Just like every other sector, the real estate industry is undergoing a digital transformation of its own. Established players and digital-first startups are competing to develop new solutions that will drive growth and efficiencies in a sector that still requires significant manual and administrative tasks. Welcome to the PropTech revolution!
“PropTech is one small part of a wider digital transformation in the property industry,” explains Vincent Lecamus, co-founder of Immobilier 2.0. “It considers both the technological and mentality change of the real estate industry, and its consumers to our attitudes, movements and transactions involving both buildings and cities.[1]”
Belgian startup SweepBright is one of the leaders at the forefront of the PropTech revolution. The company secured €2.3 million in additional funding late last year to support the global expansion of its services.
Founded in 2016 by Yoram Speaker and Raphaël Bochner, SweepBright rapidly established a solid reputation within the real estate industry as a valuable time-saver. Users of its app report indeed saving up to 70 per cent of their time by reducing tedious admin tasks.
Thanks to the app, real estate agents can create, publish, and follow up on their listings just using their mobile phone. Traditionally, real estate agents would perform the exact same tasks everywhere in the world. They would visit properties, take notes and photos, and then later on enter all this information into whatever system their agency might use to publish and distribute property details. It’s a very manual and time-consuming process that forces real estate agents to spend a significant amount of their time sitting in front of a computer instead of discovering new properties.
The future belongs to real estate agencies who are able to make the shift to increased productivity, provide better customer experience and deliver a more robust digital marketing.”
– Raphael Bochner, SweepBright CEO
SweepBright greatly reduces that admin time by enabling agents to take care of all their admin work instantly and on-site, while visiting a property. The app is easy to use and integrates with a range of third-party services via its open API.
“There have been some significant evolutions on the real-estate market,” explains Frank Maene, Managing Partner of Volta Ventures that invested in SweepBright from the early stage of the startup. “But when it comes to efficiency, there is still a lot of room for improvement. SweepBright is already facilitating that shift, enabling estate agents to focus more of their time on clients. Raphael Bochner knows the property market better than anyone and is well aware of the challenges facing the sector. He has developed the solution. Now it’s simply a matter of rolling it out as far and as wide as possible.[3]”
- PropTech: What is it and how to address the new wave of real estate startups?, by Vincent Lecamus, Medium, July 11, 2017.
- SweepBright veut transformer le métier d’agent immobilier, by Sarah Godard, L’Echo, April 28, 2017.
- Belgian startup SweepBright raises €2.3 million to conquer South American and Australian property markets, by Thomas Ohr, October 17, 2018.
