Digital transformation is crucial for real estate in the 4.0 era, playing a key role in balancing cost, time, and transaction quality

Digital transformation is no longer a choice but a “must” for real estate businesses to keep up with the trend and overcome the difficulties in the current new context.

However, aligning the business model with technology is not an easy task. In addition to applying technology, the vision and strategy of the leader, together with a dedicated team, will be the determining factors for the success of the digitalisation story.

The difficulty of digital transformation in real estate

In the real estate sector, digital transformation will help customers find suitable real estate properties at a reasonable price without spending too much time and travel costs. In particular, technology will help real estate agents connect with customers easily, helping real estate agencies optimise labour costs.

With such a large role in solving the equation of cost, time, and quality of transactions, digital transformation is truly a must-have trend for real estate businesses in the 4.0 era. However, experts also point out that digitalisation is inevitable but full of difficulties for real estate businesses.

The first difficulty to mention is the thinking and behaviour of customers. With a high-value product like real estate, most customers still want to be able to interact directly and find out before deciding to “spend money”. Once they have decided to buy a property, customers usually tend to meet in person instead of just paying online through a system.

The second challenge is the personnel factor. Previously, real estate sales agents traditionally sold properties had to meet customers to consult products and sell products directly. When applying technology, they have to plan and take customer care and update customer status in software applications.

They have to get used to interacting with the assigned management tools or applications to update and nurture every single potential. If digitalised activities do not show effectiveness shortly, many individuals tend to not focus on it anymore but go back to the traditional way of doing things.

Therefore, personnel is an important factor determining the success of a real estate trade when transforming digitally. If the staff does not have a mindset about technology skills, works traditionally and is afraid of change, it will make the digitalisation in the business delayed or difficult to complete.

Next, with a system that has been in operation for a long time, real estate businesses cannot transform digitally immediately but need a long enough time to digitalise their operating processes gradually. Currently, many businesses have boldly invested in technology but still cannot completely change the traditional form of management and business.

What is the key to driving successful real estate digital transformation?

Digital transformation does not only depend on the factor of technology, but the most important thing lies in people. The personnel factor here does not only come from customers or the workforce, but it also comes from the mindset of the leader.

The right leadership mindset will promote the rapid digitisation of the business. Conversely, the narrow leadership mindset will unintentionally turn the leader into a “bottleneck”, eliminating the development of the organisation.

Accordingly, to promote successful real estate digital transformation, the leader needs to consider carefully the core issues of the business and the level of readiness of resources to implement digitalisation of their business.

Once they dare to change, real estate business owners need to build strategies, align business models to suit digital transformation, calculate information technology investment plans, and Focus on training and building a digital workforce.

In addition, it is necessary to create inspiration and spread the mindset of digitalisation to customers so that they gradually change their habits and traditional buying behaviour.

In the context of the 4.0 Industrial Revolution taking place strongly in all fields, digital transformation is an inevitable process that determines the survival of the business. Therefore, real estate businesses, especially business owners, need to proactively seize the opportunity to digitalise their own entire system successfully.