Technology goes through all aspects of people's lives. Today, even some kiosks accept a debit card for a purchase of just $ 100. Even so, in the real estate universe the most traditional customs are preserved.
But to pay the amount of the rent, the tenants are forced to deliver a stack of bills and receive as proof of payment a paper written by hand. This happens to more than 90% of the tenants, according to the City Ombudsman.
However, in the world innovation is also prevailing in the real estate sector. The trend is so strong that it already has a name: PropTech, acronym for Property and Technology. Although ReTech (Real Estate Technology) is also used.
These terms are used to refer to startups that innovate in the real estate sector based on the use of new technologies. The most graphic and surprising examples are the houses that are built with 3D printers or the robots that monitor the works.
This trend capitalizes the cracks of the traditional market to impose itself, at a slow and firm pace, in Argentina. The experiences are not simply based on real estate agents that put pictures of properties in their social networks.
Currently, in the country it is already possible to buy a property via crowdfunding (collective financing), sign a contract digitally and tour a property through a 360 degree tour. And everything from the cell phone.
This local PropTech initiative is well known to Andrea Rodríguez Valdez, director of MKTre.com, a platform that links the actors of the sector.
"The Argentine market has been introducing technology in the real estate sector for years because it has a good entrepreneurial ecosystem, but if we talk about PropTech purely, we could say that it was heard for the first time a year ago," he recalls.
In fact, it was not until mid-2018 that all the startups in the region met at the PropTechLatam Summit event, organized by Rodríguez Valdez. And this year they plan to repeat it in five countries, including Argentina.
In economic terms, real estate is an important sector of any nation. Not only because it allows access to a house in a country with a housing deficit, but because the "bricks" were always a reliable investment within an economic context of constant turbulence and swings.
The world changed and Real Estate must accompany this transformation, says Andrés Ávila Páez, a member of Reporte Inmobiliario, a platform that closely follows this market.
"The sector is managed like 50 years ago, the only way to keep growing is to adapt, people use Netflix to watch a movie or a free market to buy something, why in real estate they have to go outside to ring the bell of a real estate company? "asks Ávila Páez.
In this sense, Hernán Ibáñez, commercial manager of classifieds in Mercado Libre, tells iProUP that "Internet and new technologies transformed the way we relate to the environment, and that also impacts the way we choose a house to live. or a department to rent. "
The most novel cases in the country
In the country there are almost 80 startups identified with the PropTech universe, a number similar to Mexico and Chile, according to a map made by MKTre.com.
"We are very well positioned at the regional level", highlights Rodríguez Valdez, director of the survey.
Newspaper classifieds have fewer and fewer sheets. When renting a property, there are pages such as ZonaProp or Argenprop that work as a window to see photos of the place and get in touch with the owner. But it is far from everything that can be done online.
The startup Alquilando, launched in 2017, is a marketplace where there are rental properties. The difference is that, in addition to seeing them, it is possible to advance in the whole process to close the operation on the computer or the smartphone: from paying with a card the reservation until sending by mail the receipt of salary.
The project started from a bad experience, tells iProUP, Mauro Ayala, its founder and CEO.
"We wanted to rent an office and all the bureaucratic processes were from the last century, you had to go to the real estate, sign in cash, do paperwork, there was so much in the middle that the operation fell," he recalls.
In addition, what makes it a PropTech with a promising future are the services that can be managed online, such as collection. And a range of insurance for those who do not have a rental guarantee.
This is a key problem in the sector, because not everyone has a direct relative who owns a property in the City. In fact, Ayala says that one out of every two tenants who rent a property has this conflict.
In this sense, he assures that the management of a rent could leave up to 50% less and finish in 24 hours.
"Real estate companies do not have so many financial products, we partner with 50 companies to manage all the documentation that is needed and in that variety you can find better prices," he explains.
This year, they will seek to incorporate the digital signature of the contract, a process that enabled the Ministry of Modernization a few months ago. With this step, tenants and owners would complete the whole process without having to know each other personally.
In addition to Alquilando, Properati stands out in Argentina for sale, rental and investment in projects, which already has regional expansion with the support of OLX. Clickaparts offers similar services. An interesting option is Wimet, a new platform for temporary rentals of places for events.
On the total real estate market, the participation of online real estate is still incipient, and this is precisely what gives it a very high potential for growth. In the United Kingdom, where the trend started a few years earlier, 15% of transactions in the real estate market are carried out in the PropTech universe.
