Smart Cities, Economic Environment, Liveability, and Applied Artificial Intelligence – These Were Among the Topics at the Sixth PropTech Hungary Conference, Held on May 22, 2025, at the Budapest Music Center. Report.
While last year the AI boom’s future-focused discourse was the main topic of the PropTech Hungary Conference, this year the question hovering over the full-day program was rather: “okay, this and this works, but what’s next?” The program promised 67 speakers on two stages, not to mention workshops and numerous exhibiting companies. Visitors could listen to long keynote presentations as well as ten-minute crash courses or in-depth professional roundtable discussions. At the center of the concept were smart cities, but there was no chasing of futuristic ideas – instead, the emphasis was on current examples and practices. The audience could even witness what happens when four large language models run the same deep research task simultaneously.
The event was opened, similarly to last year, by Zoltán Kalmár, the founder of the PropTech conference series. “I believe that the use of agile methodology and the development of organizational culture are among the most important tasks in the real estate market, forming the basis for successful transformation and digitalization. It is not important to create something perfect at first try, what matters is that the audience feels the conference is continuously evolving. That is what makes it valuable: the meaningful presentations and substantial discussions,” said the main organizer, who also drew attention to the concept of Joy of Missing Out, modeled on FOMO.
Zoltán Kalmár, Proptech Hungary (Photo: Fejes Márton)
“Imagine a global capitalism where an incredibly small number of companies hold the large models that everyone will work with in the entire world economy,” set the tone Zoltán Pogátsa, economist, who in his keynote spoke about the development, future, and social implications of the AI market dominated by big tech. Pogátsa admitted he is neither a property tech expert nor in the construction industry, but through the lens of global economic trends, he offered intriguing revelations even for the visibly well-prepared audience. He pointed out that although there were once giant corporations dominating the economy (such as banks and industrial magnates), now everything is heading in one single sector’s direction: technology. As an example, Zoltán brought up Nvidia’s stock market surge, which at one point encompassed more money than the entire German stock exchange. It would be easy to call it a bubble, especially since the stock prices fluctuate heavily, but there are also changes that are irreversible. “They often debate whether robots and artificial intelligence will take jobs,” he said.
Pogátsa Zoltán, economist (Photo: Márton Fejes)
“I am always surprised when this debate is played in the future tense, while it is taking place in the present tense. Even in Hungary I can name several companies where human work has already been massively replaced by robots and AI. This is not going to happen. This has already partly happened and is ongoing.” The lecture also covered the uneven distribution of mineral resources, the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war, and Europe’s disadvantage regarding technological innovation (although according to Pogátsa, robotics here is still relatively well). The demand for raw materials further complicates already complex international political relations, and climate change wasn’t even mentioned yet – so yes, an AI-dominated dystopia by giant corporations is coming. “Knowledge is not being created here, European manufacturing and development are no longer truly competitive,” he concluded pessimistically, highlighting that China’s strong overrepresentation in the raw material market does not bode well for innovation either. Thus the future will be shaped by the hunger for energy and the accessibility of various exotic metals mined from the ground, and according to Zoltán, the competition will become increasingly sharp.
Although far and away Zoltán Pogátsa’s lecture was the broadest and bleakest, explicit construction industry experts also avoided cheerleading optimism. Andrew Gamblen, Head of AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) at Dalux, a company developing construction technology software, spoke about the efficiency-increasing value of digitalization and about how the construction industry is very slow to adapt to new technologies. According to Gamblen, there is no need to panic, but a general change of mindset is required. It is important to safeguard the mental and emotional health of the industry’s employees, including more elaborated and flexible workflows than before, and the training enabling these. Beyond that, everything is already available – Gamblen mentioned 360-degree cameras as an example, which many use to document their holidays but can actually be considered small BIM tools, just like smartphones that were in every viewer’s pocket. Even QR codes can be included, argued Gamblen, since we have become accustomed to doing everything online.
Andrew Gamblen, AEC specialist, Dalux (Photo: Márton Fejes)
“If you want a new house, you no longer necessarily turn to a realtor but go online, pick a neighborhood, and snap up a house before someone else does,” he explained, then also mentioned booking sites, saying we have never done so many things ourselves as nowadays. The lesson? The transformation of people, technology, and processes enabled our comfortable online life, and this is what the construction industry also needs – so it is not about reinventing the wheel but about a change of mindset; one can argue which of these is the greater challenge. He also explained this transformation through modern mining challenges, which was not only thought-provoking but gave perspective regarding solving seemingly impossible engineering tasks. From this angle, the vision of a smart city is not far away, since ultimately we have everything necessary to smarten up our settlements.
The last speaker of the morning block was Luke Graham, partner of the London-based Urban Neuron innovation think tank and incubator, who has spent many years in the turbulent world of tech companies dealing with urbanization. He is currently researching the liveability of urban spaces. He began his lecture with a bitter quote from Irish comedian Jimmy Carr: “Life has never been so objectively good and subjectively bad.” What does this mean? Among other things, that even though we have all the gadgets listed by Gamblen, we work longer than previous generations, and across Europe it is harder for young people to acquire their own property. Graham noted that in the 1990s office buildings accounted for much of the financial flows in the British real estate market, but today this has shifted toward residential properties. The number and value of industrial buildings have also grown, but commercial units have declined – why?
