Proptech, short for property technology, is the software used to find, buy, pay for, furnish and live in a home. It covers the property website where the search starts, the home loan, the interior designer's 3D drawing and the app that runs a gated housing society.
Consider a young couple in Thane who want to buy a 2BHK flat. They start on a real estate portal, a website of homes for sale or rent. Each advertisement for one home on it is called a listing. They take a home loan, which they will repay in monthly EMIs for twenty years. The flat is handed over as bare rooms, so they hire an interior company to fit the kitchen and wardrobes. After they move in, the guard at the society gate logs every delivery in an app, and they approve each one on their phones.
Each of these moments runs on different software. This scene groups that software into three zones.
The first zone is home buying and mortgages. A mortgage is a loan for which the home itself is the security: if the borrower stops paying, the lender can take the home and sell it. The zone holds the portal, the automated valuation model that prices a home from data without a visit, the software that estate agents use, and mortgage servicing, which collects the instalments. When a borrower stops paying for good, the home may be sold at a foreclosure auction. How the lender decides whether to lend in the first place is explained under credit underwriting.
The second zone is home interiors. An interior design platform draws the rooms in 3D, lists every item in a quote, and makes the kitchen and wardrobes in its own factory. Showrooms use kitchen design software to design a kitchen with the customer and send the order to the factory's machines.
The third zone is apartment society management. In India, the owners of the flats in a society elect a volunteer committee. The committee chooses one society management app for the gate, the monthly maintenance charge, the clubhouse bookings and the complaints.
Two facts shape this scene. First, in India most new housing projects must be registered under RERA, the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016. Each state has its own RERA authority, and a builder must show the project's registration number in its advertisements. Second, much of the software here is built in India but sold in America. American valuation, mortgage and estate-agent software is a large business, and several of its makers run engineering centres in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Delhi. Those pages say so, and use American examples.
Running a whole office building or a rented apartment block is a related business, covered under facility and property management. Building the tower in the first place is construction technology.