£4m extra revealed for Government’s proptech push

The Government has revealed a further £4 million to help develop the proptech sector, taking the total it’s spent on backing tech for residential and commercial property to £13 million since 2021.

While making the announcement yesterday, housing minister Lee Rowley recounted his first job out of University at the Chesterfield branch of Halifax Property Services as a ‘Saturday boy’, revealing how his branch had a single computer, never mind any proptech.

The building society’s ill-fated foray in to estate agency ended when its 284 branches were sold to LSL in 2010 for £1.

Rowley is now at the helm of Government spending on tech for the property sector, revealing at The London Proptech Show yesterday that the UK boasts the largest proptech sector in Europe and the second biggest in the world after the US, with 900 firms providing services and tech.

The minister said he believed the sector would increase five-fold over the next eight years and then be worth £70 billion.”

To help drive this, he announced a further £4 million for the Government’s existing Proptech Innovation Fund, the cash from which has to date been given to dozens of local authorities to improve the new homes planning process.

The extra money comes at a time when the UK’s slow and bureaucratic planning system continues to be blamed for the ongoing lack of new homes being built.

But not everyone at the show was impressed by the announcement.

Ani Kotecha of the UK Proptech Association commented during a later seminar that the extra Government cash was “a drop in the ocean” compared to the billions being poured into proptech by investors.