Experts in conversation: New PropTech priorities

Menno Lammers is the founder and quartermaster of PropTech For Good. Here, he discusses his aspirations for the network, and how PropTech must keep pace with changing real estate market priorities.

What is the mission of PropTech For Good?

PropTech for Good is a leading global alliance of professionals, innovators and influencers active in the built environment. We are interested in how technology can help to contribute to the fulfilment of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our aspiration is to create a futureproofed, responsive and regenerative built environment for all people. We see PropTech For Good as a means of inspiring and empowering the leaders of today and tomorrow. We need a “moon shot” for our climate; we have to rethink. We talk a lot about sustainability these days but, really, sustainability is about doing less of the bad stuff; we’re interested in regenerative action – doing more of the good stuff.

And how do you see PropTech – and, by extension, property professionals – contributing to regenerative action?

Well, firstly, when we talk about PropTech, why do we always think about digitalisation? Technology is a much broader category. For instance, chemical-free paint is a great sustainable workplace solution; why don’t we call that PropTech? But look, we know the role of property and construction in global carbon emissions. So, instead of reducing energy waste in individual buildings, why not develop microgrids that allow for energy exchange between groups of buildings and whole neighbourhoods? We know this is happening, but we’re talking about isolated cases. One more example that I use is this: imagine you have a large office in Amsterdam with an onsite kitchen. When the office was full, it provided hundreds of meals a day. Now the office is closed and so, of course, is the kitchen; it’s not needed. But, because we’re all ordering take away food to support local businesses, we have “dark kitchens” (otherwise known as “ghost” or “cloud kitchens”) going up across the city. Why build a new kitchen, with all its embodied carbon, when we have this perfectly good kitchen sitting vacant? We need to share and scale such solutions if we want to meet the global challenges outlined in the SDGs and reinvent value models in the built world.

Would you say that the pandemic has amplified the importance of PropTech?

Well, there is still a lot of dust left to settle. Cities have a lot of scale benefits, but when things go wrong, they have scale drawbacks too. I’m inspired by Society 5.0, which is an initiative coming out of Japan. It predates COVID-19, but it seems even more relevant now. The goal is "a human-centred society that balances economic advancement with the resolution of social problems by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space." It’s clear to see how PropTech can play a major role just by looking at the word itself: “Prop” is the physical space; “Tech” is the cyberspace.

Is the business of real estate becoming more ethical?

We’re used to thinking about B2B and B2C formulations, but there are new formulations coming: B2S – business to society; and B2E – business to environment. We see this already with the growth of investment in ESG oriented projects. These are B2S and B2E investments, and they are outperforming traditional investments. New value models are emerging. In this context, we have to ask if there is a future for the real estate industry as we know it. We are used to looking at transactional value and asking how the money flows. But social and environmental value has not yet been integrated.

So, if the property industry has to change, is the same true of the PropTech industry?

When you look at Google Trends, there are fewer searches for PropTech these days; that being said, PropTech is definitely a “stayer”. We know the value that it can add, we just have to be sure that it is the right value for the new reality. I will say it like this: PropTech is dead, long live PropTech!