation can be a huge support for your business.
Whereas PropTech was once a trend, now it’s a necessity, and in 2023, PropTech will be a strategic anchor for agencies to thrive in tough economies, with the potential to positively affect housing access and affordability. Here are five reasons digital transformation can help your business to navigate uncertain market conditions:
1. Nurture client confidence with the right information
In the current state of the market, having the right tech is essential not only to meet the demands and expectations of consumers, but to nurture confidence amidst uncertainty. That’s because technology provides options and lets customers choose how they engage. So, whether it’s supporting vendors with the right information such that they proceed with a sale at the right time and for the right price, or supporting landlords and tenants with a high-value, ongoing service to retain their confidence and business, they have multiple forms of engagement for an enriched sales or lettings journey.
2. Deliver more value to your customers
But it’s not just about having the right PropTech, it’s how you use it. You’ve perhaps heard about digital transformation many times over by now, but to summarise again, it’s the adoption and integration of digital technology into all areas of a business. The purpose of adopting such technologies is to fundamentally change how your business operates and deliver value to your customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires you to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure.
3. Adapt to changes in the market and consumer behaviour
The process, if approached correctly, can bring significant benefits to agencies in these challenging and uncertain market conditions. The value of your data is immeasurable in these times to help you better understand market trends and discover hidden opportunities in your database. Hence, the advantages for digitally transformed agencies to utilise the power of analytics for actionable intelligence enabling them to adapt and react to the changes not only taking place in the market, but also to consumer behaviour in reaction to these market conditions, can substantially support agencies as they look to future-proof their businesses.
4. Remain competitive in a challenging environment
Digital transformation is a necessity for any digitally inclined business that wants to work smarter and faster, reduce costs, increase revenue and growth, and remain competitive in uncertain market conditions in which adaptability is required and where a lack of resolve for adopting the tech necessary to drive success can potentially lead to the redundancy of your business model.
5. Survive disruption and future-proof your agency
However, the fear of change can often lead to businesses sticking with their tried and tested methods of operating – even as the market around them and the customers they provide products and services for changes. Disruption can be a net positive for businesses and while digital transformation may seem like a risky and unnecessary move in difficult times, it could also be the solution to your challenges.
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Want to find out more about how Digital Transformation can help you identify and adopt the right technology to meet the changing needs of consumers?
Download Reapit’s Estate Agency Digital Transformation Guide for advice on the benefits of digital transformation and tips for how to ensure a successful transformation process.
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