Are you tired of relentlessly searching for a room? What are the solutions contemporary times present us with?
Rotterdam is a growing city, and home to a globally known university as well as many big multinationals. In this blogpost we will be analyzing how platforms have disrupted the housing market and explain the main concepts of platforms using Housing Anywhere as an example.
Housing Anywhere is a housing platform where people can rent out rooms to students. It started as a platform where outgoing exchange students rent out their rooms when they go abroad. Incoming exchange students can rent these rooms. Nowadays, it is a global platform where demand & supply of rooms for international students balance out. What Housing Anywhere did was that they eliminated real estate agent as intermediary. There is no more need for a real estate agent, just visit housinganywhere.com and get direct access to the objects offered in the city of your interest.
The implementation of Housing Anywhere as a platform created a two-sided market, in this case tenants on one side and landlords on the other side. Furthermore, the platform entailed a positive cross-sided network effect. This means that if one side increases or improves the other side will do the same. Applied to Housing Anywhere: the more houses will be posted on the platform the more attractive the website will become for possible tenants. This increases the platform’s attractiveness for landlords to keep posting their available objects. The market being two-sided makes pricing the platform complicated. One is consider the effect pricing will have on both sides.
Usually, there is a division in pricing: one side is the money side the other side the subsidy side. The money side pays for the privileges of getting access to the platforms network, whereas the subsidy side’s main goal is to attract more users and grow the network size. Housing Anywhere’s platform structure is a multi-homing structure, meaning students use many other platforms to look for housing and landlords post on multiple platforms as well.
The most important technologies and their implications are found below:
– Virtual Reality together with Drone technology will completely change home viewings. It will now be able to view a place inside and out without you actually being there.
– Augmented Reality will bring blueprints to life, giving project owners the chance to get a glimpse at how their home will look way before it actually built.
– Beacon technology will make it possible for sellers and landlords to send real-time location notifications to interested people in the area
– Predictive analytics will enable sellers to send out ads to clients without them knowing they want or need the house.
– With the rise of 3D-printing prices of newly built houses will go down. Furthermore, mass customization of houses will be made more possible.
Watch our video for further insight!
Will you make use of these technologies for your rental search? Will you be happy to view a room in VR?
Let us know!
References:
https://www.ad.nl/rotterdam/kamernood-sla-rotterdam-maar-over~ad56cbc7/
https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2017/may/08/the-proptech-entrepreneurs-homes-property-movebubble-housesimple-zoopla-no-agent
