At last week’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, executives from Beijing-based property platform Beike explained the potential for artificial intelligence to impact the real estate industry.
While AI has endowed more residences with smart home features like voice assistants or intelligent appliances , processes for buying and renting property can also benefit from advances in big data analytics and machine learning. By building standardized databases, real estate providers can use virtual reality and augmented reality to let prospective customers conveniently scout locations in the comfort of their own homes, Beike’s chief scientist Ye Jieping said.
An important component of the real estate industry is space, and AI can empower spatial analysis software to construct digital environments that are accurately scaled with proper dimensions, said Hui Xinchen, vice president at Beike.
Beike is bullish on the Chinese real estate market’s potential for digitization. With an urban residential housing supply of 300 million units totaling 34 billion sq m, China’s residential real estate market is the largest in the world, according to a report from the company, rivaling that of the US, Japan, and the UK. But the industry’s digital adoption rate is still low, as only 20% of residential services providers have created spatial databases for properties on their platforms. Gathering the data needed to construct immersive virtual spaces is difficult and time-consuming.
While VR and AR applications are promising for the industry’s future, obstacles include long feedback cycles and a lack of robust data infrastructure, meaning AI should not be applied blindly, Ye said. Going forward, Beike is confident that the market will develop as it focuses on its customers, properties, and technologies, he said.
Read this: 5 takeaways from MetaProp’s latest deep dive on proptech in China
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content published by 36Kr. This article was originally written by Yang Yafei for 36Kr.