Last time I wrote for The Negotiator I made it clear that the battle lines in the proptech war were drawn incorrectly – it is not a conflict between offline and online, but a competition to offer the best services to tenants and landlords in which all parties should be working together.

But now I want to make a very different point – and highlight how the customer is changing, or rather how the concept of who a ‘standard customer’ is.

Whether it’s about housing or not, the shift in expectations over the past few years among young and old has been unprecedented.

The changes in the way people interact with products and the companies who supply them are forcing innovation in the residential letting sector as much now as the humble email during the 1990s.

The residential sector may be years ahead of its commercial cousins and applied technology to customer service much faster – but that’s more in sales; in the lettings market the customer experience remains poor – sometimes.

Tenants want to see repairs and maintenance issues handled quickly, and increasingly demand a service comparable with Uber or Deliveroo – easy, quick and seamless. It’s why tenant-focused start-ups like Fixflo have done well.

Many people say this is all about Millennials – those born between the 1980s and 2000 – as the reason for this explosion in tech. But they’re not the whole story.

Here at Rentr we see tenants using technology who are up to 70 years old. This is the generation that brought us into the digital age – let’s not be too quick to judge.

Another issue that we should think more closely about is the difference between online, hybrid, traditional and whatever-comes-next agents.

Digital consumers

Traditional agents shouldn’t think of proptech as a threat, but a way of getting people to use their ‘showroom’ websites more; it’s not proptech changing things but rather businesses seeking out new revenue streams from the increasingly fluid, fickle, and selective pool of digital consumers.

The agents we talk to want to use technology to expand the depth, reach and quality of their services.

Whether a business is digitally transformed or not, information – data – is a key enabler or change: it justifies the business case and empowers businesses with confidence in their decisions.

Hitting your target market with the right service is not just about adapting to the changing expectations of millennials but the shifting expectations of society. For Generation Z – the tenants and the owners of tomorrow – that is arguably the mission at hand.

And leveraging the power of data is not only the province of the larger corporates and national service providers: Independent agencies are looking to do the same thing, through networks of collaboration and sharing.

The war is over: it is now matchmaking time.