PropTech in a Smart Nation

To download the powerpoint slides, click here: PropeTech in a Smart Nation

Everyone in this room is on the front line of a major transformation: the digitization of human culture and business.

This transformation is as significant as the world’s transformation to globalization at the end of the Cold War.

And the world’s transformation to industrialization marked by the invention of the steam engine by James Watt.

Singapore is no stranger to change.

We have seen manufacturing jobs come to our shores and then leave for other places like China and Vietnam.

We have seen the impact of globalization on our nation as the pioneering generation transformed Singapore from a backwater to Asia’s leading hub for multinational companies, transportation, biotech, and the rule of law, particularly in the area of property rights.

Every transformation has provided opportunity for those who are courageous enough to embrace it and turn it to their advantage.

By you being here, you have either embraced property technology or you are thinking about doing so.

So first off, congratulations for keeping an open mind and seeing technology as an opportunity rather than a threat.

What do I mean by digitization?

As head of digital at SPH, I think of it as a verb, not a noun.

It is the act of representing the physical world online or in a smart device like a phone or tablet.

By digitizing the physical world, we are making it easier and more efficient for people to interact in the physical world in which we live and work.

This probably sounds like a bunch of metaphysical mumbo-jumbo so let me turn to examples of digitization that are now familiar to us.

Facebook. As we know from the book Accidental Billionaire which was turned into the movie Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg and three other classmates wrote an app to evaluate the attractiveness of incoming freshman girls at Harvard.

It was called Facemash and students would look at photos and rate them “hot or not.”

Facemash, now called Facebook, went viral across universities and then investors got involved and took it mainstream.

Now Facebook is a form of digital communication that makes it easier for people to share photos, stories about what they are doing with their friends, and communicate with each other in the digital space.

Did Facebook invent human social interaction?

Absolutely not.

We’ve been sharing stories and pictures with each other ever since the cavemen drew stick figures on the walls of caves.

Facebook just made it more efficient to interact socially.

Google is about information storage and retrieval.

It is one big DIGITAL filing cabinet.

It is one big DIGITAL library.

It is one big DIGITAL translator

It is one big DIGITAL directory for eCommerce.

Google doesn’t do eCommerce.

It charges businesses for using Google as a digital directory, and it makes a lot of money for doing so. It is consistently ranked in the top three for largest companies in the world by market capitalization.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong officially launched Singapore's Smart Nation initiative on 24 November 2014.

As smartnation.sg clearly spells out, advances in digital technology have opened up new possibilities to enhance the way we live, work, play, and interact.

Singapore strives to become a Smart Nation to support better living, stronger communities, and create more opportunities, for all.

It aims to rally the collective efforts of people, technology, business and government to work together to achieve these important goals for society.

To encourage innovation and collaboration between citizens and companies, the government continues to make more and more open data available to the public.

The government knows that the formula for innovation is not subsidizes or a large army of taxpayer-funded government coders.

Instead, the formula for success is simply opening up public data via APIs - and letting entrepreneurs turn that raw data in meaningful infocomm applications and innovation.

The Smart Nation initiative focuses on 5 key strategic domains in which digital technology can have significant impact:

1. Transport

2. Home & environment

3. Business productivity

4. Health and enabled aging

5. Public sector services

But, as the government clearly points out, Smart Nation is a joint initiative between government, individuals, and companies.

When it comes to PropTech, much of the digitization that is taking place is coming from bottom-up at the professional level.

As we will see from this conference, bottom-up organizations like

• StreetSine Technology Group,
• SPH Digital,
• the SRX consortium of estate agencies,
• SRX Property,
• Maybank,
• NUS Real Estate School,

and property service firms like AIRPLE, KENBUILD, StorHub, and Xtremax, and the professionals in this room are driving innovation that is making it more efficient and less costly to buy, sell, rent, maintain, and regulate property in Singapore.

As Dr. Wang will describe next, Singapore’s property markets are entering a new phase.

I am confident that the leadership in this room – all of us – will succeed in leveraging technology to make the property market more efficient,

more professional,

and more stable

for the 1.3 million households in Singapore.

Thank you.