Five ways proptech is changing how we live

Pandemic-fueled shortages of workers and breakdowns of supply chains have driven up construction costs and slowed down building as demand for more and better housing keeps rising. Companies are trying to help the industry digitize and thereby drive down costs and speed up projects. One area ripe for change is the finance side of construction. Companies like CoFi and Built provide underwriting and origination of construction loans. This lets general contractors to pay subcontractors faster, a key benefit for a labor force that needs to get paid, said Ben Narasin of Tenacity Venture Capital. These companies then end up having proprietary data to do better loans. They also are moving billions of dollars of what were paper checks to digital payments, says Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures.