Our BtoB map (www.mapaproptech.com) was born as the result of years of work, market research, real estate companies and ecosystem knowledge, the study of traditional real estate companies needs, the creation of proptech events as Inmotecnia and the resolution of hundreds of inquiries from real estate agents regarding the proptech ecosystem.
All these facts gave us a broad perspective of the Spanish industry, not only about the B2B solutions but also gave us knowledge about all the recent changes in the Spanish proptech ecosystem, which revealed a mentality change of the entire real estate sector.
From the Catalonian Real Estate Agents Association, we identified that on many occasions techies and real estate professionals did not speak the same language, so we decided to create our proptech map with the firm intention of merging technology companies (solutions) and traditional professionals (needs). All of them, define a new game board in our sector.
It’s only been a month since we published the map. It has grown by 18% and we can begin to draw the first conclusions.
The map is divided into 3 big categories of proptech services: “Your Agency” ( 3 subcategories: legal, CRM and Digital Signature), “Your Clients” ( 4 subcategories: Investment, Financing, Personal Rating, and Home Management) and “Your product” ( 7 subcategories: RE Image, Exclusive Listing, Smart Homes, Tech at the Office, Property Valuation and RE Portals).
If we look into the number of companies for each category and subcategory, we can draw the following chart:
| Your agency |
Your clients |
Your RE product | |||
| Legal | 5 | Investment | 7 | Image | 25 |
| CRM | 33 | Financing | 11 | Get clients | 7 |
| Digital signature | 3 | Rating, scoring | 6 | Smart homes | 8 |
| 41 | Property management | 12 | Smart offices | 7 | |
| 36 | Peer to Peer | 12 | |||
| Property valuation | 13 | ||||
| Portals and marketplaces | 29 | ||||
| 101 |
If we calculate the percentage of each category we obtain the following chart:
| Your agency | 23% |
| Your clients | 20% |
| Your RE products | 57% |
| 100% |
Finally, we can see who is the final user of each solution:
| # Proptechs | Percentage | ||
| BtoB | 142 | 79% | |
| BtoBtoC | 36 | 21% | |
| 100% | |||
From all these data, we can begin to draw several conclusions:
– There are just a few solutions on the market that help the buying client during the different steps of the customer journey. We should focus on improving the customer´s experience during the whole process.
– The proptech startups’ creators offering BtoB or BtoBtoC services are focused on services related to the real estate agent’s product and not on improving the customer journey.
– There are very few tenant-focused solutions.
– There are so many solutions focused on the real estate product, but very few on making effective contacts to get exclusive listings, one of the tasks that most worries and gives work to real estate professionals.
– Only 36 companies on our map, 21% of the total of companies, perform BtoBtoC services. These are the only ones that offer services that benefit directly the real estate agent’s client.
– There are no after-sale mechanisms that follow the future needs of clients (both buyer and seller) after the real estate transaction. There is no further engagement, any ideas?
Therefore, it is clear that there are still niches to explore within proptech, which are related to favoring that real estate agents improve the service to their clients. All modern strategies are focused on the client, not the product. Let’s hope that the proptech growth entails a change in the previous statistics.
Gustavo Lopez and Sheila Gracia
Catalan Real Estate Agents Association