Real Estate's Empty Desks Aren't Ours Alone
Every technology and data specialist real estate wants to hire has other options now: a bank, a consultancy, a tech firm, all offering a bigger budget and a bigger name. APSCo UK and Vacancysoft's “London Regional Labour Market Trends” report, released in July 2026, backs that up: London's professional vacancies are set to grow 13.5% this year, more than three times the 3.9% forecast for the rest of the UK. The sectors behind that growth, finance, technology and professional services, are all after exactly the skills real estate technology teams need too. What this doesn't tell us is who's actually winning those hires, only that more people are competing for them than a year ago.
The competition is becoming particularly visible in roles that sit between technology and the property business. Real estate increasingly wants people who understand both: a data professional who understands property and investment data, a systems specialist who knows platforms such as Yardi or MRI, or a technology leader who can translate between an operational property team and an engineering function. Those combinations are difficult to find in the first place. Once you add banks, consultancies, technology companies and software vendors to the list of potential employers, the genuinely relevant candidate pool gets smaller again.
The competitive reality
While the rest of the UK's job market cools, London hasn't followed. The reason is simple: London's economy runs on finance, technology and professional services, the industries that kept spending while everyone else pulled back. Good news if you're in one of those industries. Harder if you're hiring similar skills from a smaller pool, which is where most real estate technology teams sit, at least within the London data this report covers. Behind every one of those unfilled vacancies is a team already carrying the gap: the data lead covering work two people used to do, the project that slips another quarter because there's no one free to build the integration, the manager fielding “when will we hire” for the fourth month running. None of that shows up in a vacancy count either, but it's the part that doesn't stay abstract for long once you're the one living it.
Two caveats worth having in mind. This report only counts London vacancies, and a lot of these roles, cloud, data, cybersecurity, can be hired remotely, a route real estate doesn't use as often as it could. And the four companies named through this piece are simply the ones the report happens to track. Proptech firms, the software vendors real estate already relies on, and public-sector bodies are all chasing the same skills without showing up in this data at all.
IT vacancies across London are up 26.1% this year. Within that, Development & Engineering roles, the software, cloud and AI side of the market, are up 32.4%. IT Management, IT Infrastructure, IT Analyst and Digital all show up as their own fast-growing categories, not one catch-all “tech” bucket. The Confederation of British Industry points to a persistent shortage of AI engineers stretching out recruitment across key occupations.
AI is adding another layer to this. Real estate businesses do not necessarily need armies of AI engineers, but they increasingly need people who can make AI useful inside existing businesses: connecting systems, improving data quality, automating workflows, introducing governance and turning experimentation into something operational. In practice, that puts pressure on many of the same people already in short supply: data engineers, architects, developers, business systems specialists, transformation professionals and technology leaders who can bridge technical capability with commercial reality.
Four employers show who's driving it. J.P. Morgan is increasing vacancies by 24.5% this year, backed by roughly £15 billion in technology spending. Barclays is up 24.8% on a similar bet, building advanced technology into customer service, operations and compliance. Deloitte is forecast to grow 67.3%, the steepest rise of the four, almost all of it consulting demand for AI, cybersecurity and digital transformation work, though a jump that size could just as easily be one new practice launching as a lasting shift. GroupM is up 39.4% as AI and data-driven advertising reshape media.
None of that is a scoreboard. It tells us four employers are hiring harder than they were a year ago, not how many of those hires they're actually winning against real estate. Every one of them is chasing the same shortlist a real estate technology hire comes from, and whether real estate is actually losing that fight isn't something vacancy numbers alone can show us. It's not something worth waiting to find out the hard way, either.
What this costs, and what would change it
Most of this piece looks at the market from the employer's side, and that's worth naming as a gap. The specialists real estate wants to hire aren't just moving between job offers, they're weighing careers. In the searches we run, pay matters, but so does whether a firm takes its engineering and data work seriously or treats it as an afterthought, whether a role actually offers flexibility rather than a return-to-office policy dressed up as culture, whether there's a real budget for learning, and whether someone can flag a problem with a system or a decision without it costing them. None of that shows up in a vacancy count. All of it shows up in whether an offer gets accepted.
We see this first-hand: the CIOs, data leads and cybersecurity specialists real estate depends on come from that same pool banks and consultancies are hiring from, usually with a smaller budget on our side of the table. From what we see across those searches, pay rarely decides the outcome on its own once it's in a reasonable range. Culture and career path usually do.
