Coyote is mulling breaking into the US market following its recent foray into Germany.
The UK-based proptech platform signed it’s first German client this week, HIH Real Estate, which has €28.1bn (£24.2bn) of assets under management.
It is now exploring the US market, said chief executive Oli Farago. “We are spending a lot of time doing early-stage research into the US. We expect to make further announcements around what we will do there early next year. We want to get the UK and Germany singing first.
“To effectively operate in a market, we want to have boots on the ground. The challenge around opening up in too many different European markets is you are using a lot of resources in smaller markets.”
In Germany, HIH Real Estate will adopt Coyote across all three of its acquisition teams.
Coyote has also signed up a handful of new clients this month, UK REIT Picton Property Income, Kames Capital and Tandem Property Asset Management. The firm was first developed and used by M7 Real Estate and its clients for over eight years before it was launched commercially to the market in September 2017.
Coyote’s software aims to speed up the property acquisition process. Users save at least 40% of the overall time it takes traditionally to identify a deal through to closing on it, said Farago. Going forward, he said Coyote was expecting to advance the software to include machine learning and artificial intelligence. “It is definitely moving in that direction. But before you can take advantage of things like that you have to have quite a lot of data in one place first.
Farago on..
Brexit: People are not wholesale cutting back due to Brexit, but definitely those conversations around investing less in technology are happening more.
His plan B: A helicopter pilot. I’ve been massively into helicopters since 2001. There is nothing more relaxing than flying.
Innovation in real estate: The biggest challenge is still the mindset. Even though you might have senior people in a company, you need the people in charge to be behind the change.
His favourite (other) proptech firm: Proda. We have invested in the firm. It focuses on rent roll data and they have built-in some incredible machine learning tech.
This article originally appeared on EGi, on Wednesday 6th November 2019.
