Property's Biggest Challenge Isn't Technology. It's Data.

Here's a question that should bother everyone in real estate: why is it still so hard to get a straight answer about a property?

We can tell you what it sold for three years ago. We can give you a zoning code and a floor plan. But ask a simple question - can I build a granny flat on this block? What's the real energy cost of living here? Is the agent selling it actually compliant? - and you'll spend hours, maybe days, hunting through disconnected council portals, state government databases, utility records, and regulatory registers.

One of the greatest challenges in the Australian property industry is not that we have a shortage of data. But what we have is a data fragmentation crisis.

At this year's Proptech Awards, finalists in the Data Solutions category demonstrated they were doing more than just highlighting the issues. Fifteen companies - spanning start-ups, scale-ups, and established suppliers - are actively constructing the data needed to see the whole picture piece by piece.

The high cost of fragmentation

Property data has existed in the real estate sector in Australia for decades. It’s always been locked behind different doors, formatted in different ways, governed by different rules, and held by different agencies - none of which talk to each other, even when they are part of the same government.

Homesnoop made this point sharply in their entry. They aggregate data from more than 50 separate sources - councils, state governments, utilities, federal agencies -  to generate a property due diligence report in about 60 seconds. Manually? That same report takes a professional 30 minutes or more. Their customer base is roughly 80% buyers' agents, which tells you something about the appetite for information that is readily accessible.

Before You Buy is coming at the same gap from the buyer intelligence side, pulling transparency into what remains one of the most opaque stages of any property transaction — the pre-purchase due diligence window.

And Canibuild's SiteCheck platform is turning fragmented planning, zoning, and geospatial data into instant 3D visual insights. Forget the question of whether a site is suitable for development. SiteCheck shows you what can actually be built, rendered in three dimensions, using the actual planning rules.

Every one of these companies is essentially doing the same thing: replacing hours of human research across disconnected systems with a single, unified answer. They're removing the cost and inefficiency of data fragmentation - and the market is responding.

Beyond price and postcode

For decades, "property data" has meant one thing: transaction history. What did that property sell for, when, and where? That's important, obviously. But it's a fraction of what decision-makers actually need.

What struck me about this year's Data Solutions finalists is how dramatically they're expanding the definition of property intelligence and the new datasets that they are bringing to the market. 

EnergyFlex is turning smart meter data into real-time property insights at the intersection of energy, finance, and housing. They're not just telling homeowners how much energy they use — they're connecting that to what it costs, when it peaks, and how it could be optimised. In a world where energy performance will increasingly affect property value, this is foundational infrastructure.

In the commercial space, Bitpool is using AI to build what it calls "trusted building intelligence" - connecting to any building system and transforming fragmented operational data into continuous performance insights. When buildings account for 30-40% of global energy consumption, the commercial implications of making that data actionable are enormous.

Then there's DAS - Digital Agriculture Services - perhaps the most unexpected entry in the category and one of the most compelling. They've built Australia's first unified geospatial platform for rural property, connecting climate risk, AI-powered valuations, and property analytics across a $100 billion market that the wider proptech ecosystem has largely overlooked.

And Billie Onsite is bringing structured data to construction inspections — a process still dominated by paper logbooks, WhatsApp messages, and manually typed reports. Their AI engine captures findings by voice (in 20+ languages), photo, or text, and converts them into deterministic, schema-compliant records tagged by location, severity, and trade. Reports are generated before the inspector even leaves the site. When you consider that rework costs in Australian construction average 39% of original contract value, the magnitude of turning messy inspection data into structured intelligence becomes very clear.

The collective message from these finalists? Property data in 2026 is multi-dimensional. Energy performance, construction quality, climate risk, compliance status, operational efficiency -  the companies that can capture and structure these layers are building the intelligence that the industry will depend on in the future.

The death of rear-view mirror data

Here's the shift that excited me most this year: several finalists are fundamentally challenging the industry's addiction to backward-looking data.

ScaleApp makes the case most explicitly. As they put it in their entry: "Every property dataset in Australia tells you what has already happened. Settlement data is three to six months old. ABS census data is years old." Their platform is generating forward-looking buyer intent data. When a user builds a strategy in ScaleApp, they reveal through their actions (not surveys) when they plan to buy, what they can afford, and how interest rate changes affect their timeline.

That's not modelling. That's direct signal capture. And it matters because the people making decisions about housing — lenders, regulators, brokers, policy-makers — have been relying on historical patterns to predict future behaviour. ScaleApp skips the model entirely.

