n mid-October, Arbio announced it had raised $36 million through a Series A funding round, bringing the Berlin-based company’s total funding to more than $45 million. The full-stack, AI-first property-management company has become just one of the latest firms to ride the wave of booming PropTech (property technology)—the use of digital technology in real estate. And as the likes of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and cloud-based software platforms continue to achieve mammoth gains in innovation, the future for PropTech looks distinctly bright.
Until the last few years, the world’s real-estate markets had become outdated, with buyers, owners and property firms relying on antiquated tools and methods to conduct business. But today the market is modernising at a breathless pace. A new generation of PropTech firms is leveraging the latest technologies to deliver myriad innovative solutions that are decisively overhauling how real estate is developed, marketed, managed and occupied. Today, PropTech is assisting all types of real-estate market participants, including property owners, potential buyers, occupants, landlords and tenants, in managing their assets more efficiently and making more informed decisions.
“Simply put, ‘PropTech’ refers to property technology: the data, algorithms, photo-scraping and image-recognition capabilities, dynamic-valuation models, customer-relationship management systems and everything else that can power AI to better inform users and improve systemic efficiencies,” according to Mike S. Shapiro, co-founder and managing director of PropTech start-up Plunk. “It’s also the underlying technology that real estate professionals, underwriters, developers, property managers, title companies, banks and others use to manage and improve real estate transactions from start to finish.”
In Arbio’s case, this means disrupting Europe’s $20-billion-plus holiday-rental market as a PropTech property-management company aiming to become the market leader in European short-term rentals, particularly in the German, Austrian and United Kingdom markets. Its full-stack, AI-first approach to short-term rental operations enables it to uniquely integrate service automation, acquisitions and cross-market scaling within a single system.
“Starting as operators ourselves, we’ve felt where the real pain for operating and managing holiday rentals lies. Therefore, at Arbio, we get extremely excited about leveraging AI to change the fundamentals of a traditionally messy, service-heavy sector,” Constantin Schröder, Arbio’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said recently. “With our involvement in existing holiday property managers, we’re very particular about how we believe building and rolling out our platform delivers the highest value to homeowners, so that ultimately travellers have a wonderful time exploring new places.”
According to Elise Stern, investment director at Eurazeo (the investment firm that led the Series A funding round), Arbio is pioneering an AI-native model in one of Europe’s largest and least digitised service sectors. “By combining technology, data, and operational excellence, they’re redefining what property owners and guests can expect,” Stern said following the completion of the funding round. “We believe Arbio will become the category leader in the multi-billion-euro holiday rental management space, and we are excited to support them in this ambition.”
Arbio is just one of several PropTech firms that are thoroughly disrupting the European property-management space, with AI-based innovations propelling new players to deliver compelling service propositions. For instance, fellow German firm Buena recently raised €49 million to expand its AI-powered property-management platform, while Brühl-based SCALARA’s digital property-management software platform announced in May that it had secured €3 million to augment its platform and digitalise property workflows. Zurich’s viboo, which connects IoT (internet of things) devices in buildings, meanwhile, raised €3.3 million to expand its AI building-management system into Germany.
Source: https://internationalbanker.com/technology/proptech-has-a-bright-future-ahead/
