MVPs in the property transformation game

Tech moves fast. Who is keeping up and leading the way? PlaceTech editor, Paul Unger, names his Most Valuable Players that are progressing the digital transformation of real estate.

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Katharina Sorg

Bosch

The content strategist at the German automotive and domestic appliance giant blended consumer goods with business implications to produce the funny and widely picked up Like a Bosch campaign. Media lapped up the music video launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to ignite the hashtag campaign #LikeaBosch in a memorable way. Bosch needs to take more products from concept to delivery if it wants to really be a contender but it is certainly putting a great big flag in the ground to be the brand that owns IoT.

Henrik Botten Taubøll

WeWork Nordics, Baltic & Netherlands

Hired from law firm BAHR in Oslo, Henrik will lead the much anticipated opening of WeWork in Sweden in the middle of 2019. He is the co-founder of PropTech Norway, which matches the real estate industry with the tech community. All eyes will be on Stockholm to see how it performs in the new era of question marks hanging over WeWork following the scaling back of investment by Japanese investor SoftBank.

Irene Philipps

Disruptive Technologies

All her business process experience will have been needed to get the first 20,000 tiny sensors, used for monitoring building condition, off the production line at the firm’s German factory. Irene is director and board member for business process at DT, and is a former management consultant with Deloitte and McKinsey. She joined Disruptive during prototyping in August 2017 following 2 years as chief operating officer at Norwegian industrial group, GC Rieber, whose interests cover salt, oil, shipping and property.

Daniel Burton

Wondrwall

Finished 2018 entering mass production of its powerful ‘brain for the home’, capable of running heating, security, lighting and much more from its elegant light switch-style boxes. Now being installed by Kier Living and Avant among other housebuilders, expect Wondrwall to emerge as a household (sorry) name in 2019.

Magnus Svantegård

Datscha, Stronghold Invest, Nordic PropTech Initiative

A growing influencer in the pivotal Nordics market, seen by many as being the forefront of tech adoption in Europe and somewhere most UK-based EMEA sales offices are targeting. Magnus Svantegård is chief product officer at Datscha, the land and property data supplier, a senior advisor at its parent Stronghold Invest, and co-founder of Nordic Proptech Initiative with over 22 years of experience in proptech – longer than many tech founders have been alive.

Shan He

Uber

Data visualisation is an emerging science and will be hugely important as property grapples with the terabytes of information coming its way. Shan qualified in architecture and design computation, and now leads Uber’s experimental open source geospatial tool box, kepler.gl. Large data sets are being released by cities more frequently as the open data movement gathers pace. A good thing, but making sense of the data and deriving insight that can inspire improvements in how those cities are run, requires something more than large spreadsheets. Shan and her team turn data into more digestible maps that can tell useful stories.

Doug Ward

NODE + Telcom

In December, Ward strengthened the board at the internet service startup, Telcom, ahead of an aggressive rollout strategy. In came lawyer and experienced excecutive in telecoms, Christopher Baldock, as chairman. Also, Mike Blackburn, chair of the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership; David Lathwood, lead director for JLL North West; and John Ogden, managing director of CBRE North. Affiliate company Node already provides infrastructure for billions of pounds of UK property, used by Schroders, Legal + General and Allied London. Node, which pre-installs a suite of different providers’ telecoms lines into buildings, is tipped to make a big play in the US market in 2019.

James Cooksey

Crown Estate

If you thought the Queen’s property company would be sleepy and boring, think again. Cooksey is leading a quiet revolution at the Crown Estate, typified by its recent move into coworking. As director of central London, Cooksey is exploring how to implement green infrastructure across the portfolio, invest in office hospitality and make the back-end database more efficient for running the estate.

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