4
CATEGORIES
7,691
COMPANIES
16,865
INVESTORS
$408.82
BILLION RAISED (2000-2022)
95
COUNTRIES

Overview

This chapter focuses on the global PropTech industry with an increased eye toward long-term trends. In the first section we provide an overview of the global industry, before diving into an assessment of five year trends, and then concluding with a longview of comparisons between leaders who have emerged in the past decade with those who have emerged in the past fiscal year.

Industry Trends

We have better data on emerging markets in this year’s barometer when compared to previous years. This year, we found 7,691 companies had raised $408.82 Billion USD with the help of 16,865 investors from 95 countries between 2012 and 2023. In previous PropTech Barometer reporting, we found just 2,405 companies raised $74.2 Billion USD from 1,809 investors in 66 countries between 1999 and 2021. Even still, improved data cannot account for all of the changes. Therefore, we attribute the significant difference to a combination of our improved dataset and the growth of the industry, especially as PropTech has begun to work in ever increasingly in developing markets, particularly in the People’s Republic of China and India, as well as their neighbors. With each passing year, the spread of technology into real estate markets is penetrating further than before.

7,691
companies

Our current data indicates PropTech investors have hit record highs in recent years. There were more than three thousand active investors in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, substantially down from the more than four thousand active investors recorded in the 2021-2022 fiscal year. Nevertheless, examining the longterm trends of investor make-up suggests the field of investors remains quite healthily diverse.

95
countries

Additionally, although the vast majority of investments occur in the United States and the People’s Republic of China, followed by European countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, we see emergent PropTech markets in countries. In Latin American markets like Colombia, Peru, and Brazil join Southeast Asian markets like Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia, along with African markets like Nigeria and South Africaand Southwest Asian markets like Israel, the UAE, and Turkey in becoming innovators in the PropTech industry. In future years, we may look to such countries as leaders in their regions, and even, possibly, the global PropTech community.

Figure 13 the global distribution of PropTech investments excluding the United States, to give us a better sense of the current top investment markets. Of course, we should not be surprised to see the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the top of the list, along with the United Kingdom – since London is often referred to as the capital of global finance. Then, we find Germany — the European Union’s largest market as measured by GDP — and Switzerland, an established and well-known market for global finance

Figure 14 shows the bar graph of the top countries in terms of PropTech investments from 2012 through 2023. The top five include Spain (attracting $990 Million USD in investments in the 2021-2022 fiscal year and a total of $10.56 Billion USD since 2012), Switzerland ($13.5 Billion USD), Germany ($17.16 Billion USD), the United Kingdom ($23.90 Billion USD), and China ($58.41 Billion USD). Other important markets include Australia ($8.15 Billion USD) and Canada ($5.76 Billion USD). Another tier of countries, including Brazil, India, and France, have attracted between $3 and $4 Billion in investments in the past decade, while a third tier of countries, including Singapore, Japan, Sweden, South Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Italy have attracted between $1 and $2 Billion in investments. Finally, the countries that have attracted more than $100 Million in investments, but less than $1 Billion, are quite diverse, including Israel, Colombia, Lithuania, Austria, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, Portugal and South Africa.

Over the course of the past five years, the shape of PropTech investments by company category has changed substantially. Beginning this measurement in Q3 of the calendar year in 2018, B2B companies attracted the most capital, with more than $6 Billion USD. However, the longer term trend is for B2C PropTech companies to attract more investments, totaling over $86 Billion in the five year period and Information Technology (IT) companies attracting over $96 Billion in investments. Overall, the data also suggests there is a close relationship between the number of deals by company category and the capital invested, especially since Information Technology and B2C companies had the largest number of deals during the five year period in question, with 152 and 167 deals respectively.

Five Year Trends

Figure 16 is an illustration of the investments received by individual companies completed deals and their categories to give a bit of a long term perspective on the Global PropTech market. Here we see that major players from this past year, such as China Vanke in the Building category, HTA in the Investing category, ICE Mortgage Technology in the Managing Category, and KE Holdings in the Living category are also among the top fundraisers of the past five years.

