By Andrew Waller
I still remember the slightly awkward meeting, nearly twenty-five years ago, when a group of us at a Big Four consultancy were, ahem, “encouraged to consider our next move.” It does not feel as long ago as it sounds, but as we look back at the founding of Remit Consulting, it is striking how much of our original mission remains unchanged.
Back then, I even wrote a book for the Estates Gazette called IT for Property People, which tried to predict the future. Given the current uncertainty in the world, it feels like a good time to see which of those predictions landed and what the next decade holds.
The Context of 2003
When we started, we were experts in real estate technology in a very different world. This was eight years after Windows 95 began harnessing the World Wide Web and mere months after the dotcom bubble burst. The iPhone didn’t exist yet, and the BlackBerry was about to become the must-have tool for agents.
What we got right
Our core conviction was that firms should understand their own processes before choosing technology. This led to the Remit Process Model (RPM) and our leading practice library. We believed that fixing the business problem first was the only way to make technology work. Nearly 25 years and thousands of workshops later, that flexible, templated approach to business change remains unique to the industry, and more relevant than ever.
What we got wrong
We were over-optimistic about the speed of change. We thought that after five years, everyone would have adopted leading practice and that future gains would be incremental. How wrong we were!
Two decades later, we are running more process workshops than ever. We underestimated how long even simple automation, like deal flow management, would take to become established. Many ideas mooted in 2001 didn't become reality until after the Great Financial Crash. Even now, the European software market remains fragmented, and implementations are often riskier and more expensive than they should be.
The Shifting Landscape
The most visible shifts in the early 2000s were in residential property. US startups like Zillow paved the way for Rightmove to transform sales. While brochures became PDFs early on, saving about 30 days of manual work, genuinely useful tools like digital signatures didn't gain widespread traction until after 2015.
In the UK, commercial real estate's use of social media is still largely focused on LinkedIn. While other industries have become adept at mining digital data, for commercial property, it still feels as if the industry hasn't embraced social media data in the same way as, say, the finance industry as a whole.
And what of AI?
We are likely entering the "trough of disillusionment" on Gartner’s Hype Cycle. Early, unrealisable expectations are being moderated. However, the pressure is real:
Fund Managers are exploring AI to lean out experienced asset management teams.
Property Managers are facing margin squeezes that force them to automate or fail.
ESG Regulations have made data a board-level discussion, requiring reporting speeds that manual processes can't match.
AI will certainly have an effect, though in the short term, it may feel detrimental as the technology struggles to catch up with over-ambitious cost-saving targets.
Final thoughts
Is our industry really 20 years behind other industries? Perhaps. But that doesn’t diminish the challenge. The change management principles of our RPM are even more vital today as we navigate this next wave.
In 2003, we had no idea what the World Wide Web would eventually become. We guessed; some of our guesses were right, and some were wrong. That is exactly where we are with AI today.