Hoping you have all had a great weekend thus far and welcome to my usual round up of the weekly PropTech news. It has been as busy week as ever so do look for my complete reading list I have worked through at the end of this e-mail.

Equally, I must thank those of you that send me articles each week that you think should be included. It is always a great help and lovely to hear from you.

Lastly, I must just thank those of you that kindly voted for me in the poll run by LendInvest to find the top PropTech influencers. Again, very kind of you.

Without further ado, lets get on with the latest news.

1. The most socially shared article of the week

As always, I start with the most socially shared article of the week. This week it is an overview of a joint survey by PWC and the Urban Land Institute about the emerging trends in Europe for 2017. Whilst you will see sections all about the market data, there are also interesting sections about the Sharing Economy as well as technology in general

One quote of interest is as follows:

“The insights we get as owner, as user, as tenant from big data represent one of the most important long-term trends. The availability of data will add a lot of transparency to any market and will be very important for making investment decisions. It will also affect pricing.”

2. Just how will London look in 2035?

A while back I made a particular feature of mapping in a Sunday review and it was one of the most popular ones to date with the highest click throughs. As such, I felt it worth including this article about Vucity and their attempts at mapping the skyline looking forward to 2035.

VUCITY is the first fully interactive 3D digital model of London and is accurate to just 15cm. Worth a read through.

Equally, if we are able to map our cities in we should understand how we will be buying properties in the future too. VMI Studio, a VR and CGI firm based in South London, put a blog together about viewing properties in 2025. Worth reading together.

3. PropTech Deal Activity still crazy high despite large funding drop

CB Insights always offer a great overview of the market and this week they have released data from the last quarter about funding activity. Whilst this is hugely US centric the patters are still interesting. The UK is usually a few months behind so perhaps this will gives us an insight to UK funding in early 2017?

Either way, in tandem with this you may be interesting in knowing who is investing in the UK PropTech Scene in a post put together by LendInvest - I have to say it is rather generic in nature and, considering the discussions I have been having with VC's, comes rather short, but still an interesting overview.

4. The latest PropTech Podcast - Habito

Following on from last weeks article comparing Habito to Trussle, this is well worth a listen to this Sunday morning. 23 minutes of information about the digitisation of the mortgage market

5. Strutt and Parker asks a critical question about Commercial Real Estate

One of the articles I was kindly sent this week included this one, asking the pivotal question about commercial real estate technology. With the Residential sectors seeing huge shifts, will it ever impact Commercial?

To quote: "How much of a surveyor’s time is wasted on archaic, inefficient and unnecessarily complicated portals? Tech is the solution". Perhaps one sided but a few good and interesting insights here

6. Chatbots and their impact on the Real Estate Sector

I have been hearing more and more about the use of Chatbots. Therefore, I urge you to read this through with interest about how business practices are changing - both for the business as well as the consumer.

This ties in with an article I have wanted to produce for a while about not just Chatbots but also the influence on Facebook moving forward. It has the perfect recipe of data on you as a person and the AI mechanics to make realistic conversations about you as a person. Things could be starting to get very interesting in this space.

Talking of "Bots", if you liked my overview of Robots in Construction recently, you may like this article on a recent robotic construction project in Shanghai. The walls built here would have been almost impossible had a human been put in charge of the build.

7. All my interesting articles from the week

As usual, I end with all the articles I have put together from the week - genuinely one of the harder weeks to pull together given the raft of great articles out there.

Other than that, I am off to watch Match of the Day before putting on the Roast for a lovely lunch time treat.

If you ever want to call me, please do. Just give me a buzz on 07775 797 286

Happy Sunday and wishing you all a great Sunday morning.

James



