Why Excel Still Runs the Property Industry: The Persistence of Flexible Chaos
In an era of artificial intelligence, high-speed portals, and multi-million-ringgit proptech platforms, the most powerful tool in the Malaysian property industry remains a 40-year-old software: Microsoft Excel.
From small boutique agencies to global consultancies, the industry's most sensitive data still lives inside files with names like: Commission_FINAL_v4_MASTER_REVISED.xlsx.
To many proptech founders, this looks like backwardness. It isn't. Excel runs the industry because it has one superpower that most "modern systems" still lack: Unbounded flexibility.
The Flexibility Advantage Most Systems Lose
Most agency systems are designed by engineers who prize order. They build clean workflows where Step A leads to Step B, which triggers Payout C. There is no ambiguity and no deviation.
But real estate is not a factory line; it is a business of exceptions.
- Developers change commissions mid-campaign.
- Seniors negotiate one-off overrides.
- Deals violate the process but "make sense" commercially.
- Principals override logic to preserve relationships.
When a rigid system meets a special case, it breaks. It throws an error, needs a developer, and delays execution. When Excel meets a special case, someone adds a row.
Principals resist "proper systems" not because they hate technology, but because they refuse to be trapped inside a box that cannot think like the market.
The Hidden Intelligence Inside the Chaos
Spreadsheets are often dismissed as messy. In reality, the master Excel file of an agency is a compressed map of its internal intelligence. Every hidden column exists for a reason; every ugly formula is a fossil of a real problem solved under pressure.
The spreadsheet encodes:
- The agency's unique economic logic.
- The founder's mental model of fairness.
- The organisation's real incentive structure.
- The exceptions that actually matter.
Excel survives because it allows principals to think in real time. Not after approvals, and not after system updates. Now.
The Flexibility Tax: When Thinking Becomes Dangerous
Excel is unmatched as a thinking surface, but it is disastrous as an operating system. As agencies grow, spreadsheet flexibility starts charging a hidden tax:
- Version Fragility: One broken cell can misallocate RM20,000 across multiple agents.
- Knowledge Concentration: Only one person truly understands the sheet—usually the principal or a long-suffering admin.
- Zero Auditability: There is no truth state, only "latest input." Who changed what, when, and why is unknowable—which is why disputes explode into emotion instead of resolution.
Excel works brilliantly for Stage-1 thinking and catastrophically for Stage-2 execution.
The Great Standoff
The industry is stuck between two bad options:
- Rigid Systems: Clean, auditable, and scalable—but they force agencies to abandon how they actually think.
- Excel: Flexible, expressive, and adaptive—but it forces agencies to remain manual, founder-dependent, and fragile.
This is not a tooling problem. It is an architectural gap. The industry is not waiting for a "better ERP." It is waiting for something that has the structure of a database, the expressiveness of a spreadsheet, and the adaptability of a founder's intuition.
The Future Is Not Anti-Excel
The goal is not to kill the spreadsheet; the goal is to liberate its logic. To take the living formulas and the edge-case rules trapped in cells and give them versioning, audit trails, and automation.
The next era of property systems will not replace Excel. They will finish what Excel started. When spreadsheet logic can finally scale without breaking, the industry will stop choosing between flexibility and control.
It will finally have both.