Luke Graham, Partner, Urban Neuron (Photo: Márton Fejes)
This is what happens when many people buy the kind of apartment they can just afford, thereby chaining themselves to local infrastructure. This is not satisfactory, so instead of going shopping, they buy everything online – practically wiping out small retailers. Although Graham’s example is far from average Hungarian-compatible, it highlights the problem Carr referred to: it doesn’t matter what the numbers say about our reality if our personal experience points in the opposite direction. The solution is to make cities more liveable, which means a set of complex tasks, but according to Graham, the technology for this also exists – so again it is perspective that needs to change.
The importance of mindset change was also a recurring theme in panels focused on Hungary. In the roundtable discussion on domestic smart cities, Zoltán Erő, Chief Architect of Budapest, emphasized that it is not really the technical background of “smartness” that matters but what city dwellers experience from it. “We have plenty of tasks in smart decision-making, in smart use, and in operating the entire urban culture properly,” he said. The primary tool for the latter is not innovation but communication – Erő recalled the story of Déli Railway Station “wandering” meters in official documents, which over time physically did move, but even now not all documents reflect that. The reason is that responsible organizations have not yet agreed to update everything according to reality – thus urban problems are not primarily digitalization obstacles but bureaucratic ones. “It is worth bringing together collaborations and not thinking in a pyramid,” he said.
Erő Zoltán, Chief Architect of Budapest (Photo: Márton Fejes)
Of course, it is not harmful if our city is as digital as possible, since data can even reveal future trends. A great example was given by László Balogh, lead analyst at Ingatlan.com, who said that with their roughly 500 terabytes of data they detected changes in Budapest’s housing price trends a year earlier than the National Bank of Hungary or the Central Statistical Office published.
According to Balogh, renting apartments is no longer as good a business as it was a few years ago, while property prices have skyrocketed, with square meter prices in the most sought-after Buda districts approaching three million forints. At the same time, data and trends aside, human behavior can still override our assumptions. “In practice, real estate market decisions are often made on emotional grounds, based on opinions, sometimes even impulses,” he said with a smile.
Balogh László, Lead Analyst, United Platforms (Photo: Márton Fejes)
It is worth highlighting one of the innovations of the 2025 event: during discussions, the audience could vote on certain questions. What will AI be good for? Which areas can be most boosted by digitalization? Where are the markets going? The organizers displayed the answers on diagrams, outlining a trend that the audience primarily expects a revolution and help from AI in decision-making. László Balogh also emphasized the importance of data-driven decisions, pointing out that according to the numbers, smart cities will grow around newly built blocks, because it is simply more reasonable to construct buildings designed smart from the outset than to retrofit old homes. According to Balogh, sustainability and advanced building technology will be a highlighted focus for investors in the future, so it is worth developing in this direction too.
There will certainly be no shortage of data and AI solutions in the Hungarian construction industry either. At the PropTech Hungary Conference, numerous companies exhibited their own smart solutions, whether in lighting, parking, energy, or even BIM, which was once used only in large-scale projects but is now useful even on a small scale – just one example: at the Brick+Data booth, visitors could see for themselves how impressive a digital twin model of a library room scanned into a point cloud with LiDAR looks in a Meta Quest 3. During the demonstration, an example was also mentioned: someone once wanted to install special doors in their home, and for the exact measurement the contractor preferred to use a 3D model, because in it everything is where it should be.
But of course, the digital Canaan is still far away – Csaba Livják, founder and CEO of BuildEXT Kft., once again gave a sparkling lecture about what hinders domestic digital innovation. In short: the old-fashioned mindset present in every part of the process, meaning that even if someone wants to innovate, they constantly run into walls. Yet according to Livják, development will not stop, indeed he sees that in the future an integrator role will emerge, connecting old-school professionals with actors using new solutions, as well as often wide-eyed clients. “My experience is that in large companies, with hundreds of thousands of square meters and hundreds of sites, this is built in-house. But in the Hungarian market, I don’t think there is enough real estate volume or the market is large enough for individual actors to build this themselves, so I think it will be used as a service by those who want a functioning BIM model.”
Livják Csaba, CEO, Founder, BuildEXT Kft. (Photo: Márton Fejes)
Of course, BIM or smart city aside, transportation cannot be taken lightly – automotive journalist Gábor Bazsó, better known as Karotta, was again co-host of the event alongside founder Zoltán Kalmár, and as last year, he also gave a presentation on the advance of electric cars. He reinforced his statements from a year earlier, saying that the electric transition is real, and what’s more, China is already far ahead in it, more than can be seen from here. He even played his own short video of a bustling Chinese metropolis street where only electric cars were on the move, from sedans and SUVs to buses. “Ah, the silence,” he said with a smile. “When from the noise of rushing cars only their glide remains.” Indeed, if such a quiet and calm smart future awaits us, it cannot come fast enough.
Bazsó Gábor (Karotta), journalist (Photo: Márton Fejes)
The official program of the conference is available here.