Bidrento made it to the finals of the DREA Award 2026 in the BUY, SELL & RENT category. The final will take place on 5 October at EXPO REAL in Munich, bringing Bidrento onto the stage of Europe’s largest trade fair for real estate, investment and infrastructure.
Last year, EXPO REAL brought together around 42,000 participants from more than 70 countries and 1,742 exhibitors. Investors, developers, property operators, service providers and technology companies all meet in one place.
And Germany is an interesting place to have this discussion right now.
German real estate does not have a digital awareness problem
The German real estate industry clearly understands that technology matters.
The 2025 ZIA and EY digitalisation study found that 90% of respondents see AI as one of the key technologies for the next five years, while 82% prefer cloud-based solutions.
But the more interesting numbers are elsewhere.
79% cite a lack of internal resources as an obstacle to digitalisation, 75% point to insufficient data quality, and integration between different systems remains a major challenge.
At the same time, German real estate companies are increasingly looking outside their existing technology stack for answers. 45% already cooperate with PropTech companies and another 12% are planning or considering such cooperation.
So the question is no longer whether real estate should become more digital. The question is how to do it without ending up with ten different systems that still require people to copy data between them.
This is exactly the problem Bidrento was built for
A property manager should not need one system for agreements, another for invoicing, another for maintenance, another for tenant communication, spreadsheets for utility allocation and yet another tool to understand whether tenants have actually paid.
Bidrento connects these processes.
A lease already contains the tenant, unit, dates, prices and billing rules. That information can then drive invoicing automatically. Payments can be matched. Outstanding invoices can be followed up. Utility costs can be allocated. Maintenance requests can be connected to the right building, unit and tenant. Management can see what is happening across the portfolio without rebuilding the same information in Excel every month.
It sounds obvious.
In practice, it is still far from standard.
And this matters even more in Germany, where personnel shortages are putting additional pressure on property and facility management teams. PwC found that digitalisation is the top efficiency priority for 62% of German facility management organisations.
Software should therefore not create another system to manage. It should remove work.
Not a small local tool. Not a huge legacy system.
There is another reason we believe Bidrento fits the German market particularly well.
Many operators face an uncomfortable choice.
A local solution can be very good at one specific process or local requirement, but becomes limiting when the portfolio grows, expands into another asset class or another country.
At the other end are large enterprise platforms with enormous functionality, but also potentially enormous implementation projects, complex configuration and systems that can be difficult for everyday users to adopt.
There is a large space between those two extremes.
That is where we have built Bidrento.
It is a European property management platform with the depth needed for professional operators, while remaining flexible enough to implement and adapt without turning the software project itself into a multi-year transformation.
Bidrento’s advantage is combining the things professional European operators need from both worlds: local language and workflows, strong automation, multiple property types, tenant-facing technology, integrations and the ability to support portfolios operating across different European markets.
And because Bidrento is cloud-based, teams can work from the same live information across properties, departments and locations. The platform is designed around a single source of truth for agreements, invoices, meter readings, payments, maintenance and tenant data.
For growing operators, that becomes increasingly important.
More units should not automatically mean proportionally more administration. A new asset class should not require another software stack. And entering another European country should not mean starting the digitalisation process again from zero.
One platform, very different real estate businesses
The German market is not one asset class, and neither is Bidrento.
For residential and BTR operators, the platform covers agreements, recurring rent invoicing, deposits, payments, utility calculations, maintenance and tenant communication.
For student housing and PBSA, operators can manage large volumes of residents, agreements, move-ins, invoicing, services and maintenance while giving students a digital tenant experience.
For co-living and serviced living, the same platform can handle accommodation alongside additional services and resident communication.
For commercial real estate, lease dates, indexation, different rent and service-charge structures, utility allocation, invoicing, maintenance and portfolio reporting can be managed together rather than in separate operational silos.
For office, retail, logistics and industrial portfolios, this becomes especially important when agreements, buildings, meters, equipment, maintenance and financial data all need to connect.
The same approach also works for mixed-use portfolios, social housing and self-storage where operators increasingly need one view across very different types of spaces and tenants.
And because residents and tenants are increasingly international, Bidrento also provides a multilingual digital tenant experience, including German.
Automation before buzzwords
There is currently a lot of attention on AI in real estate - understandably. The same ZIA/EY research shows just how high expectations are.
But AI works only as well as the processes and data underneath it.
If lease information lives in one system, invoices in another, maintenance requests in email and payment information in a spreadsheet, adding AI does not fix the underlying operating model.
The first step is structured data and connected workflows. This is why some of the most valuable automation in Bidrento is not particularly glamorous.
- Generating recurring rent invoices automatically.
- Adding extra service charges.
- Matching incoming payments.
- Following up overdue invoices.
- Synchronising financial data with accounting.
- Allocating utility costs.
- Tracking agreement dates and indexation.
- Creating and following maintenance workflows.
These are the processes property teams repeat every day, week and month. Removing manual work from them creates measurable value immediately.
Built for operators who want to scale without scaling administration
For us, this is ultimately the biggest advantage.
A property portfolio growing from 500 to 1,500 units should not require twice as much administration. Adding another country should not mean rebuilding the entire operating model.
Adding student housing to a residential portfolio, or commercial units to a mixed-use development, should not automatically require another property management system.
Technology should allow the portfolio to become more complex without administration increasing at the same speed.
That is what we believe modern property management software should do.
And it is why reaching the DREA Award 2026 final at EXPO REAL means a lot to us.
Germany is one of Europe’s largest and most sophisticated real estate markets, but the numbers show that the transition towards integrated, data-driven property operations is far from finished.
We want Bidrento to be part of that transition.
The DREA Award final takes place on 5 October, during EXPO REAL 2026 in Munich. EXPO REAL itself runs from 5-7 October 2026.
See you in Munich. 🏆