Overall, the Managing category of PropTech companies are still seeing some of the largest and most significant deals, in part because this may well be the market segment that has most readily adopted to the digital transformation. The relative financialization of the US and UK markets, coupled with the innovations of FinTech, help to explain why Investing has been the consistently second most substantial category. The data illustrates that the technological revolution may still well have the greatest space to innovate, diversify, and disrupt the Living and Building spaces, as these are the spaces where the least disruption has occurred in the real estate market – relatively speaking – thus far. However, with interest rates relatively high in many markets, it is unclear at present what forms of financing will take over, although there is a pervasive sentiment that leveraged buyouts and debt financing are on the decline in the current cycle.

Overall, the vast majority of deals covered by the press reporting on the PropTech industry are large Mergers & Acquisitions or significant VC funding. The data also supports this focus, since Mergers & Acquisitions represented the most significant capital invested by deal type in the past five years, totaling over $73 billion in M&A deals, representing 25.49% of all deals. A second tier of deals, being Growth/Expansion, IPO, Private Secondary Transactions, Reverse Mergers, and Prive Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) deals remain quite significant, as each of these categories represents more than $10 billion of financial deals, and together they represent 29.63% of all deals. By the time the trend of market consolidation emerged, as we had predicted in last year’s barometer, and by the end of the 2022 calendar year, deals were significantly smaller in the PropTech industry. As of the first quarter of the 2023 calendar year, Reverse Mergers, strikingly, became the largest category of deals, totaling over $5.18 billion, while PIPE and Later Stage VC deals remained significant, totaling over $2.36 billion and over $1.39 billion respectively. We take the data that M&A dropped to just around $1.07 billion of all deals as a further sign that we have entered a period when the market consolidation has already occurred.

Over the past five years, examining the total capital raised by fund type in the PropTech industry provides important insight into the financial dealings of an industry that is typically described as one of the least transparent in the business world. The top five categories of funds during the period in question were Buyout funds, Venture – General funds, Growth/Expansion funds, Real Estate Opportunistic Funds, and Direct Lending. Of these, Buyout funds totalled over $1 Trillion, while Venture – General funds totalled around $606.29 billion. Growth/Expansion funds totalled around $330 billion, and Real Estate Opportunistic funds totalled around $228 billion. Finally, Direct lending funds totalled around $196.56 billion. This overall picture is very different from that which emerges when we examine the key quarters of Q3 2020, Q4 2020, and Q2 of 2021, when compared to Q1 of 2023.

$1
TRILLION Buyout funds

Ten Year & Past Year Comparison

Figure 19a: Top 10 PropTech Companies by Amount Raised to Date (2012-2023)

$ 10.22 Bn
$ 9.05 Bn
$ 8.82 Bn
$ 8.38 Bn
$ 5.43 Bn
$ 4.85 Bn
$ 4.37 Bn
$ 4.06 Bn
$ 2.79 Bn
$ 1.63 Bn

In our final assessment of the global PropTech industry update, we aim to highlight the top companies in the industry, as measured by their fundraising. If we examine the past decade of the industry, we have some major players, who will also be quite familiar to followers of the PropTech Industry. For instance, Lineage Logistics has raised an impressive total of over $10 billion USD, while the American giant AirBnb has raised over $9 billion. Two Chinese companies, KE Holdings and China Vanke, each come in with over $8 billion in total fundraising, while OpenDoor has raised a total of $5.43 billion. Then we have three companies that have raised between four and five billion USD: CSC ($4.85 billion), SoFi ($4.37 billion), and MRI Software ($4.06 billion). Finally, CoStar Group ($2.79 billion), and Market Tech Holdings ($1.63 billion) round out the list for the top fundraisers in the past decade. However, if we narrow the list to just those fundraisers that were active in the past year of 2022-2023, we see a distinctly different list, especially since AirBnB and OpenDoor do not represent major fundraisers in the current market. Thus, Reef Technology, Generation Home, Figure, and JD Property are all on the top ten list of to-date fundraising, as measured by fundraisers active in the 2022-2023 fiscal cycle. Each of these companies features particular technological solutions that help explain why they have reached the top of the list.

