12 days of Remit - one for each of our discoveries this year
Dear friends and clients,
We would like to wish you a very happy Christmas and prosperous New Year. As we've done in previous years, we are donating the cost of sending Christmas cards to the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.
However, we hope this festive edition of our newsletter will fill you with Christmas cheer, as we look back at 2019. We’ve done a whip around the office to gather together some interesting discoveries from the year, across a range of topics, and we hope you will enjoy our twelve days of Remit…!
1. You may remember our first frontispiece of 2019, back in January, 'Real Estate - a technology battleground?' As the year draws to a close, we’re still seeing an increasing amount of tech moving into the marketplace from non-property industries. Asset Managers need more “out-of-the-box” thinkers and a growing number of tech companies view property as just another approachable market.
2. The last year of the decade has also seen new and emerging FM and PM models starting to be accepted and used by the market for procurement.
3. Our data paper with the RICS revealed in April that ‘100% of valuers believe that valuation data is the most difficult to get hold of’. This could either challenge the confidence of today’s valuations or protect valuers’ position as experts in analysing the data that is available.
4. Looking back at our spring frontispiece, ‘Are "Prop-striches" taking their heads out of the data sand?’, and with the new insight from Andrew’s trip to RealComm in Nashville, we remain of the opinion that UK property companies are behind the US. The industry can catch up, but individual organisations will need to commit to sharing more of their data to enable better market transparency and efficiency.
5. The student housing market has piqued our interest in 2019, as there’s no set fee structure for its management. Having always been an alternative market, student housing seems to be forging its own path, untethered by traditional thinking.
6. Our ReTour in July confirmed what we predicted in 2017 and highlighted that having good cycle parking provision in a building not only adds to the wellbeing of staff but can be a differentiator in a competitive property and recruitment market.
7. Excitingly the market does seem to have recognised and be reacting to this, as we detailed in our summer frontispiece, ‘Property cycle highlights industry challenges’. 2019 has seen a clear rise in investors and developers prioritising cycling facilities in their buildings. Sustainability, mental health, staff wellbeing and talent retention all play a key role in this decision-making.
8. One of the hot topics from our October REMark Survey, was rent collection by Direct Debit – only 15% of all rent due is collected by Direct Debit or standing order.
9. Unissu reported that total global PropTech funding surpassed $934m in October 2019 alone. This brings the total for 2019 (as of October) to just under $13 billion, across 454 individual funding events.
10. Our November frontispiece, entitled ‘Leading edge, or bleeding edge? ’ explored 5G and its use in the present day. Although 5G is still in the early stages of deployment and many will not yet feel its effects (especially as many devices are not yet enabled), property companies are beginning to take it into consideration in their futureproofing strategies.
11. Predictions from PlaceTech in November suggested that by 2025, there will have been an exponential rise in the volume and importance of data - a fifth of data gathered will be ‘hypercritical’ and a further tenth as ‘critical’. This sheer volume of essential data starts to negate the economic benefits we currently gain from using the cloud, and thus new storage solutions will come to the fore.
12. Lastly, despite all of these 2019 tech developments, McKinsey have told us that by 2030, more than 66% of purchases will still occur in physical stores, and in-store experience will have a bearing on even more transactions. This offers great scope for PropTech to help to shape a better physical future, and for retailers to capitalise on more personalisation in store, where currently only 10% of retailers are differentiating themselves by doing so.
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