The Proptech Innovation Network: A Complexity-Evolutionary Perspective

It is evident that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption and popularity of proptech. Remote work, social distancing, and the need for contactless transactions have driven the need for enhanced solutions that enable virtual property tours, online lease signing, and other digital services. Such global growth of the proptech sector has been mirrored by accelerated funding campaigns, increased number of proptech startups, and unprecedent interest from real estate developers as well as policy makers. A specific shift has been observed in the networks of the proptech around the world. Industry associations, accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces, and other forms of collaboration and networking have played a decisive role in taking the proptech into the next level. However, this networking intensifying efforts were not only attributed to the crisis as a trigger, but also to well-developed international-local high-tech innovation linkages, active innovation personal networks, and, in most cases, regional public and private readiness to adopt the new changes. In this study, we adopt a complexity-evolutionary perspective to illustrate the evolution of the proptech networks before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Such approach is allowing us to assess the emergence of a cluster of proptech through studying the linkages between real estate actors, high-tech actors and startups and the funding organisations. Notions such as small events, windows of opportunities, local-international pipelines, regional readiness and path dependency are employed to draw a quasi-full picture of the proptech ecosystem in the last five years and its perspective for the near future. The study is taking the French proptech market as a case study. Our paper introduces the theoretical approach and the preliminary results of this study.