PropTech & Financial Inclusion

In Round Hill Venture’s newest white paper in partnership with Crisis, the leading UK charity fighting homelessness, we explore the role PropTech plays in financial inclusion. How will PropTech solutions help people find housing as the cost of both renting and buying homes is at an all time high?

Read the full paper here, but below are the key takeaways…

• Access to a safe, dignified, and affordable home is an essential condition for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many face barriers to secure housing and to the financial systems which support it.

• Policy change will play the central role in achieving financial and property sectors that can empower everyone in our society. However, we believe that new technologies and entrepreneurial approaches can also drive tangible and long-lasting change.

• Most people in the UK rent their home — but as rent prices drift further from incomes, the burden pressures increasing numbers of people. Through scaling up emerging solutions from the UK and abroad, we can make renting easier and more accessible.

• Social Housing, once a vibrant part of the property system, has been severely curtailed by decades of privatisation and austerity. The social housing sector needs new solutions, to build sustainable homes, identify key locations and maximise the value of existing stock.

• Traditional home ownership, once a realistic goal for many, is increasingly unattainable. Less than 30% of UK millennials owned a property by the age of 30 — a drastic decline from over 50% of the baby boomer generation. Technology can simplify and optimise the existing customer journey, offloading some of the work from the consumers to emerging PropTech and FinTech companies.

• Co-investment, shared equity loan, and rent-to-buy/ leasing are three alternative home ownership models. Each model differs in the financing structure, degree of ownership, how changes in the property price affect the buyer/ investor/ seller, etc., hence every interested buyer should clearly identify their constraints and capabilities to determine which ownership model is the most suitable for them. All models are being disrupted by some of the UK’s most promising start-ups.

•Across all segments, the pandemic has accelerated the development of solutions like digital referencing and deposit solutions. Founders and funders alike have an opportunity to use these developments and accelerate the end of homelessness and achieve true financial inclusion.

Read the full paper on our website here.

With no clear solutions for the ongoing housing crisis, this is an area to watch. If you are a founder in this space, do not hesitate to reach out to discuss more!