PropTech: A look at ‘what comes next’ in CRE

It’s not news that industry is in the midst of a massive, technology-driven disruption. The word itself — disruption — is overused to the point of cliché. Executives, finance professionals, workers lower down the totem pole with justifiable worries that they’ll soon be supplanted by algorithms or black-box AI — all care not so much about the “why” of disruption as the “what comes next.”

In commercial real estate, “what comes next” is, in a word, “a lot.” According to a July 2019 report from CREtech, venture capital investors plowed some $14 billion into commercial real estate tech startups — PropTech — through the first half of 2019. The recipients ran the gamut from AI-powered tenant risk assessment tools to automated design solutions to next-generation property management software to real-time building and hazard information tools for property insurers.