Helping shopping centres and districts adapt to the digital world has won French company Wishibam the PropTech Innovation Award 2021.

Wishibam’s offering, a digital marketplace for brick-and-mortar retailers, won over the seven-strong expert jury who gave it top prize in the Re:Create Retail category, impressed by its ecosystem of additional tools for logistics, warehouse management, marketing and interaction between visitors.

Jury member Christoph Holzmann said: “The battered retail industry needs digital pioneers like Wishibam. We are therefore particularly pleased that we were able to select a solution from the retail category as the overall winner this year.

“One of the greatest threats to real estate markets and also to towns and cities overall are empty streets, empty shops, no traffic, no people and no social interaction. Wishibam has come up with a way to prevent this, developing an impressive technological solution that we will also be taking a closer look at with regard to our own retail space.”

Holzmann is a member of the management board at Union Investment Real Estate, which organises the awards along with Germantech. The awards theme was Accelerating Real Estate Evolution, with the aim of finding the best digital solutions and business models that address pressing issues in the real estate industry post-coronavirus.

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Second prize was awarded to Good Monday from Denmark, winner of the ‘Future Proof Office Places’ category, while third place went to Placense from Israel, winner in the ‘Smart & Sustainable: Connected Cities and Buildings’ category. The three winners saw off competition from 180 digital innovators, startups and established companies from 40 countries.

Photo: Christoph Holzmann (left) and presenter Martin Kloss congratulate Wishibam founder Charlotte Journo-Baur