Convinced that innovation is a collective sport that can only be won in teams and the ecosystem, the teams of PropTech lab and Czech PropTech have merged and believe the merger will allow Belgium, Czechia, Luxembourg and Iberia to be closer to each other, to increase the intensity of the business interactions between these geographies, and have the local real estate ecosystem better equipped to source best-in-class innovations.
Marian Skvarek, President of Czech PropTech Association, said: “PropTech Lab has shown us all that even smaller countries can have a successful proptech ecosystem. I am very excited that Czech real estate and proptech companies will now have the same opportunity to speed up the adoption of technology in the built world.”
Idriss Goossens, CEO at PropTech Lab, added: “Our Members will greatly take advantage of our move because the value for money has more than doubled: startups will benefit from geographical expansion opportunities while corporates will be able to source innovations in a huge pool. This Merger is also expected to result in a significant increase of the innovation maturity of both markets and a jump of technology adoption of 2 years in the future.“
The challenges of the built world are huge, but solutions are out there
- Construction & Real Estate is the largest asset class in the world (321T $)
- But it is the least digitized and the most polluting (40 percent of GHG emissions, 50 percent of the raw materials extractions, 30 percent of waste 30 percent of resources)
- All of these problems will accelerate in the next years if we don’t tackle them because we will have to build 13,000 net homes every single day for the next 30 years to house the 2B new people that will exist on earth in 2050
- However, we are lucky because 10,000 proptech startups exist globally and are reinventing construction & real estate – PropTech lab has a database of 7,000 solutions
- Individuals spend 80 percent of their lifetime indoors during their life, so proptech dominates every aspect of their daily life
- It is to bridge the gap between the corporates and the startups that the proptech lab was created
The importance of collective intelligence in the context of Real Estate Stagnation
In a context of economic stagnation, corporates are forced to adapt their innovation strategy and identify key themes to focus on. Many of the corporate members are running internal exercises to list what are the essential innovations they should continue to invest in, and what are the non-essential innovations they should cut costs on.
However, there is so much collective intelligence available, so many corporates willing to share their lessons learned and returns of experiences, and so many founders willing to share their findings and their vision.
The Czech PropTech Association is a construction and real estate innovators network founded in 2018. Their mission is to federate the local proptech companies to facilitate synergies and leverage collective intelligence for this ecosystem to thrive.
PropTech Lab was founded in 2018 and is the next-gen business club in construction and real estate, with the mission to ease the digital and sustainable transformation of real estate. This partnership with Czechia is the first move of PropTech Lab in Central Europe, after having acquired the Luxembourgish network in 2022, and starting operations in Iberia earlier in 2024. This merger allows the building of a bridge between West and Central Europe.