Buy and sell from your cell phone
It would seem unthinkable to buy a house without visiting it together with a real estate agent or without calling him on the phone every so often to clear up doubts. But not for Lugaren, the first online real estate in Latin America, launched just over a year ago.
"In a traditional real estate, the web page is a complement, for us, the platform is central, we have no place to the street," explains Pablo Brodsky, 38, founder of the company.
On the Lugaren website, the seller of a property (the owner or an estate agent) loads all the information from his home or office, while the buyer goes through different homes from the computer with a virtual tour in 360 degrees.
In case of any doubt, there is a bot that responds 24 hours with artificial intelligence. You can plan a visit through an online calendar. And, to reserve the unit, the documentation is digitally signed and the deposit is received by credit card.
"With the virtual tour it is possible to know a lot, we had more than 10 people from the interior of the country who made apartment reservations without coordinating any visits," says Brodsky, who reveals that the use of technology has two main advantages for buyers.
On the one hand, the low cost because of not having a location and employees, which translates into lower prices. While a real estate agent pays 3% commission, in Lugaren it is a fixed value of $ 10 thousand plus VAT, regardless of the value of the property.
"Argentina is the second most expensive country in Latin America, after Venezuela, to make a transaction of this type, and many people can not access housing because of real estate and clerical expenses," explains Brodsky.
On the other, the speed to perform such an important process, such as buying a house, from a computer.
In this sense, Brodsky recalls: "In the year marked by the strong devaluation, as it was in 2018, we were able to save many operations by being expeditious in the signing dates, we are obsessed in reducing times in a volatile country like Argentina."
Buy a "bit" of a house
Crowdfunding or collective financing also reached the real estate ecosystem. There are several platforms in Argentina that allow small amounts to be invested in properties.
This was the case of Bricksave, a startup that turns three years old in March. From the page, you can invest from $ 1,000 in properties from different parts of the world.
Sofia Gancedo, director of operations of the company, tells how the idea came about. "I had been working on real estate developments with Eduardo Costantini, he always recommended real estate, because it is one of the best investments that can be made," he recalls.
However, not everyone has the money for it. "You have to have all the capital, but with crowdfunding you can have" bits "of the property and in this way make it more accessible to ordinary people," explains Gancedo.
Bricksave offers to deposit the money and sign contracts digitally. In addition, in the short term they will add blockchain and artificial intelligence for the allocation of investors and properties.
According to Gancedo, who was one of the founders of Dinero Mail, 10 people work at the company. With lower fixed costs, they look for investors to obtain greater profitability. And, at the same time, they operate with properties in New York, Miami, Barcelona and soon Singapore to diversify the portfolios.
"Recently, a Frenchwoman named Charlotte was climbing in Tibet and from a camp she invested 20 thousand dollars in a house in Barcelona with her laptop," says the businesswoman.
In addition to profitability, Gancedo remarks that investment in bricks is very chosen in the unstable economies of Latin America to maintain savings.
With this collective financing technology, in Argentina Crowdium also stands out, which has already received the contribution of local and foreign investors. Another is LinkRE.biz, a crowdlending platform (loans) to raise funds for real estate developments.
The future of the PropTech
In Latin America, 37% of the PropTech ecosystem is concentrated in the purchase and sale of real estate, 33% in the administration, 20% in construction and 10% in rent, according to a report by UNISSU, a PropTech aggregator that gathers more than 6 thousand projects around the world.
From Real Estate Report explain why this trend. "The simplest and easiest things to adapt were brought to Argentina, such as crowdfunding and rentals."
"Last year, the investment in technology companies related to the real estate sector grew 162% worldwide, which is why the latest investments were in improving the development quote, and we are going to introduce the possibility of reserving properties in real time", affirms Hernán Ibáñez, commercial manager of classifieds in Mercado Libre.
The specialists are optimistic about all the technologies that could be developed.
"Far away I do not see anything," says Ávila Páez, a member of the Real Estate Report, although he perceives the current economic situation as a barrier.
"A moving market such as the mortgage loans of 2017 suggested that more tools would come, such as 3D models of printing or augmented reality," adds Ávila Páez. It considers that when sales are reactivated, new innovations will arrive, because even if there is a differential, the client is not.
Andrea Rodríguez Valdez, director of MKTre.com, suggests paying attention to what happens in other countries.
"The United Kingdom was the first to develop the issue, and now the United States and Europe have moved from the need to incorporate technology to fully adopt it, and incorporate information to adapt success stories," he concludes.
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