The Why

The real estate industry has long been considered a laggard insofar as technology adoption has been concerned with more than 40% of real estate companies still relying on spreadsheets and paper-based processes to manage properties today. However, today’s business landscape is fast changing thanks to the exponential growth in technology and the lower barriers to entry that it presents for disruptors such as Uber, Airbnb and Zillow. It’s no longer a matter of choosing to innovate, it’s a matter of innovate or die.

Unfortunately for many incumbents, it’s not as simple as flicking a switch to transition from “the way things have always been done around here” to thinking and working like a disruptive startup, nor should they. Large organisations have been built to deliver on a repeatable, scalable business model that makes money today, but it can’t come at the expense of what will create value and make money tomorrow.

While many incumbents are slowly navigating the path forward to becoming more innovative internally, some are also looking outside the building to fast-track innovation by partnering with emerging tech startups in their field.

A corporate accelerator program brings together the domain expertise, resources and networks of a large industry incumbent with the talent, tech and speed of startups, to leverage each other’s strengths and create new game-changing solutions; it’s kind of like bringing together the power of George Foreman with the speed of Muhammad Ali.

Charter Hall, one of Australia’s largest property groups, owns and manage 332 commercial properties around Australia, and sought to complement its internal innovation initiatives by gaining exposure to emerging talent in the PropTech space. According to Re:Tech, PropTech startups have gone from strength to strength in the past four years, having attracted just US$500M in VC investment globally in 2014 to over US$12.5B in 2017 with a recent KPMG report indicating that PropTech is set to become a US$20B market by 2020.

As such, Charter Hall partnered with Collective Campus to develop and run Australia, and Asia-Pac’s first PropTech accelerator program, the Charter Hall Accelerator. A number of program partners supported the startups, including Amazon Web Services, SendGrid, Zendesk, HubSpot and AutoPilot.

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The Process

We sat down with key executives from Charter Hall such as its CTO Aidan Coleman, its innovation lead Craig Rodgers and its head of digital, Oliver Sebastian. This helped us to gain a better understanding of its business model and strategy. We used this to inform the types of startups we were looking for.

We ran an elaborate online marketing campaign as well as roadshow events in Sydney and Melbourne to attract startups from across Australia. The roadshow events brought together thought leaders in the proptech space, as well as program mentors, to discuss the what, why and how of proptech as well as drum up additional interest in the accelerator program.

Roadshow event in Melbourne

Listen: The Future of Real Estate @ the Charter Hall Roadshow event in Melbourne

When all was said and done, we  secured 48 applications, including one from the Philippines.

In addition to business model and strategic alignment, we evaluated the startups across a number of factors, including management team, traction, value proposition, market opportunity, defensibility and more.

This informed an initial shortlist of 15 startups that were invited along to our 2-day bootcamp and pitch night held in Melbourne. Having worked with the startups across the two days to better understand and hone their business models, the scene was set at Charter Hall’s HQ for the pitch night where each of the 15 startups shared their vision and how they plan to execute on it.

Pitch Night @ Charter Hall HQ in Melbourne

Video: Watch the highlight reel from the Charter Hall bootcamp and pitch night

With only four spots available for the startups, it made our decision after the bootcamp incredibly difficult as there were always going to be some high potential candidates that missed out.

However, after much deliberation, the final four were:

InSpaceXR: virtual reality solutions for architects, engineers and the construction industry

Bricks & Agent: property management and maintenance portal

Snaploader: 3D visualisation of CAD floor-plans for the real estate industry

Estate Baron: property investment and development crowdfunding platform

FlexiSpaces, an internal project team from Charter Hall, were given a wildcard entry into the program and are working to optimise underutilised space by leveraging sharing economy fundamentals.

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