PPW founder and serial investor Simon Baker has officially launched the 2017 innovation-themed PPW Bangkok Conference at the Radisson Blu Hotel.
Over 180 delegates and 75+ companies are in attendance for PPW’s 19th conference which runs over three days until Friday 10th March.
Baker kicked off the conference with a presentation on innovation and how it relates to the world or property portals; talking delegates through the industry’s evolution from the days of print advertising until what it is now: an industry worth billions of dollars.
“Innovation is happening in many different ways; there’s innovation in how people operate and this now includes the way people interact with property through technology such as laptops and iPads,” he said.
The conversation then turned to the way in which these technologies are used in complex searching by using features such as a pin-drop maps which show specific amenities within a particular suburb such as schools, and how this can influence where people buy property.
Other technologies that are changing the way we experience property are via 3D rendering and digitisation of floor plans which are giving the user a very realistic portrayal of what it feels like to set foot inside a property without doing so physically.
But where Baker sees the future of property portals boils down to one thing: predictive matching.
“The future of property portals will be all about matching the buyer and seller,” he admits.
He says this will become a reality by building profiles of people through collecting a variety of data to find out exactly what property searchers want. Baker says this data may stem from a variety of places including social media sites such as Facebook, which carries an excessive amount of information and can track what users and their cohorts are doing.
If this is the future, then the online property industry is in for a very exhilarating ride.