Block Builder is working in a similar direction. Starting from digitising cash deposits through their Downsizer.com and Deposit Power brands, they're now generating demand-side datasets that show developers where to build, what to build, and who to reach. Their hyper-targeting pilot in Castle Hill identified high-potential buyer households at a letterbox level, including equity positions and ownership duration.

Equally, Sonar AI is applying forward-looking intelligence to agency performance itself — aggregating data from CRMs, property portals, and PropTrack to surface the signals that define what's happening now and what's likely next, not just what happened last quarter so that principals can have informed and meaningful conversations with team members about how to improve their performance, while also being able to better track agency performance to targets as a whole. 

AI as plumbing, not product

In my recent analysis of the Proptech Awards 2026 winners I noted that 91% of winning entries deploy AI in production. In the Data Solutions category, the pattern goes deeper: AI isn't just powering the analysis - it's becoming the capture and validation layer for data itself.

New startup TRACit stood out in this area. Their AI-powered document analysis converts unstructured compliance certificates into validated, structured data in seconds - automatically checking each document against an individual agent's requirements. In 2025, more than 2,000 fines were issued in NSW alone for compliance failures. TRACit is turning a pain point into a data asset.

Voqo AI started with AI phone agents — because missed calls and delayed follow-up are among the most expensive operational failures in real estate — but their broader vision is an AI-powered operating layer that captures demand signals, handles routine conversations, and routes the right action to the right person.

iD4me has built a prospecting intelligence engine that gives agents instant access to over 19 million verified contact records with DNCR compliance built in. The scale of adoption - 42.5 million searches in the past twelve months, averaging 116,505 every single day - says everything about the industry's hunger for this kind of data access.

And established supplier MRI, with its MRI Agora Insights, is positioning itself as the analytics layer across an agency's entire operational data footprint — surfacing intelligence that teams need to make faster, better-informed decisions.

The pattern is consistent: AI is moving from novelty to infrastructure. It's the mechanism through which messy, unstructured information becomes clean, trustworthy, actionable data.

The infrastructure underneath

What I also noticed was the number of companies not trying to own the whole stack, but building out data layers that everyone else plugs into. That infrastructure mindset — the shift from tool to platform — is the most important signal of maturity in this category.

Terralytics describes itself as "the lot-level intelligence platform Australia's land industry now runs on" — giving developers, builders, financiers, and government agencies a single, lifecycle-aligned source of truth from first land release to final settlement. TRACit is working toward a compliance registry. MRI Agora Insights is building the analytics layer for agency operations.

What this means for Proptech in Australia

When I look at these fifteen finalists together, I see an industry crossing a threshold. Property isn't moving from data poverty to data abundance. It's moving from fragmented noise to structured intelligence. And the implications cut across the entire sector.

For agents and agencies: The days of running your business on spreadsheets and gut feel are numbered. Platforms like Sonar AI, MRI Agora Insights, iD4me, and Voqo AI are setting a new standard for operational intelligence.

For buyers and sellers: Transparency is coming. Homesnoop, Before You Buy, and EnergyFlex are putting information directly into consumer hands that was previously locked behind fragmented government, utility and company databases. The information asymmetry that has characterised property transactions for decades is being dismantled.

For developers and builders: The combination of forward-looking demand data (ScaleApp, Block Builder), planning intelligence (Canibuild), lot-level analytics (Terralytics), and construction quality data (Billie Onsite) is creating a toolkit for development decisions that is more precise and evidence-based than anything that came before.

For the industry as a whole: With 568 companies now mapped across Australia's proptech ecosystem, we have real depth and real specialisation. The Data Solutions finalists demonstrate that property data is expanding beyond price and location into energy performance, climate risk, compliance, operational efficiency, and buyer intent - and a host of new datasets. That richer picture will drive better decisions at every level.

The bottom line

Property's biggest problem was never a lack of technology. It was the gap between the data that exists and the intelligence people actually need.

These fifteen companies are closing that gap — and in doing so, they're building the infrastructure that Australian real estate will run on for the next decade.

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• Kylie Davis is the President of Proptech Australia and CEO of Proptech Gurus, a strategic growth consultancy that specialises in positioning, marketing and growing successful proptechs.

The 2026 Proptech Awards were proudly supported by Gold Partner Realtair (part of REA Group), Silver Partner Cloudstaff, and sponsors Cloudflare, ALRO (Australian Land Registry Operators), Stone & Chalk and charity partner, The Rise Initiative.