Knight Frank joins the world’s largest proptech investment club

Knight Frank has made its most significant commitment so far to proptech with an investment in US tech fund Fifth Wall’s latest European venture. Despite its traditional reputation, Knight Frank has been pumping significant sums into proptech in recent years including investment and partnerships with several residential platforms, including an artificial intelligence start-up that better predicts apartment development yields. But Knight Frank’s investment in Fifth Wall, which is the largest venture capital firm in the world focussed on proptech, takes it to a new level. Proptech start-ups The money raised by Fifth Wall from Knight Frank and other firms will be used to invest in UK and European proptech start-ups in the property buying, selling, renting and building sectors, and the estate agency joins an illustrious club who have invested in the Californian company’s different funds. These include British Land, BNP Parisbas and CBRE, all of which want to get a piece of the proptech action and be able to present themselves to residential and commercial clients as ‘plugged into’ the future of property. Fifth Wall is most famous for its $100m investment in US iBuyer platform OpenDoor, a model which is gaining some ground in the UK with two…