- Real-estate tech startups aim to make tasks from property management to homebuying more efficient.
- We surveyed 10 venture capitalists to identify the hottest proptech companies of the year.
- Some of the firms are modernizing real estate by digitizing analog processes, sometimes using AI.
The frozen housing market meant tough times for the proptech — or property technology — industry.
As the market starts to thaw, however, things are looking up for firms that seek to use technology to digitize, automate, or otherwise improve legacy processes in the worlds of residential and commercial real estate.
Business Insider asked 10 venture-capital investors who focus on real-estate and construction technology to nominate the most exciting, promising, and talked-about proptech startups in 2024.
The 20 companies on the final list reveal the breadth of the proptech universe.
[Read the full list on Business Insider]
City: Medfield, Massachusetts
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $20.35 million
What it does: Tour24 is an app that lets prospective tenants take self-guided apartment tours without a leasing agent present.
Why it’s hot: In many cities, renting an apartment can be cutthroat, with open-house lines and bidding wars to nab a good unit at a reasonable price.
More than ever, people are deciding on places to live quickly — sometimes even committing before they’ve even seen the unit because they aren’t able to schedule a walkthrough that jives with their working hours.
Tour24 allows users — who are ID- and credit card-verified — to tour apartments when leasing agents aren’t available, such as on evenings and weekends.
“We are seeing that certainly millennials really prefer self-guided experience,” Georgianna W. Oliver, the founder of Tour24, told Business Insider.
Oliver said many of their leasing-agency clients offer Tour24’s self-guided tours as well as leasing agent-led tours and virtual tours — and have given feedback that the more options they give potential renters, the better.
“People have the options,” she said. “And they really like having the options.”
The main challenge it faces: Since the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individual leasing agencies have been offering some version of a self-guided tour on their own with their own video Tour24 also competes with other self-guided rental-tour apps like Rently and CareTaker.
Tour24 seems to be holding its own: The startup announced in October that it raised $5 million in a Series B round, noting that it had doubled in size in 2024 to reach 525,000 units across over 2,060 multifamily properties.
[Source: Business Insider]