Review of the Digit!mmo.17

Digit!mmo.17: Exciting presentations and innovative startups (Image: Mathias Rinka)

"I recommend established companies to have a healthy paranoia." This striking sentence and tip regarding current changes in the real estate industry due to digitalization was recently uttered by Adrian Bührer, Managing Director of Swiss Life LAB. With it, he got right to the heart of the situation in which large parts of the industry currently find themselves and how they should react to it. The disruptive forces of the new digital (real estate) world can be felt everywhere and every day. They are gnawing away at both the traditional and the familiar. This year's Digit!mmo.17 event, organized by RESO datamind, Swiss Circle and IMMOBILIEN Business, once again highlighted the most important innovations at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), while also presenting ten promising startup companies. A good 300 representatives of young and old companies discussed new paths together in Rüschlikon and outlined unprecedented business models and collaborations.

Search and find innovations

The largest life insurance company in Switzerland is therefore also keeping its eyes open and its ears wide: With Swiss Life LAB, Adrian Bührer and his management partner Myke Näf, the former founder of Doodle, have been on the lookout since mid-2015 for new startups (also and especially in the real estate industry) for the former Swiss Pension Company, where an investment today could possibly soon prove to be very successful and profitable in the future. As Bührer explained in his presentation at Digit!mmo.17, Swiss Life LAB has already made two investments in emerging companies in the past 18 months. For the next twelve months, he and Näf are targeting two to five more investments. However, he is also aware that "nine out of ten startups fail." It is therefore important for the Swiss Life Group's innovation lab, which is currently the largest real estate asset manager in Europe, to put new business models through their paces.

The guests and participants of Digit!mmo.17 also felt a little of the rough wind that can sometimes blow in the face of young companies. The event included a "pitch" by ten hopeful and promising startups. Here, the companies eMonitor (rental and application management), eSmart (intelligent systems for building automation), Green City Solutions (plant filters for less environmental impact), HOOC (a plug-and-play solution for building technology) and PropMatch (the first robo advisor for direct real estate investments) presented themselves in a first round. In the second round came Spectando (360-degree virtual tours of real estate), Technis ("smart" floors for the real estate and healthcare industries), The Smarter Place (messaging and data platform for tenants, landlords and managers), Thingdust (space management systems) and Timum (online appointment coordination for players in the real estate world).

The majority of Digit!mmo.17 participants ultimately voted in favor of the startup eSmart from Ecublens in western Switzerland, which had already been founded in 2011 as a spin-off of the EPF Lausanne. The founders Fabrizio Lo Conte and Laurent Fabre can now present their business idea to international industry players at the upcoming real estate trade fair MIPIM 2017 in Cannes in March.

Great potential for BIM

Furthermore, three presentations and lectures on the topic of BIM (Building Information Modeling) at this year's Digit!mmo.17 provided participants with a very good insight into the practical work in this field with great future potential. Field reports from the environment of "Innovation and digitalization of the real estate world" (this was also the new subtitle of the industry event) from SBB, Swisscom, Losinger Marazzi, Haworth, Senozon and KPMG rounded off the range of contributions at Digit!mmo.17.

• You can find all presentations on the event homepage www.digit-immo.ch (Password Immo17) and take a look at it. And the next date for Digit!mmo.18 has already been set: it will take place on January 10, 2018.