A French government dataset, freely downloadable from data.gouv.fr, now powers residential valuation products across Europe. Banks pay millions to access products built on it. The dataset is called DVF. Many proptech startups outside France have never heard of it.
The knowledge gap is the real story in European proptech.
Companies winning in European real estate technology compete on data access, not on software interfaces. The firms building durable market positions learned which public datasets exist, how to extract and clean them, and how to combine open government records with licensed commercial data into products institutional buyers pay for consistently.
Data access is now the real competitive moat
European real estate generates large volumes of data. Land registers, transaction histories, energy certificates, planning applications, and cadastral maps exist across dozens of national systems. For years, the data sat in fragmented public archives with no practical way to connect them at scale.
Firms able to work across national data boundaries built a structural advantage.
Not in software. In data pipelines.
Europe’s strongest proptech companies do not merely aggregate records. They normalize, model, and package data into proprietary intelligence. Banks, developers, and institutional investors increasingly buy access to the output rather than the underlying platform. The barrier to entry is years of work building clean, connected data coverage, not code.
What Europe’s open data layer looks like now
For most European proptech products, the starting point is public records, and quality varies considerably by country.
The UK remains one of Europe’s strongest open-data markets for residential proptech. HM Land Registry publishes Price Paid Data covering England and Wales property sales since 1995, and since late August 2026 the monthly release also carries UPRN and INSPIRE property identifiers for new sales, making address matching easier for downstream products. The government also runs a separate Energy Performance Certificate data service with API access and bulk downloads. The service was rebuilt in 2026 under a new name, Open Data Communities, and its most recently published figures put monthly traffic at roughly 34.7 million API requests alongside about 2,200 direct data-download requests. The redesign changed the platform and the way it counts usage, so the download figure is not a clean comparison to older reports, but it confirms the service remains heavily used.
France offers DVF, covering sold property transactions nationwide and refreshed twice a year, every April and October. Cerema, the government’s technical agency, publishes a companion dataset called DV3F, geolocating and structuring the raw DVF records for analysis, hosted on data.ademe.fr. DVF itself has not been replaced or rebranded. DV3F sits alongside it as an enrichment layer, not a successor.
The Netherlands maintains a unified real estate database managed by Kadaster, the Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen, covering buildings and addresses. The underlying law took effect in 2009, and it required government bodies to adopt the register by 2011. Spain’s Directorate General for Cadastre publishes cadastral parcels and address data through INSPIRE cartographic services at no charge. Finland’s National Land Survey publishes real estate transaction statistics with annual records dating to 1990.
Germany diverges from the UK and France. Land-register and cadastral systems exist in electronic form, but ownership data access remains interest-based and controlled at the federal state level. Germany is a harder market for consumer-facing valuation products than countries with open price-paid records.
The EU’s High-Value Datasets Regulation, formally Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138, became applicable across member states in June 2024. It covers six categories: geospatial, earth observation and environment, meteorological, statistics, company ownership, and mobility data, all published free of charge and in machine-readable form. The European Commission has since proposed seven additional candidate categories for future expansion, including energy, health, and public administration data, though none of the seven proposals has taken force yet. For proptech firms, the practical result is more public data to access and reuse, across borders, with more likely on the way.
Commercial data completes the picture
Open datasets provide the skeleton. Raw public records rarely convert directly into enterprise-grade products without enrichment.
Accurate valuation models require transaction depth, listing prices, rental comparables, and property attributes alongside the registry backbone. Licensed data providers fill the gap. Commercial vendors supply asking prices, occupancy rates, lease terms, building performance benchmarks, and portfolio comparables public registries do not carry. Proptech firms combine open and licensed data layers, apply analytical models, and sell the output rather than the raw inputs.
Six companies still building on the data stack, with mixed results
PriceHubble, headquartered in Switzerland, builds automated valuation models for banks, asset managers, developers, and agents across 10 European countries. The company raised a confirmed $34 million Series B in 2021, led by Digital+ Partners, and has not disclosed a new priced round since. Instead, it grew its data pipeline by acquisition, buying UK data firms WhenFresh and Dataloft and French firm Urbanease. In 2025, PriceHubble reported its tools covered four million properties across Europe, representing 607 billion euros in property value, with more than 50 billion euros analyzed per month across financing, valuation, and risk workflows.
France-based Deepki raised 150 million euros in Series C funding in 2022, still its most recent disclosed round. Its platform collects energy and sustainability data from fragmented building records, normalizes records at portfolio scale, and produces ESG reporting and decarbonization planning for institutional real estate clients. Deepki said the platform monitored more than 4 trillion euros in assets under management across 80 countries for over 500 customers by 2025. CRREM, the Carbon Risk Real Estate Monitor, now operating as the CRREM Foundation, provides a complementary public framework, delivering science-based decarbonization pathways across 44 countries. Institutional investors use CRREM pathways to benchmark stranding risk and sequence retrofit decisions.
