For decades, the real estate business has existed, and fostered immense wealth, largely without technology. As a result, technology’s integration into the industry has been slow.
However, with the arrival of technology, the traditional role of the real estate agent is changing, more deals are getting done and properties are more accessible than ever to interested buyers. As New York City has traditionally served as a hotbed for the residential and commercial real estate businesses, we caught up with three tech companies shaking up real estate. Here’s what they had to say about how the industry is changing.
Jason Griffith is the CEO of SiteCompli. SiteCompli gathers and analyzes data on the ever-changing regulations with which property owners, managers and developers must comply. Its suite of products provides precise monitoring and easy access to violations — information that was once much harder to obtain without technology.
Built In: How do you think real estate has changed by way of technology in NYC over the past 5 years? 10 years?
Jason Griffith: The real estate industry was traditionally paper-heavy, especially on the operations side. Ten years ago, important documents were stored in endless rows of filing cabinets and work orders were sent and completed via fax. It was nearly impossible to locate information quickly, or effectively prioritize and respond to competing compliance issues. Slowly but surely, the industry began to accept technology as a necessity to increase efficiency, enhance organization and save time. Compliance automation technology has especially grown over the past five years, making automation a must-have for property owners and managers across the country.
Built In: How has SiteCompli contributed to this change?
Jason Griffith: The increase in real estate technology has prompted a need for greater access to information. SiteCompli has led the charge in providing (NYC) owners and managers with critical information necessary for them to run safe and compliant buildings. We've built our product not just around organizing and analyzing data, but making critical information actionable, resulting in less time spent finding and resolving issues and less resources spent on unresolved items and penalties. Using an automated system to manage compliance was once a novel idea — now it's an industry standard, and the only way to organize data and action items across several municipal agencies.
Built In: How do you think real estate will change over the next five years through technology?
Jason Griffith: Real estate technology is evolving from collecting data to providing insights behind data that offer real operational impacts. Going forward, real estate professionals will utilize tools that enable collaborative action both inside and outside their organization. Property managers will interact with vendors in-app, resolving open items much more quickly and directly. Big data won’t just be about aggregation and analysis — faster, straightforward action is the next level of real estate tech.
Robert Reffkin is the CEO of Compass. Compass's platform works as a comprehensive brokerage service that fuses real estate agents with technology to make buying, selling and renting property a simpler process. Compass offers an alternative to sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow with a more intuitive platform.
Built In: How do you think real estate has changed by way of technology in NYC over the past 5 years? 10 years?
Robert Reffkin: On the consumer side, aggregators like Streeteasy have totally reshaped how consumers search for properties. Before sites like this came around, consumers had very few options for searching on their own, often having to visit each brokerage’s site to see their respective listings. Now a comprehensive search is one click away — and that has led many brokerages to adopt a more comprehensive listing database, showcasing all brokerages’ listings, not just their own. On the agent side, there are now hundreds of vendors providing tools and products which can assist an agent’s workflow, from property search, closing information, open house tools, and much more. Technology’s key function is to increase efficiency, and we have seen that across the board in real estate over the last five — 10 years. The challenge is that a lot of it was happening outside of the brokerage.
Built In: How has Compass contributed to this change?
Robert Reffkin: Compass has shifted the paradigm of what technology is expected (or possible) from a brokerage. Five years ago, I don’t think any agent would have expected to be able to interact directly with the team building their valuation tool or search platform. By bringing the engineers and product managers together in the same organization as the power user, the agent, we have been able to act quickly and directly respond what agents need to improve their businesses. And thankfully, I think the industry is reacting. Regularly, I hear in meetings with agents from other brokerages, how their firms are now revamping their search capabilities and looking to build out their internal technology teams. This is exactly what we wanted to see happen — elevating the experience for the agent and improving an industry that was behind the times.
Built In: How do you think real estate will change over the next five years through technology?
Robert Reffkin: What’s so exciting to me is that I cannot even dream up what sort of products our engineering team will be creating and rolling out in five years. We are just at the beginning of the technology revolution in real estate. Over the next five years, there will definitely be new players cropping up both on the vendor and the brokerage side and I am excited for what that will mean for improving the lives of agents.
David Eisenberg is the founder and CEO of Floored. Floored is using virtual reality to change how people buy and sell homes. The company develops software that turns 3D spatial data into interactive virtual spaces.
Built In: How do you think real estate has changed by way of technology in NYC over the past 5 years? 10 years?
Over the past decade, technology hasn't changed the real estate industry very much, other than the smartphone enabling more email and more phone calls! In the past few years, however, we've seen the shift from offline, desktop use of legacy software systems in real estate shift to modern, connected, well-designed applications that serve a variety of needs within the real estate operating and investing industries. A lot of that has been due to changing demographics, as former real estate operators, investors and brokers have facility with technology and leave traditional roles to found newer startups.
Some of it is due to changing platforms. The dominance of the iPhone, the availability of massive new data sets, the shift to the cloud, the internet of things, crowdfunding regulation and virtual reality are examples of technologies that have made new applications possible for the real estate industry in the past five years. They are being adopted at a rapid pace because they are simply superior to previous offerings, technological or otherwise. Faster, cheaper and better solutions — that's the key to adoption in real estate.
Built In: How has Floored contributed to this change?
We pioneered the use of interactive 3D applications in commercial real estate over the past four years. We helped organizations like the Related Companies market the Hudson Yards use interactive 3D models and virtual reality. We've helped firms like Macerich view and walk around their new shopping center developments virtually years before they broke ground. As we've enhanced our technology we've also expanded into new research areas such as 3D scanning, virtual reality and AI, all in an effort to bring cutting edge technology, and business results, to our clients.
Built In: How do you think real estate will change over the next five years through technology?
The next five years will bring tremendous change to the real estate industry. The introduction of autonomous vehicles, in particular, will literally shift the values of properties as the cost of transportation per mile continues to plummet, helped along by tremendous progress in the renewable energy industry. In our field, virtual and augmented reality will continue to expand their footprints, as GPUs get more powerful every year, enabling incredibly realistic simulations. Every year that internet speeds increase (initiatives such as LinkNYC help a lot!), more data will move to the cloud, where it can be analyzed by algorithms that will help unlock new insights. One thing is for sure, the next five years of technological growth will bring more change than the previous five!
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