17 December 2018 - OKAY.com was honored to be invited as speaker at the Big Data & Machine Learning Leaders Summit Hong Kong 2018 held on the 6th December 2018 at the InterContinental Grand Stanford Hong Kong.
Our CTO, Mr. Torbjorn Dimblad explored how technology is already disrupting the real estate industry and shed some light on how Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform the way people do business in this industry. Torbjorn believes blockchain can helps in disintermediation and fraud prevention with the application of smart contracts. On the AI aspect, he believes it will be applied to vast majority of areas including decision making, service, search & matching, valuation & risk and property management.
Currently the property market has entered a regression period, which is a challenge for companies such as OpenDoor or blockchain companies investing in physical real-estate. Asset-backed real estate investment platforms, e.g. BrickBlock, REIDAO and BitProperty are highly likely to struggle during market downturn due to the nature of their business model—to facilitate the tokenization of real estate ownership by creating a digital asset class in terms of tokens backed by physical assets. Yet Purple Birds can benefit from it as it operates under a completely different business model with lower commission scheme. Even though the market trend is opaque, Torbjorn is optimistic as he believes bull market will come in the near future.
While Blockchain and AI technologies will have significant implications to the industry, Torbjorn also touched on the future role of the real estate agents. He says that property purchases remain a very emotional decision for buyers thus they would still turn to “trusted advisors” during the process. Agents are still more capable than AI technology in the following aspects:
- Advise landlords how best to market their asset to maximize exposure and interest
- Guide clients through the transaction process – 75% of real-estate transactions are consumer-based and infrequent. Sellers and purchasers need support in guiding them through the process no matter how “enabled” that process may be
- It will remain some time before AI knows “everything” – agents help clients see value in a potential home, whether through re-decoration, advising them on district developments, opening of new schools etc.
Torbjorn also participated in a panel discussion on the future of Big Data & AI in the financial industry alongside Peter Clark, Chief Information Officer of Standard Chartered and Jayatu Sen Chaudhury, VP, Global Commercial and Merchant Data Science of American Express. The panel shared insights on topics ranging from the specifics of algorithm selection for different cases, to the effects of such initiatives as Open API. We look forward to more technology summits to be held in Hong Kong in the future.
