SoftBank is all over the biggest real-estate tech funding rounds of 2019 - Business Insider

CREtech, an advocacy and research group in the real estate tech industry, provided Business Insider with a list of the ten largest deals of the year.CREtech estimated a total of $31.6 billion in funding for real-estate tech as a sector in 2019. Four of the companies on the list and three out of the top four funding rounds are based in Asia. Three of those companies are based in China, a testament to the country's burgeoning real-estate tech scene. Four of the largest funding rounds came from SoftBank. Read more BI Prime stories here.2019 has been the biggest for real-estate technology funding yet. CREtech, an advocacy and research group in the real estate tech industry, provided Business Insider with a list of the 10 largest deals of the year. CREtech estimated a total of $31.6 billion in funding for real estate tech as a sector in 2019. Three of the companies on CRETech's top-10 list are based in China, a testament to the country's burgeoning real estate tech scene. Chinese conglomerate Tencent contributed to two of the three Chinese rounds.Oyo Hotels is one of four companies on the list as a result of a SoftBank funding round. It is joined by Compass, Opendoor and WeWork; each of the four companies representing one of the major categories on the list.WeWork is one of two flex-office companies on the list, while Compass is one of two real-estate brokerages on the list. Opendoor is one of two iBuyers on the list, and Oyo is one of three hospitality companies on the list. There are some caveats - For WeWork, the $11.5 billion in total funding included SoftBank's early January funding round plus an October bailout. Without including the $9.5 billion bailout, CREtech's tally for total funding across the sector in 2019 is $22.1 billion. And real estate tech is notoriously hard to define. There have been monster funding rounds in flexible office, short-term rentals, and real estate brokerage. Many of these startups say they put a tech spin on old-school real estate models, but their day-to-day business is heavy on the real estate side. The biggest dollars have, so far, avoided the cutting-edge of real estate technology in construction and AI. Expectations for continued funding growth in the broad space are high. As we wrote in October, when CB Insights counted a record $24.6 billion in funding through the third quarter of this year, it also predicted category winners would begin to break out in 2020, and that the number of funding rounds and the sizes of deals would continue to increase.See the full list of the 10 largest real estate tech deals of 2019 below.