Commercial Real Estate (CRE) technology, or Proptech (property technology) are forging a new facet to the Real Estate world, infusing the market with an energy that mirrors the accelerated innovation mindset of a tech startup.
Don’t freak out. We know you might be thinking that all this tech takes away from the human aspects of real estate and property management – a sector built on a foundation of relationships. But CRE tech isn’t as great a leap forward as you might think. In fact, it’s the natural next step.
Let’s take a look at the history of CRE.
In the “old days”, they used books. We have the luxury today of computerized Multiple Listing System (MLS) but in the 1980s the MLS was a book of pictures updated and dropped off to agencies bi-monthly. When people were interested in purchasing a home, they had to come into the office to get pre-approved…and they walked uphill both ways to get there.
Larry wakes up at 6:30 am and stretches. He’s getting up early so he can make the drive to get some signatures he needs to move ahead with a transaction he is working to complete. He walks across his shag carpet and heads down the hall to make himself a cup of General Foods coffee, stopping along the way to water his ferns.
On the road, Larry’s beeper alerts him to call the client he is on his way to see about the paperwork. Having had a slower quarter, Larry can’t yet afford the expensive bag phone so he pulls over at a gas station to pop a quarter in a payphone and see what’s going on. The client needs to postpone the signing and Larry’s just wasted half a tank of gas.
Don’t worry about Larry too much though, a little further on in the decade his agency gets a fax machine and he gets an extra 30 minutes of sleep most mornings.
Sharon lives just outside the city center, her real estate career is new, she’s a secretary working for an agent trying to expand his territory. She hops out of bed at 7am and plays with the antennae on her boombox until the station comes in clear.
Out the door an hour later with Weezer still stuck in her head, Sharon catches the bus to the target territory with a stack of flyers; today she’s determined to conquer a long list of addresses for door-to-door marketing to follow up on the cold mailers she previously sent out. People are starting to talk about ‘the net’ but Sharon’s office only has two computers at the office that she and the other secretaries share for word processing. P.S. on her secretary salary, Sharon is also a frequenter of payphones.
It’s hard to fathom sometimes that the turn of the Millenium was 20 years ago. At the start of 2000 the internet was available both privately, and for businesses and it was catching like wildfire. This is when the tech revolution really started to gain momentum and ever since we’ve been pushing forward at light speed. Why? Because it makes everything we were working to do before easier and more profitable while using less resources.
2000 saw the widespread incorporation of software programs like Autodesk and CoStar – perhaps considered necessary to keep up with the boom of the early 2000s housing bubble – but these programs couldn’t talk to one another, or integrate with one another in any way. Plus, they were costly.
By the 2010s most professional people, and 75% of U.S. teens, have a personal cell phone and suddenly communication access isn’t so much of an issue anymore. A key point, however, is that the structure of the office hasn’t changed. Real estate is still primarily operating on a 9-5 mentality. You could probably pluck Walter Hathaway from the 50’s and plop him into 2010 – sure, he’d fumble with computers and fax machines, but he’d find comfort in the familiarity of a Greatest Generation office structure.
Here’s where it gets really interesting.
The first iPhone was released in 2007. The Blackberries and Palm Pilots of previous years had paved the way for hand-held personal organizers and e-mail, but we can pinpoint the change in the workforce structure to the integration of apps and the increase in device connections, or the ‘Internet of Things’.
In 2021, not only is it possible to make calls without a quarter, but you can sign documents on your phone, integrate with your entire office remotely, check your listings, explore Nation-wide listing databases, and more, all while simultaneously ordering a pizza from your couch. The world is different and technology is certainly shaping the way we do business, but collectively, our ambitions haven’t changed.
Perhaps the biggest tech innovation is cloud-based platforms that talk to third-party providers and integrate to centralize information. Platforms like RealDash incorporate back end functions like smart data collection and analytics, with traditional front of house operations like marketing and industry research.
We mentioned before that we were charging into the tech revolution at the speed of light. Why? Because the speed of light is also the speed of data, and data sets the pace. In the 80’s deals were made as quickly as they could be hand-delivered or faxed. In the 90’s territories were grown as fast as they could be covered on foot going door-to-door. In the early 2000’s transactions were made at the speed of dial up, and now we make them at the speed of light.
As any space traveller will tell you, it’s not a good idea to go off warp speed on your own. Reach out to us for a demo today and stay ahead of the next decade of development.
