REIT ASIAPAC
COLUMN
C A S H
F L O W
V I S I B I L I T Y
Second-placed team Mr. Ja addressed the retail challenge with
a solution called AirCNC. They marketed themselves as the
“AirBnB for retail” by providing under-utilised retail space for
“pop-up” retail. The team already has a platform in place for
offices and believes the addition of big data and algorithms can
provide a more effective solution to match pop-up retail with the
available space.
Participants, mentors, judges and hosts for the Asia PropTech Innovathon.
Column
INSIGHTS FROM A
PROPTECH HACKATHON
Competitors proposed solutions to tackle Hong Kong’s land and housing
shortage, retail mall operations and China’s multi-family housing.
By Paul Chen, Head of Asia for RealFoundations
In August, I helped run “Asia PropTech
Innovathon
(www.innovathon-asiaprop.
tech),” a hackathon held in Hong Kong.
Participants were expected to create
technology-based solutions for a given
problem within 24 hours. Teams were vying
for cash prizes of HK$20,000 (US$2,500),
HK$15,000, and HK$5,000, along with a
multitude of mentorship opportunities.
Pitching began at 4pm on Saturday. Teams had roughly 20 hours
to formulate their solutions. Each team had 5 minutes to pitch,
followed by a 4-minute Q&A. We had about 10 mentors at the
event to help the teams on the problem statement, advise on
market realities and formulate the storyboard for their pitch.
Most participants chose to tackle the land and housing supply
shortage in Hong Kong. Among the “hot” technologies that were
included in the proposed solutions were the Internet of Things
(IoT), Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most solutions
involved combining a mobile-based front-end solution with
a business model. There were also teams that combined the
different “hot” technologies to arrive at a solution.
Doors opened on Friday (August 17) at 6pm. We had over 100
participants ranging from university students to professionals
from the real estate and technology industries. Some came as
pre-formed teams, and others were looking to join a team. By
8 pm, participants were grouped into 15 teams, and they were
asked to tackle three challenges:
Third-placed team ReVita proposed to solve the housing
shortage problem by streamlining the development permitting
process. Through a combination of data aggregation, AI and
workflows, ReVita aimed to bring together various stakeholders
in the development permit process including government
agencies, owners, brokers, developers and contractors so that
they could collaborate on a common platform to help simplify
the development approval processes.
1. Address the land and housing supply shortage in
Hong Kong
2. Optimise retail operations to enhance convenience
and accessibility
3. Improve residential operations to enhance the
end-to-end customer experience
24
The winning team was Farmacy HK, whose motto is “make
farming possible in the heart of our city.” The company, which had
been in business for a few months, grows agricultural products
such as flowers, herbs and fruits in urban areas. Their solution
enables the decentralisation of farming operations through IoT,
monitoring systems, smart farming modules and agricultural
sciences. Farmacy claimed that with their technology and
know-how, they can deliver higher yields per square foot even
in urban areas. Their current revenue streams come from both
agriculture sales and modular system sales. They already have
local restaurants as customers with an additional 10 restaurants
in the pipeline.
Winning Team Farmacy HK with judging panel and event hosts.
C H I N A’ S M U LT I - FA M I LY
P R O P T E C H V E N T U R E S
The untold story in recent years has been China’s PropTech
market. A growing number of tech and real estate start-ups have
been focusing on the rental market for multi-family housing in
China. The western media often do not pick up on these ventures
because they are not well known outside
of China, and they don’t need to be because
Globally, the real estate
industry has been slow to their domestic market is massive.
Honourable mention goes to AG Ventures,
which addressed the residential challenge,
targeted explicitly at opportunities in the
multi-family sector in China. AG Ventures adopt innovative solutions,
Start-ups in Asia haven’t been able to build
provided a platform to manage customer
but this is even more so in scale to disrupt the incumbents due to a lack
demand, renovations, capital expenditures,
of financial and political capital, and hence
Asia compared to North
move-ins/move-outs, rents and others. The
traditional real estate players in Asia are
America and Europe.
platform enabled investors to understand the
unlikely to become obsolete soon. However,
drivers that impact cash flows in their multi-
to stay competitive and retain their significant
family portfolio. It had been in development
market share, these incumbent players must learn to engage in
for some time and was being used in North America and Japan.
strategic partnerships with large tech giants as well as startups.
AG Ventures hopes to localise the product for China.
Asia PropTech aims to help PropTech startups in the region by
building an eco-system consisting of Asian real estate veterans
to inject know-how, a “PropTech lab” to accelerate proof-of-
concepts with real-life use cases, and funding to scale start-ups.
The PropTech Innovathon was a catalyst to connect real estate
companies with future stars in PropTech. Key sponsors Great
Eagle and RealFoundations have already begun their mentorship
program for the outstanding university student teams from the
event. Active collaboration between tech entrepreneurs and
real estate incumbents will lead to innovations for the real
estate industry in Asia.
Among the participants, over 75% had a tech background, and
almost everyone had a real estate interest. Most of the teams
already had a technical tool in mind. They needed to see how they
could apply their solutions to address the relevant problems to
create value.
While the growth of the PropTech industry as a whole is in its
early stages, Asia has had some high-profile funding in the
past few years. Globally, the real estate industry has been slow
to adopt innovative solutions, but this is even more so in Asia
compared to North America and Europe.
About the author: Paul Chen is Head of Asia for RealFoundations,
a global services company focused on helping real estate companies
improve their operating platforms. Paul is also the designated guru
of Asia PropTech. Paul has worked at the intersection of real estate
and technology for 25 years.
An important condition for the PropTech industry to succeed
is market size. North America and the UK have huge domestic
markets and they share a common language. Startups in these
regions have larger markets with which to experiment their
products or pivot their solution to address a related sector.
25