Significant capital has flowed into property technology over the past fifteen years. Some businesses have delivered. Others have struggled. The difference has less to do with the quality of the technology than with the structure of the market they were trying to change. Understanding that structure is how you distinguish a sustainable investment thesis from a fragile one.

Two other sectors offer a useful lens.

When Ofcom (and before it Oftel) set about reforming UK telecommunications from the 1980s onwards, it did something deceptively simple. It defined the consumer outcomes it wanted — genuine competition, fair access, interoperability across networks — and then designed the regulatory game that the market would have to play to deliver them. Local loop unbundling forced BT to open its infrastructure to competitors at regulated prices; in mobile, spectrum allocation built a competitive market from a blank slate. Both were the same regulatory architecture in different forms — define what good looks like for the consumer, and design the rules that would force it. The rules were clear, enforceable, and applied to everyone. Investors backing challenger businesses knew what they were building toward. The risk was commercial — could you execute, could you win customers, could you build a sustainable cost base — not existential. You could underwrite it because the game itself was stable.

Digital media disruption worked entirely differently. When job boards emerged in the late 1990s, nobody needed to redesign the regulatory environment to make space for them. TotalJobs and Monster didn’t require an Ofcom. They required a browser, a database, and the simple observation that matching candidates to employers online was cheaper, faster, and more useful than a column of newsprint. The incumbents — regional newspapers, classified print publishers — had no meaningful structural defence. The consumer outcome delivered itself, and capital followed the disruption rather than enabling it.

The environment into which “property technology” innovators have launched into has been a mix of these two. For businesses whose models depend on coordinated behaviour across the transaction chain — shared infrastructure, interoperable data, network-wide adoption — there has been no regulatory authority with the clarity of purpose and genuine authority to define what a better market would look like and oblige participants to help build it. Nor has there been the kind of structural inevitability that made digital media disruption essentially self-executing. What there has been instead is a fragmented ecosystem of professionals — estate agents, conveyancers, mortgage lenders, surveyors — each with legitimate interests, misaligned incentives, and no particular obligation to change how they operate.

Into that environment, investors have repeatedly backed businesses whose commercial models depended on voluntary adoption of what perhaps the telecoms industry would say should be influenced by the regulator. The technology was often good. The consumer proposition was frequently genuine. But the route to scale ran through an industry that could simply opt out, and often did. Without binding agreements or regulatory obligation, even the most promising propositions remained vulnerable to a single participant deciding the status quo served them better.

This is not a criticism of the entrepreneurs or the investors involved. Operating in a market without clear rules is a legitimate business challenge, and some businesses have navigated it well, others not. What separates them is the reading of structural conditions in advance — rarely the technology itself.

Which is what makes the current moment worth paying attention to.

The government’s Home Buying and Selling Reform consultation, published in October 2025, may yet produce consumer-first outputs. What emerges from the consultation could include mandatory upfront information requirements, common interoperability standards, professionalisation of estate agents, and digital property packs linked to authoritative data sources. It has the potential to move us on more than anything recent.

Whether the roadmap that follows the consultation delivers on that ambition remains to be seen. Regulatory intent and regulatory execution are different things, and the property sector has a long memory for reforms that promised much and changed little. Honest investors will price that uncertainty in rather than assume the problem is solved.

But the direction of travel matters independently of the timetable. Businesses building infrastructure that assumes coordinated behaviour across the transaction chain — chain visibility, digital completion, interoperable data — are now building toward a market structure that government has explicitly said it wants to create. That is a materially different investment thesis from backing the same businesses five years ago, when the regulatory environment offered no such signal.

It is also worth being clear about what this shift does not change. Data and intelligence businesses serving the property market as it currently exists — market analytics, transaction data, CRM, workflow tools — do not require regulatory permission to operate or to grow. They are more analogous to the job boards than to the telecoms challengers: their value is immediate, their customers are already motivated, and their commercial models do not depend on the market reorganising around them. The investment case for those businesses is different in kind, not just in degree.

The question for the next wave of proptech investment is whether backers can distinguish clearly between businesses that need the regulatory game to be defined before they can win it, and businesses that are already playing a game with clear rules. Businesses that require coordinated industry behaviour need regulatory certainty to become investable. Businesses serving the market as it exists do not. Both are legitimate. But the risk profiles are entirely different, and the capital strategies should be too.

This is harder than it reads. Many proptech businesses sit on both sides — providing immediate value to existing users while their full thesis depends on the wider market reorganising around them. Working out which side dominates is the diligence question, and the sector has not really answered it successfully before.

This piece was originally posted on LinkedIn.

Paul Halliwell is Executive Director at ViewMyChain and COO at TwentyCi Group. He previously launched TalkTalk for Carphone Warehouse and led digital classifieds at Trinity Mirror.