Sofie sprak op 27 juni op de Proptech afterwork over de digitale revolutie in de vastgoedwereld.
Ze lichtte toe wat de innovatiestrategie is van Dewaele Vastgoed met advies

How can residential brokers tackle the digital revolution of the brokerage world? Is the co-living the next big thing in Residential Real Estate? What is the innovation strategy of Dewaele Vastgoed?

Een stuk uit haar keynote:

'From our lighthouse, we see new business models in real estate brokerage rising, nowadays especially overseas (US and UK). Next generation agencies such as Compass, Redfin and Purple Bricks are flooding the market with their rather offensive pricing models and their clever use of technology and userfriendly customer interfaces.

Due to our innovation DNA, we’re not afraid to radically question our current business model of traditional brokerage. That’s how we came up with the idea of Soldandset.be, an online platform for real estate owners who want to sell their homes without the traditional help from a real estate broker.

Our platform automatically publishes the property on several portal websites and immediately creates a facebook and google add for the listing. The platform works with a transparent bidding system. Potential buyers can place a non-binding offer, which can be made binding afterwards. An ideal way for the owner to get a clear view on the market price of the property.

These services are free for the owner, the buyer pays a transactional buying fee to the platform.

With this new business model, we keep giving added value as a real estate broker to our customers, but in an alternative way. We were able to create such a scalable platform as a new business model because of our earlier efforts in process automation and investments new features such as the use of digital signatures.

We see this initiative as a start-up within our organisation. To become profitable, we still need a large increase of listings in our portfolio, but we see a positive evolution in spontaneous uploads of properties and take time to learn from the feedback from our early customers.

Positive side-effect also is that 30% of our clients on the platform eventually choose to sell their property within our traditional Dewaele business model. Those definitely are new customers we wouldn’t have reached without our initiative.'

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'It has become common knowledge that the customers are the biggest disruptors. Who killed companies such as Kodak and Nokia? You all did!

Today, customers are more likely to engage with companies who invest in products and services which are fast, easy, accessible, simple and tempting. The positive attraction of the customer interface and the smooth experience the customer obtains, are decisive.

It is likely that In the near future, the power of the customer will only increase. Therefore as a company, we try to focus on:

And that is why our partnerships with start-ups, our innovation culture with a lighthouse and our diversification strategy are so important to maintain futureproof.'