PropTech ignites CRE: Spark’s vision for 2025

Hope you have had a good start to the year! If you read our 2025 predictions you’ll know that we remain bullish on PropTech and are forecasting that a number of themes such as sustainability, the growth of AI and general deployment of capital against tech-led solutions will all flourish this year. Those themes will drag along significant investment in areas such as data centers, energy solutions, and carbon metrics as a result. 

Spark’s philosophy remains unchanged, however. The macro trends dominating the real estate industry (lack of skilled personnel to drive growth, headwinds from the hybrid work styles adopted by companies lowering occupancy, and increasing concentration of asset ownership, etc.) all point to the absolute necessity of technology deployment to deliver profitable growth. 

So, Spark is planning to increase our investments in the space to capitalize on the growth in these areas. As well as planning a number of new investments, in 2024 we revamped our internal processes to provide closer alignment with JLL’s strategic goals. This has resulted in a faster path to market via our distribution channels and is a huge advantage we can bring to our portfolio, and uniquely something that only corporate venture capital (CVC) can provide. 

In addition, we delineate our strategy internally as ‘Pull’ and ‘Push’. Pull is where we gather strategic requirements from the JLL business lines and deliver technology that helps meet those goals – be it Capital Markets, Leasing, or Facilities Management. Push, in contrast, is where we see trends and new developments that are potential disruptors to our business and recommend investments to be able to deliver a new business model, say, or expand our total addressable market (TAM). In combination, the approach is perfectly suited to delivering both growth and future proofing – again something uniquely suited to the CVC model. 

Finally, we have the capability to deliver new startups ‘on demand’. We call this Spark X. The idea is that where we know there is a strategic need, or white space in the industry yet no start-up is addressing it, we can build it ourselves using our in-house venture studio. The value of building product this way is that you get the focus and dedication of a startup allied to the market signal of an already identified need – and yes, once again a unique aspect of who we are and why JLL Spark continues to be the partner of choice for smart PropTech founders focused on commercial real estate use cases. 2025 is going to be a great ride – join us! 

Written by Raj Singh, Managing Partner

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