How to be successful in SaaS products for the Proptech Industrial Sector?
When a client looks at the Proptech market today they will see an abundance of tools available to them as a corporate occupier but what benefits do these tools have if you are not your typical high street office block occupier and need large parcels of land and manufacturing sites?
A customer with a diverse range of property from land, owned, leased and complex multi-site leases where they are both landlord and tenant find they are less than well served if they are looking further than space to lease on the high street for a new city-based office
Why is this?
1 – The Proptech SaaS market does not know how to service an industrial customer?
Our view is that the typical life cycle of a proptech product perhaps is partly the issue. Many new technologies are created from a clever idea taken from a current market need and then built into some level of tool which is then focussed on that specific market need.
This means that proptech firms aim their offering at a specific client or micro segment of a sector, often due to their market presence or at a market that is currently booming with potential returns, hence why high street, ‘most loved’ clients become the beacon to aim at.
COVID 19 changed the market landscape in a macroeconomic shock that is still reverberating 2 years on from the first cases being reported. In terms of recovery, the one market that has not only recovered but is now booming is that of the combined sector of manufacturing, industrial, utilities and logistics.
For these clients there is a different buying behaviour present for their prop tech needs and this tends towards a much more pragmatic ‘Function over Form’ mentality.
We see much of the proptech market start to struggle to address this sectors scope and here is why:
- Many tools are a cobbled together mix of technology and manual processes behind the scenes to ‘look’ like a product. We call this ‘seeming’ as in “this product seems to be a good tool, I’ll buy it!” And then on closer inspection the tool needs significant manual work behind the scenes (i.e. loading of data into records manually, keying in data sets, creation of reports by taking data from one tool to a market BI tool etc)
- Tools are only as good as their data – a main challenge within the manufacturing market is the availability of market data that is comparable to the need. For example, many brokers will be able to give a client a cost per square meter of prime office space in Berlin, but what about that parcel of land on the outskirts of Duisburg? Even world leading global real estate companies do not have this ability due to it not being prime real estate.
2 – How can SaaS products help this booming market?
SaaS products that have a high degree of agile features tend to perform well in this situation. The core design principle is speed of change and agility to address a client’s system needs, mostly drawn from the ability to change a data model quickly and a user interface / reporting. Complexity comes from many market sectors who have diverse and unique sector needs means one rigid and fixed tool will not meet the need.
At AGW Advisory, we have encountered this issue many times and have found having an agile and structured deployment process is what makes us successful:
- SaaS products mobilisation leads need to understand the business as well as the technology. Real Estate professionals with many decades of experience who understand the data. When we mobilise a customer, we are part consultant / part project manager and are always looking for ways to innovate and improve both our clients processes as well as the tool to make things easier.
- If we find something the client needs, we can engage our industry leading product team who bring significant understanding of best practise to our clients to then work as a single team to define what needs to be done.
- Our ability to work with development teams of agile development and have time and again proved our ability to support coding at speed with a measure twice, cut once attitude.
- Our devops consulting team then deliver new features to our clients with speed and confidence
3 – What specifically makes a successful Proptech SaaS product for an industrial customer?
Based on 20 years of successful delivery, AGW Advisory has embraced several key attributes that to this day continue to serve us well, which are the ability to innovate, the ability to be flexible with the data model and finally the ability to understand that our customers have unique needs by market.
This is demonstrated through the core tool and how it works:
1 – SaaS products structured around the physical site and buildings themselves.
Many property management systems today have a fleeting link to the physical reality that the lease covers. A contract to lease 2 floors of a building puts that contract into the real world in that it covers two floors of a real building with all the associated real-world challenges that come with that.
How is the building secured? What equipment sits on these floors? What is the layout of the space? How occupied at these floors? What is the energy consumption of these floors?
Transpose this into a company owning a complex multi building site each with owned, leased and sub leased positions for this client. Many systems today would create a basic link at most. SaaS products creates a complex hierarchy between the entire site and enables multiple teams of real estate professionals to all work on the same data while having sight of any changes. I.e. a lease being renegotiated.
Our typical client comes with many owned locations and plots of land, the core vs custom data model we start with means infinite flexibility for a manufacturing occupier / owner.
2 – Supply chain visualisation tools
One of the main features we see with property tools generally is that they all feel a bit like a long list of excel. Tools today are becoming ever more complex and interactive; a list of static data is fine but not innovative or insightful.
SaaS products work on a range of new features that enables a client to see their entire supply chain overlayed on their portfolio either by the global map or by a form of network diagram which clearly shows each layer of the supply chain, its comparable components and how they interrelate back to the wider organisation.
For example:
A logistics chain of locations throughout a country can be seen in a map view with pop ups showing the ownership of the property (Leased, owned etc) salient points of the facility such as security, staffing, operation hours, type of material flow etc
When a real estate leader is informed that the organisation is experiencing problems with logistics, the ability to see this both on a network diagram as well as a global map gives teams the ability to forward plan redundant or overloaded sites and mitigate supply chain issues.
3 – Your data is yours, at all times!
Successful SaaS products have at their core a clear concise message that the data held within their products always belongs to you, the client. When they offboard and part ways, they are contractually bound to give the entire database back to you.
This method of zero risk data handling is something that clients respond well to given data is a commodity you entrust us to manage for you.
The AGW Advisory team has a keen passion to build on our ever-growing client base of industrial customers. The sharing of best practise, the ability to work with peers in the market all make for what we believe is the most compelling, agile property management system in the market today that competes by differentiation from our peers.
Contact one of our team today to learn more!