Game-changing proptech: Lisa smart leasing platform launches in South Africa

Rael Levitt, founder and CEO of Inospace, announced Lisa's breakthrough market entry today and confirmed that Inospace has entered into a three-year license agreement for Lisa to manage its half-a-million-square-metre property portfolio.

Rael Levitt, founder and CEO of Inospace

Several South African property companies have already contracted with Lisa, which is rolling out its solutions to listed and unlisted property companies with portfolios of more than 200,000 sqm and 200 tenants.

"Inotech was launched in 2021 to market and lease our high-volume multi-tenant property portfolio. Leasing-focused technology was a game changer for Inospace, making it one of the fastest-growing private property owners in South Africa's challenging commercial property market," says Levitt. "Responding to demand for our proptech platform from other property funds, Inospace sold it to Lisa so that we could focus on being a last-mile logistics property owner and operator."

Lisa is a leasing, marketing, asset management and tenant experience platform for the commercial real estate industry. Its tenant-lifecycle leasing software helps property owners, managers, brokers and tenants align in a unified platform to execute leasing transactions.

Valued at around $20m, Lisa recently raised over $2m in new funding. Buffet Investments, backed by South African property billionaire Jonathan Beare, led the initial funding round.

With 30 years of property experience and an established passion for tech, Levitt will join the company's international board alongside Lisa's Dutch CEO, Hein Pretorius.

Hein Pretorius, CEO of Lisa

Pretorius says, "Inospace is a great example of a property player using technology to grow its business through a vastly improved leasing ecosystem. We believe Lisa's products will rapidly be adopted in South Africa and key European markets."

Lisa offers three integrated products. Lease, the core product, manages automated lead-to-lease processes for multi-let property companies. Market provides automated campaigns to commercial property owners and brokers, streamlining marketing and leasing workflows and delivering powerful tenant demand data and analytics. Engage is a tenant experience solution that enables property owners to get as close to their customers as possible.

Lisa's core leasing and marketing services are already available in South Africa and will be launched in Europe in the second quarter of 2024. Lisa Engage will also become available in the first half of 2024. Further product launches will be announced in the next few months.

Lisa has already enhanced Inotech's leasing platform through intensive development, building on its two-year development and fine-tuning at Inospace. Levitt explains how the smart leasing platform transformed Inospace's operations: "Leasing out a fast-moving portfolio using Excel spreadsheets and manual processes was tedious and time-consuming, making it extremely difficult to be agile and approve deals quickly.

One of Inospace's KPIs is occupancy, but in industrial property, these are high. "Demand isn't the challenge," explains Levitt, "It's having accurate demand-side data about what tenants were prepared to pay in a supply-constrained market."

With Lisa, property owners can now drill into analytics to understand which buildings and expiring leases have the highest demand or revenue risk and strategise around them based on real-time demand data.

"Lisa resolves inefficient, slow and inaccurate manual leasing processes and eliminates outdated market information in a fast-changing environment," says Levitt.

Tenant demand data is critical for asset management decisions. Still, property owners are often left to rely on outdated information and hearsay about who is interested in their space and at what rental rate.

With automated marketing and lead-to-lease technology, brokers and asset managers have instant access to premium content, including videos and accurate floor plans. The platform will allow them to enter updates as they happen, enabling asset managers to sign off on deals faster.

"It used to take us 32 days to execute a lease from a tenant's first viewing until it was signed and the deposit received. That was reduced to seven days. In some instances, leases have been concluded instantly".

A major advantage of Lisa is that it seamlessly syncs into established platforms and processes. It supports and enhances South Africa's sophisticated real estate broker market with real-time information, premium content and information directly from existing asset management software such as MRI. It is the obvious way for today's tech-savvy property professionals to do business.

Levitt says it is a misconception that real estate owners are old-fashioned and resistant to new technology. "That is not our experience. SA property funds may have been slow to adopt new technology in the past, but they are embracing it like never before. A significant digital shift in commercial real estate is disrupting the SA market, which, in a rising interest rate environment, is driving property funds to seek out technology that lowers operating costs, increases rental rates and brings them much closer to their customers."