Brandon Weber, co-founder and chief product officer at VTS, offers advice on how to take advantage of the rising tide of proptech innovators
As 2016 drew to a close, one question on many people’s minds was: have we reached a tipping point in proptech? To some, the recent merger between Hightower and VTS represented a coming of age for the industry. However, while the deal is significant, it only marks the beginning of a period of rapid technological innovation in the management and operation of commercial real estate that I believe will reshape the asset class over the next five to 10 years.
This is not to underplay the impact of the VTS/Hightower merger, both for us as a company and our clients. Our vision is to create a modern operating system for agents and property owners. By migrating their core workflows or processes into an integrated, easy to use, mobile-first application, we enable our customers to drive efficiencies, reduce risk, and above all, extract greater value from their portfolios.
With the combined expertise of the leadership team and engineering capacity focused on innovation, we will march toward this vision at a much faster pace than before.
My hope is that this merger acts as a clear case study for how proptech can deliver real return on investment to the property industry and as a result spark deeper interest in other technology solutions. In this way, we hope to support the rising tide of proptech innovators by raising awareness of the potential of the sector.
So what should we all be doing to take advantage of this opportunity?
My advice to property owners and brokerage firms is twofold. First, embrace the fact that our industry is at a tipping point in its use of data and technology, and that the status quo will soon be transformed. This recognition inevitably leads to companies asking important strategic questions and to a great deal of education.
Second is to focus on people and culture. We are entering a time when an entirely new skillset around technology and data use will be needed inside organisations. As an adjacent example, finance firm Goldman Sachs employs thousands of software engineers, and it is no coincidence that the world’s largest brokerage firm, CBRE, has just hired its first chief technology officer (Chandra Dhandapani) and this month acquired Floored, a 3D technology company.
Having senior people on staff with a strong technical background will be critical to building a strategy for the future that leverages this innovation. Those that do not make this talent shift will find themselves outpaced by more innovative competitors.
We are on the cusp of unprecedented innovation in the property sector, where new technology will be deployed at scale. Within five years, data will be moving rapidly across organisations and the sector more broadly, and this will only be accelerated by external factors such as the evolution of AI and machine learning.
It will be those that embrace change over the next 18 to 24 months, those that recognise the opportunity and get staffed up for the implementation, that will reap the most benefit.
As we move into a world where we will have a true, data-driven commercial property market, it is time to create new strategies which create the space for innovation.
Interact with Brandon Weber on Twitter using @BrandonGWeber