WeMaintain, also French, uses IoT sensors and real-time data for predictive maintenance of lifts, escalators, fire-safety systems, and automatic doors. The company raised $36 million in Series B funding in 2021 and named Allianz Real Estate, Swiss Life, and BNP Paribas among its clients at the time. In April 2026, US elevator and escalator manufacturer Otis Worldwide took a majority stake in WeMaintain. WeMaintain and Otis frame the deal as a strategic investment rather than a merger, and WeMaintain says founder Benoit Dupont stays on as CEO with the platform continuing to operate as an equipment-agnostic, independent brand. That framing will get tested over time: the pitch that built WeMaintain’s reputation was servicing lifts regardless of who manufactured them, and the company now answers to a majority owner that manufactures lifts.
Germany-based Drooms operates AI-powered virtual data rooms for commercial real estate sales, M&A deals, and NPL transactions. Its due diligence product applies automated document processing to reduce manual review time and speed up transaction workflows. Drooms still counts more than 40,000 clients worldwide. In June 2026, private equity firm EOS Partners acquired a majority stake in the company, and co-founder Jan Hoffmeister exited after 25 years. CEO Alexandre Grellier remains in place, and Drooms reported roughly 20 percent revenue growth in 2025 alongside a 120 percent net retention rate, evidence the ownership change followed strong performance rather than distress.
Casavo, founded in Italy, is a data-led residential transaction platform. After shifting from an instant-buyer model to an asset-light marketplace, the company raised 20 million euros in 2024, led by UniCredit, on the back of 225 million euros in consolidated 2023 turnover and more than 3,200 sellers and buyers served in 2023. The turnaround proved incomplete. In December 2025, Casavo restructured its balance sheet, canceling roughly 200 million euros in accumulated losses and raising a much smaller 12 million euros in fresh capital, a move reported to have wiped out most of the value held by existing shareholders. The company posted a 44.5 million euro loss for the first nine months of 2025 and negative net equity of 3.5 million euros as of September 30, 2025. Shareholders Exor and UniCredit approved the restructuring; Intesa Sanpaolo and P101 abstained. Casavo says it now targets profitability in 2026 and is still pursuing expansion into France and Spain. Casavo survived. A data-led model alone did not spare it from a severe financial reset, and the difference between “winning on data” and “winning financially” shows up clearly in its balance sheet.
Residently, based in the UK, provides a rental operating system for institutional residential portfolios covering marketing, leasing, tenant communications, payments, and maintenance, and the company still reports its system powers more than 21,000 homes. UK corporate filings show Residently’s original operating subsidiary entered voluntary liquidation in June 2024. A new entity, Residently Labs, appeared in the corporate register weeks earlier with a software-focused registration. The timing suggests a restructuring tied to Residently’s shift toward a pure software model rather than a business failure, though independent press coverage of the change could not be found, so the interpretation rests on the public filings alone.
The fragmentation problem remains real
Europe’s open data environment is better than most proptech founders assume. It is also far more fragmented than it needs to be.
No unified European land registry exists, and no harmonized property transaction database spans the continent. EPC records age out, get superseded, or become inconsistent without clear flagging in the dataset. Older buildings carry incomplete digital records, missing floor plans, or unreliable address matching.
Privacy rules add a further layer of constraint. GDPR and national land-register rules limit access to owner-level, identity, and occupancy data. Proptech firms building mortgage tools, ownership products, and tenant-screening systems operate in a stricter compliance environment than analytics-only platforms.
Commercial data costs create a real barrier for early-stage companies. Firms needing licensed comparables, portal data, and commercial market benchmarks must clear a meaningful cost threshold before reaching enterprise-grade analytics. Coverage comparable to incumbents takes years to build from scratch.
EU policy is closing the gap faster than companies expect
Two EU initiatives are moving the data environment faster than most companies planned for.
The High-Value Datasets Regulation has been opening geospatial, statistical, environmental, and company-ownership records across member states since June 2024. The EU Data Act targets a different problem: data generated by connected building products, and its timeline stopped being theoretical months ago.
Lifts, HVAC systems, smart meters, and access controls generate operational data constantly, and manufacturers, not building owners or operators, have historically held most of it. The Data Act became generally applicable in September 2025, giving building owners and operators a right to request operational data on demand. A harder obligation arrives on September 12, 2026, when manufacturers of newly placed connected products must build data access into the product itself by default, through APIs or export functions, rather than waiting for a request. For the elevator, HVAC, and access-control systems firms like WeMaintain instrument, the shift from access-on-request to access-by-default lowers the cost of building new products around equipment data without first negotiating a data-sharing agreement.
The obligation only covers “readily available raw and pre-processed data,” not the heavily processed, higher-value outputs firms like WeMaintain and Drooms already sell, and manufacturers retain wide latitude to define what counts as processed. Legal analysts tracking the rule expect the real fight to play out over the processed-versus-raw distinction, not over the September deadline itself. Manufacturers have to open the door, in other words, but they still get to decide where raw data stops and their proprietary, higher-value layer begins.
The companies building proprietary data stacks are not easy to catch, and 2025 and 2026 showed the cost of trying: an industrial acquirer took a majority stake in WeMaintain, a private equity firm did the same at Drooms, and Casavo needed a painful balance-sheet reset to keep building. Clean, connected property data coverage does not appear overnight. It takes deliberate work, country-by-country relationships, and years of normalization effort. European regulatory frameworks are improving the foundation. No policy will hand a startup a finished data pipeline. Firms doing the hard work of data assembly will outlast competitors with stronger products but weaker pipelines, even when pipeline ownership changes hands.
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