PropTech Is Growing Up—And Getting Tougher.

That was one of the messages that came across clearly at the Boston PropTech event we hosted at our office last night.

Real estate operators are now adopting technology. And in a perverse way, it’s making it harder for PropTech start-ups. Here’s why:

Real estate firms and operators/investors are building their own tech infrastructure, customized to their specific business needs. So if you’re a PropTech start-up offering a solution, it’s much harder when a well-capitalized firm is also competing with its in-house system.

Real estate is a multi-trillion-dollar market with massive fees, volumes of transactions, and huge inefficiencies, creating a market ripe for disruption.

There’s huge opportunity to build and create new products; however, it’s a more competitive landscape than it was previously, imho.

RD Advisors is a prime example: we built our own tech platform to analyze, close, asset-manage, and service loans, and we’re now building AI tools into the process. We are also utilizing and integrating a variety of best-in-class tech platforms (and looking for more) in our workflow.

Even so, my own personal frustrations led Colin and me to create ReoRei, to streamline our investment process from analysis to offer to bank financing. Another example of building in-house and then offering it to other investors (feel free to check it out and DM me with feedback).

The next few years will see massive changes in PropTech and BuildTech, imho, but it’s going to be tougher and tougher to compete.

What is everyone else seeing?

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