Gil Sperling: A Techpreneur Driving Innovations in Africa’s Property Industry

Gil Sperling is the co-founder and co-CEO of Flow, a proptech company that taps into the largest social media platforms to match people with suitable properties in South Africa.

Atech whiz, Sperling launched his entrepreneurial career as one of three founding partners of Popimedia, one of Africa’s biggest adtech and performance marketing companies. The business is one of Facebook’s largest marketing partners. Having attained a major milestone in the adtech ecosystem, Gil turned to his next interest, the property industry. He couldn’t overlook the slow pace of technological advancement in this industry. And so he and his co-founder Daniel Levy launched Flow, a proprietary technology which empowers estate agents, tenants and landlords.

Business Elites Africa caught up with Gil on the future of Flow, proptech in Africa and a lot more.

What is Flow?

Flow’s a prop-tech marketing platform which helps real estate agencies and property developers to automate their marketing on Facebook and Instagram. We learnt through our experience that it’s very complicated and difficult to run Facebook campaigns effectively, especially within the property and real estate sectors which are highly fragmented.

Think of a real estate company that has many branches. Each branch has many agents with their respective property listings. It’ll be near impossible for someone to create hundreds of ads for those listings on social media. This is where we come in. We’ve automated the process so the property industry can easily use social media platforms to reach buyers and tenants.

What was it like funding the platform?

During my time at Popimedia, which was Facebook’s largest partner in Africa, we built a technology that automated the marketing for big businesses like Unilever, Nestle and BMW. We also did some work in the property industry. When we sold Popimedia, we started exploring other areas where we could impact the world.

From our insights into these different industries and how they market themselves, we realized that there’s a gap in the property sector that witnesses the least innovation in terms of technology.

You may have heard of fintech, agritech and health tech. But proptech is the least progressed and one of the most valuable sectors. This slow pace is because it is old, archaic and fragmented. But we decided to give it a go and unlock value for people and how they live, how they find their property; how they engage and the trust that they have in the ecosystem. The property tech industry generally involves some of the biggest transactions for any one of us. Whether it’s your monthly rent, which is generally a third of your income, or buying a home, which you do once every 10 years. It is a massive transaction, and a basic human need, especially when we’re talking about your home. That’s why we thought, let us see if we can create an impact.

What would you say is the biggest challenge right now in South Africa’s Property Tech?

The biggest challenge right now is the old generation of landlords or property developers which isn’t compatible with how consumers behave and engage.

That incompatibility is the biggest challenge - How do these property agencies, estate agents and developers actually engage and communicate with the millennials and generation Z of today who are used to certain modes of engagement, such as social media and so on. These property transactions also require a tremendous amount of trust because of the value of the transactions usually involved.

Flow entered the market in the middle of the pandemic, what was that like?

Out of the ashes rises the Phoenix! We launched in the early days as a rental rewards platform where tenants got rewarded by landlords for being better tenants; paying rent on time and so on. And part of the vision was to extend that to enable tenants to find better homes and landlords.

That’s when we launched Search, it was the home finding part of our platform, which would have glued everything together. And we launched it two weeks before the hard lockdown in South Africa. So obviously that was quite a challenge because the industry completely shut down. It really puts people in survival mode. Out of necessity, we had to adapt. And that’s what a lot of the industries did. Fortunately, there was a big leapfrog effect where a lot of technologies that would have taken way longer to adapt got adapted far quicker, bypassing a lot of existing legacy technologies.

People got way more used to viewing apartments through videos and walkthroughs, on WhatsApp, signing leases and making purchases on their phones.

How would you advise earlystage entrepreneurs to raise funds?

It’s hard work to be an entrepreneur. That’s for sure! But my experience has been about staying focused and adding to my personal growth every day. You’re generally inventing something that people don’t know they need or want.

And there are a lot of naysayers out there, a lot of rejections and punches that you take on a daily basis, and that’s where it’s hard. My advice would be that if you focus and have a strong conviction in what you’re doing; solving a big problem, stay focused on the long term. Any failures and hardships along the way are actually signals of what you’re doing wrong, what you should fix and how you can learn.

How do you relieve stress?

I like to do things that help me get perspective. The reason is, once I see a bigger picture, anything that I’m stressing about becomes minuscule and easier to deal with. I like to laugh a lot. I like to watch comedy, which really is stress relief. I like to travel, that also gives me a lot of perspective.

I’m an embodied person. So I do a lot of breathing, gym and meditation. It really helps me to reconnect on a daily basis.