If you want to send a message to your friends, you pick up your smartphone. If you need directions to the railway station, you may well do likewise. Looking up weather forecasts, shopping, surfing the net, writing reminders, reading world news, watching videos, keeping up with stock market developments, checking bus timetables, recording calendar appointments, ordering dinner, taking photos, listening to music, entering fitness data – smartphones can do all that and more.

The app was piloted in Germany in 2017 and could serve as the basis for numerous additional offerings. The first step in this direction is to map out a kind of holistic vision of tenant relations in the future. Various relationships have to be taken into consideration – initially those with tenants, but subsequently relationships with service providers and between tenants too.

Which additional apps could fill gaps in this tapestry of relationships? Aareon surveyed 1,900 tenants and owners in the core markets of Germany, France, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands on their use of apps and their requirements – and came up with some interesting findings.

National markets differ widely
“As expected for a residential survey, infrastructure topics such as handyman services, energy supply and food deliveries are regarded as extremely important in all countries,” reports Arash Houshmand, Head of Aareon’s housing platform. “But it gets more exciting when you drop down a level and analyse the differences between tenants and owners or between respondents who are about to move home and those who have stayed put for some time. That’s when major discrepancies become apparent, with results also varying from one country to the next.” Some of these findings surprised the expert in this field: “Different tenant and owner requirements as regards housing-related services are only to be expected. But I hadn’t imagined that we’d find differences in demand for car-sharing and bike rental too.”