The hiring process is increasingly part of that proposition too. The strongest technology candidates are rarely running one process at a time. A business taking four or five weeks to arrange multiple interviews isn't simply creating inconvenience; it is giving every competing employer more time to make an offer. We've seen good candidates lost where salary wasn't the issue at all; another organisation was simply clearer about the opportunity and moved faster.
What that looks like in practice is less dramatic than a bidding war, and harder to see from outside it. It's the strong candidate who goes quiet for a fortnight while a slower process grinds through its stages, and takes the faster offer instead. It's the specialist who doesn't leave loudly, they just stop mentioning real estate as an option the next time a recruiter calls, because the last search felt like being processed rather than considered. Multiply that by however many roles a firm is trying to fill this year, and the shortage stops being a percentage and starts being the reason a project runs late, a system doesn't get built on time, or a team quietly burns out covering a role that's been open too long.
Real Estate & Construction is one of the sectors this report tracks directly, and three of its biggest names show how differently firms are responding. Working from the report's underlying 2025-to-2026 figures: CBRE's vacancies are up around 25%, AECOM's around 15%, both clearly scaling up. JLL's are down around 11% over the same period, though that could mean several things, a genuine pull-back, a hiring push that's already finished, or just a different point in its own cycle. What does seem to line up with the pattern is which of these firms treats data and technology as central to the business rather than support work.
Pay is one part of the answer. So is hiring faster, building real career paths for technical staff who don't want to become managers, and giving technology and data teams a proper budget and a seat at the table rather than funding that disappears when the market softens. Firms serious about this are also looking beyond the same well-known rivals for people: apprenticeships, career-changers and upskilling widen the pool instead of just competing over the same slice of it. And not every gap needs a permanent hire, contractors, fractional specialists and vendor partnerships can close one faster than a new search can.
There is also an argument for being less rigid about property experience. For some roles, knowledge of a particular platform, portfolio or property process is essential. For others, insisting on ten years of real estate experience can unnecessarily shrink an already competitive shortlist. Financial services, retail, hospitality and other asset-heavy industries contain technology professionals with highly transferable experience in data, ERP, cloud, cybersecurity and transformation. Real estate businesses willing to teach the property context can access a much wider market.
Real estate also has something valuable to sell in return. Technology teams are often smaller than those in banking or large consultancies, which can mean broader ownership, closer access to senior leadership and a much clearer line between the technology someone implements and its impact on buildings, tenants, investors and operations. For the right candidate, that breadth is attractive. The problem is that too few hiring processes actually sell it.
Match salary alone and you'll likely buy short-term loyalty at best. The person who joined for the money tends to leave for it too, the moment someone else offers more.
What Cobalt’s Map the Gap does
This report is one publication covering one quarter, not a trend we can point to over time, and it counts posted vacancies, not actual hires or people leaving. A vacancy tells you someone wants to hire, not that they succeeded, or that real estate lost the person who filled it. We've tried to hold that line throughout rather than let one striking number do more work than it's earned.
This report doesn't track real estate technology as its own category, and that's the shortage our own desk lives with day to day. We built Map the Gap to fill that gap: real answers from the people actually hiring and working in real estate technology, on both sides of the hiring table.
One of the questions we want Map the Gap to answer is whether there really is a single “real estate technology skills shortage” at all. Our suspicion is that the picture is more fragmented: acute shortages in particular combinations of technical and property knowledge, employers competing for the same small groups of candidates, and potentially overlooked pools of transferable talent elsewhere. Understanding those distinctions matters, because each problem requires a very different hiring response.
The more people who take part, the sharper this gets. What we can promise is publishing what we actually find, rather than just the number that tells the best story.
If you're building digital capability inside real estate or construction right now: tell us where your shortages really sit, how retention is trending on technical roles, and what's actually shaping your pay and hiring decisions this year.
If you're one of the specialists weighing real estate against everywhere else that wants your skills: tell us what's swaying you, pay included, but also flexibility, culture, growth and the work itself, and what would make real estate the harder offer to turn down.
Complete the Map the Gap survey: https://map-the-gap.lovable.app
It takes a few minutes, and everyone who takes part gets a summary of what we actually find. Your answers, whichever side of the table you're on, feed directly into how we understand where this is heading.
Read the full report: APSCo UK & Vacancysoft, “London Regional Labour Market Trends,” July 2026 (APSCo membership required for full access).
Source: APSCo UK & Vacancysoft, “London Regional Labour Market Trends,” July 2026.