Figure 19b: Top 10 PropTech Companies by Amount Raised to Date (2022-2023)

$ 10.22 Bn
$ 8.82 Bn
$ 8.38 Bn
$ 4.85 Bn
$ 4.06 Bn
$ 1.70 Bn
$ 1.62 Bn
$ 1.47 Bn
$ 1.38 Bn
$ 1.30 Bn

Among the top all time PropTech fundraisers still quite active in the 2022-2023 cycle, Reef Technology is particularly important. The company is working to help transform urban landscapes, through adopting unused urban spaces to current needs. Consider the example of parking lots. These physical spaces create massive urban heat islands and often go at least partially, if not mostly unused. They are essentially single-use spaces. However, they can be transformed into multi-use places through integration with technology that connects restaurants, airports, hotels, warehouses, and more to popular brands. Each of these businesses would gain value through the interaction, while the investor in the formerly-single-use parking lot also increases their revenue stream. They additionally install “Food Hall” panels, which are quick-service interaction panels for customers in high-traffic areas, such as university campuses, urban mega-malls and shopping centers, sports stadiums, airports, and more.

While Reef Technology focuses on the fundamental transformation of public urban and commercial spaces, Generation Home is providing new technological solutions for the process of mortgage lending in England and Wales, where they utilize a combination of cutting edge UI and data management software to facilitate the entire experience of home purchasing, from formulating a budget, through the mortgage application and approval process, conveyancing, remortgaging, moving, and more. Their “Income Booster” interface allows clients to easily add family members (parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, or uncles) who are helping to purchase a home through gifts, which will help the applicant borrow more, although the “Income oster” will not live in the home. Typically, this process includes letters, signatures, and forms which all must be completed in-person or sent via e-mail, in a fashion where the data stored is not particularly secure.

Importantly, in the case of Reef Technology’s lending models, the “Income Booster” is also distinct from the “Deposit Booster” – an unlimited number of friends or family who can contribute toward the deposit and downpayment of a home. Here, a “Deposit Booster” is different from an “Income Booster” in that the pot of money is structured so the individual(s) contributing toward the deposit will get a small amount of their initial contribution back later, while also allowing for parents to support more than one child with the same pot of money. Finally, “Dynamic Ownership” allows for co-investment with up to five (5) other parties, allowing each individual to build equity in a property. Here, Generation Home’s technological contribution is through creating software that allows clients to easily track contributions and share of the home over time.

At the intersection of PropTech and FinTech, Figure (Financial Software) is a private company founded in 2018 by Mike Cagney ( who also founded SoFi), with some 53 investors and just over five hundred employees. Based in San Francisco, the company is transforming the trillion-dollar financial services industry by exhibiting the latest in combining the technologies of blockchain, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics to facilitate the management of digital assets. Figure’s platform specializes in home equity release services, including home equity lines of credit, home improvement loans, and home-buy-lease back offerings for retirement. Additionally, Figure also offers business solutions through their platform “Figure Pay” which is a Banking as a Service (BaaS) API-based platform, also built on blockchain rails, or networks of how payments move from payers to payees, offering extremely secure transactions.

While Reef Technology, Generation Home, and Figure all emphasize the intersections between B2B and B2C interactions, JD Property is a major Chinese innovator in infrastructure and B2B interactions, with eight significant investors, including BlackRock and GIC (a Singapore-based Sovereign Wealth Fund). JD Property aims to create intelligent industrial parks and energy systems through merging solutions from renewable energy and smart technology. By doing so, they enable their clientele with the ability to create sustainable and efficient production environments. While the technologies they utilize might not be adoptable to economies of countries with less emphasis on manufacturing and production, it is still important to remember that these environments are another area where PropTech is providing vital solutions to today’s most pressing challenges.