Embracing digital transformation in Nigeria’s real estate sphere – Oladipupo Clement

The real estate industry like every other industry is in the rave of digital transformation. Technologies are evolving and adding in numbers to cater for most real estate processes, making it seamless, transparent and faster. This is in contrast to traditional methods marred by lengthy processes and a list of other inefficiencies declining the values of space and time. This is more evident in a developing nation like Nigeria whose real estate journey is marked by cumbersome paperwork, fraud, and issues of unavailability, hampering the smooth process involved in property acquisition.

Despite the beaming opportunities arising from the Nigerian real estate sector, the adoption of digital technologies into the operations of realtors and developers remains limited. Issues as lack of infrastructure and ultimate resistance to accept and learn a new medium acts as a barrier to a more secure practice. Through this exploration, the article promises to identify and explain the technologies relevant to real estate practice and comprehensively posit strategic approaches facilitating a smooth digital transformation in Nigeria’s real estate sector, enhancing an overall beautiful user experience.

Blockchain technology is one technology that has a decentralized ledger system used for the recording of digital transactions across multiple computers. This technology allows for the recording of property transactions that cannot be retroactively altered without the alteration of prior blocks registered. This tamper-proof technology provides transparency, security and invariability of data, reducing the attempt of fraudsters in the real estate space.

Blockchain has been widely known in cryptocurrency but in recent times, it has spread its impact to sectors such as healthcare, finance, and real estate. This technology is heavily impactful in diverse ways following a report by Deloitte, blockchain can minimise the time of transaction at 50 per cent and also transaction cost by 30 per cent to 50 per cent. The growth of this technology in the real estate market is expected to grow from $81.78 million in 2022 to $1.372 billion by 2028, summing up a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 59.5per cent.

Artificial Intelligence has taken over the world, it would be surprising if it’s not a technology transforming the real estate sector. AI helps to analyse algorithms in accumulated data and study market trends to provide accurate valuations of properties. This is in the same vein with the function of machine learning where it’s used to predict future values, rental revenue and market positions. Also, machine learning through data analysis can easily detect fraud and unusual patterns in digital transactions. This helps investors to know when the market is ripe for venture and when it isn’t. AI and machine learning offers an avalanche of other benefits including the provision of automated customer service through chatbots, responding swiftly to customers and personalising communication with them; analysing large data for market analysis in order to enable professionals in the field to understand the demand and supply cycle; providing virtual touring and augmented reality, where AR applications enables immersive property viewing to buyers as though they were physically onsite. This helps to save time and allows for quick purchase which according to McKinsey, if adequately leveraged upon is capable of creating between $1.3 trillion and $2 trillion in value annually in the real estate sector alone.

These tools are very impactful to improving market efficiency and the overall performance of the industry.

This technology is powered by AI but is singled out for the sake of thorough explanation. Virtual reality and augmented reality are two powerful technologies shaping the real estate landscape today. They are used for potential buyers who might be far away from the location of the properties, reducing the need to waste time and energy for physical assessments. This technology has ushered in convenience. Applications such as Matterport allows for customers to have an immersive experience with the layouts and design of the house through a 3D tour. While, “Houzz” is also an AR application that incorporates the feature of ‘view in my room’ to visualize furniture and decor of the properties on sale. A survey conducted by Coldwell Banker reveals that 77 per cent of potential home buyers like to use VR applications to assess the property before visiting in person. The global market for VR in real estate is expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 33.5per cent.

The invention of VR and AR applications has transformed the real estate market significantly, enhancing the marketing, customidation and visualisation of properties in a competitive real estate market.

One of the issues that still breeds human meetings in a conventional estate transaction process is the cause of signature. However, with the invention of E-signature and digital documentation with platforms such as DocuSign and Adobe Sign, the signing and management of contracts becomes easy, making the completion of transactions seamless. These tools also minimize the risk of errors and loss of important documents, clearly augmenting the study gathered by DocuSign revealing that digital signatures reduce the average transaction time from days to minutes, with a 20 per cent improvement in document completion rates.

The above technologies have taken over the industry striking importance to why industry players need to adapt. Digital transformation in the real estate sector offers effective efficiency. Through these technologies, one can bank on obtaining results as compared to traditional patterns that allows for prolonged biddings. The technologies are also best for transparency, where everything is clear and bright from the beginning of the transactional dialogue to the end, platforms such as Blockchain and VR makes it more feasible. All of these projects an overall improved user experience boosting the sector in alignment to global standards.

It’s important that professionals in real estate should see to resisting the urge for not adapting to change. Change is constant and they must embrace this transition from traditional to digital methods passionately. There shouldn’t be room for a lackluster attitude and complaining about not learning how these technologies are obtained and how they operate. Another challenge facing the implementation of digital tools is the inadequacy of digital infrastructure. Most of these technologies cannot be fully harnessed, even when real estate professionals might have these technologies, network connection barrier and lack of technical know-how diminishes its function. Professionals should involve themselves in training and tech summits in order to meet up with the market trend.

The real estate world has revolutionised. Technologies inherent in the sector keep on evolving to improve the operations of its professionals, property transactions inclusive. Professionals in the real estate field are urged to remove themselves from the lingering constrain of reluctancy and lack of technical know-how of these emerging technologies to embracing the solutions of willingness and the ability to know and learn in order for them to keep up with the market, else they stand the risk of being kicked out in a competitive space. They have to constantly leverage on technologies such as blockchain, AI, VR, among many others to drive favourable user experiences for their clients.

Oladipupo Timothy Clement is a highly accomplished real estate and business coach with a career spanning over two decades. He is the Founder and CEO of Lifepage Property & Investments Limited, a leading real estate company in Nigeria.