23 Proptechs tackle property's most expensive problem

Building and Construction companies are tackling arguably the most expensive and wasteful issue that faces the property industry – the reality gap between a home that's been approved and a home that is built.

In this year’s Proptech Map, the association has found 23 proptechs who are working diligently to help combat and resolve time challenges and building waste issues that inflate the cost of building.  

While Building & Construction might not be the biggest cohort in the Proptech Map, its members certainly confront one of the most important challenges confronting not just the real estate industry but the Australian economy.

The time and cost challenge has become the defining story of the failing national housing target. 

Here’s some of the context: The Federal Government has committed to 1.2 million new, well-located homes in the five years to June 2029, which is around 240,000 a year, or 60,000 completions every quarter. Sadly, and frustratingly, we’re not even close. 

The Housing Industry Association (HIA) reported in early July that just 197,340 new homes commenced construction in the 12 months to March, running almost 30% below target. 

Analysis published in mid-July put the accumulated shortfall at 112,400 homes over the Accord's first 21 months — a 27% gap that would now require roughly 69,000 completions every quarter for the rest of the program to hit the original target. 

HIA's own forecast, repeated on 12 August, has Australia finishing 15% short, with NSW and Queensland tracking furthest behind.

Approvals are up. Delivery is the problem

Here's the twist: approvals are no longer the constraint. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' June figures, released at the end of July, showed total dwelling approvals up 7.2%,for the month to 18,328, with the value of residential building approved climbing 15.1% to $11.75 billion. Apartment approvals for the financial year finished around 13% ahead of the corresponding period for 2024-25.

Put those two data sets side by side, and the story is obvious: approvals are permission, not product. The bottleneck has shifted downstream into cost, capacity, coordination and waste – and that's precisely where our 23 proptechs on this map operate.

Three structural drags explain why. Waste sits at the centre: the Green Building Council of Australia and Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s (CEFC) report, Australia's Waste[d] Opportunity puts construction's annual discarded material at around 29 million tonnes, 39% of the nation's total waste. The average project wastes about 141kg of material per square metre, and as much as $64 billion of materials are at risk of landfill without reform. 

Industry rules of thumb put waste, rework and variations at up to 30% of the cost of delivering a building; whatever the precise figure, a large share of the money in a build is spent twice.

Time is the second drag. For example, NSW has legislated against its own bureaucracy, setting a 90-day determination target from 1 July, dropping to 65 days by 2028, with a new Development Coordination Authority giving referral agencies a single 28-day window. Why? Because, on NSW's own figures, every extra agency referral adds around 100 days to an assessment.

Commercial stress is the third issue. Data from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) shows 3,435 construction companies entered external administration in 2025–26, which represents the first annual fall in five years.

And this is despite the fact the sector should have zero spare capacity to absorb a 69,000-a-quarter build rate to meet the Federal Government’s housing target. The rising cost of building materials and a stressed skills market has forced many companies to the wall.

Four ways of closing the gap

Read the category against those three drags and four clear groups emerge.

The first gets the bottom line cost before anyone digs: utecture, TrueCost / How Much To, Land Connect and Procuracon attack pricing errors at the source, arguably the highest-leverage software in the category because an estimating mistake is a waste event that hasn't happened yet.

The second sells and specifies the home before it's built: Dwella, an AI homebuilding agent that researches builders and compares quotes side by side; Away Digital Home's real-time 3D visualisation; Constructive Software's customer portals and online selections; and Conversion Assist AI. Locking in a buyer's selections early isn't a marketing nicety. Late variations are among the most expensive forms of waste in residential building.

The third, and densest, group runs the site: Procore and PlanRadar (the latter with more than 120,000 users), OpenSpace (turning jobsite imagery into visual intelligence across 95,000-plus projects), Sitesched, Scenario, Wiseworking, Simpro, Build Buddy, BuildHQ, and Ready Team and Build Macro act as AI co-builders for the back office. Every one of them is selling a shared, current version of the truth.

The fourth group is changing how the building actually gets made: PT Blink has a software-and-marketplace approach to offsite manufacture and onsite integration. ARBT Pre-Fab focuses on modular homes, Airconnect in HVAC design and integration, Gallery Group on the development side, and payapps, which digitises progress claims and keeps subcontractors solvent.

Three issues require attention. 

Waste is becoming a measurable, reportable number, and that will pull software through as mandatory climate reporting expands, quantification moves from optional to contractual, favouring platforms like utecture, PT Blink and Procore that already hold the data. 

Prefab is finally getting a regulatory on-ramp, with the Australian Building Codes Board consulting on national certification for manufacturers and residential code changes paused until the end of the Accord period. 

The AI wave in construction will hit the office before it hits the trowel: Australian builders are overwhelmingly small businesses drowning in coordination, and they’re not candidates for labour-saving robotics. As a result, the productivity dividend goes to whoever removes administrative load from a five-person builder.

Bottom line: Every housing target in the country has a delivery challenge, not an approvals problem. Closing the 27% gap between the target and delivery of new homes under the Government’s Accord won't come from another policy announcement. Instead, it will be a result of pricing builds accurately, freezing decisions earlier, moving work into factories, keeping subcontractors paid, and stopping so much money being spent twice. 

That's a proptech agenda, and our Proptech community already has 23 companies focused on resolving these issues.

Building & Construction is part of the staged release of the 2026 Proptech Map. If your company is missing from the map, or you think it's been placed in the wrong category, we want to hear from you — email members@proptechaustralia.com.au.

The static slide only tells part of the story. Members get access to the full interactive 2026 Proptech Map, with live filtering across all 14 categories.

For more information on becoming a member, go to proptechaustralia.com.au/signup, or email our Membership Services Specialist, Patricia Louise, at members@proptechaustralia.com.au.