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PropTech, education reform in New York City, and motivating innovation…
Ryan Baxter, making NYC’s built environment more educational, Founder/Chairman of PASSNYC, Real Estate Liaison for MetaProp NYC, and Co-founder of PropTech Challenge, and former Vice President of REBNY, joins Tom Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studio powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.
In this episode:
- Real estate tech/prop tech
- Baxter‘s unique path to prop tech, how he started in a trade association, Real Estate Board of NY
- His undying love for NYC, looking for way to work around that, loved lobbying as a concept
- The opportunity to make lots of impact
- How the Association is older than NYC, serves more than 17,000 members across real estate professions
- How Baxter started a regulatory effort on changing how ConEd treats power plants within buildings, taught him a lot about how NYC interacts with and treats tech
- Aaron Block, a founder of PropNYC, knocked on door asking for help, saw them as distribution platform
- How his work allows outcome beyond pursuit of wealth
- Bing Co-Founder of Protech challenge, started last year grew to over 100 people from 47 companies,
- Moving from personally-participated to virtually to impact many more people, to spur innovation, increase diversity, and create opportunities around the world
- An augmented reality tool to overlay real time building information, helpful for engineers to know what a particular system’s flow of info in real time
- A lack of agility and responsiveness in real estate is going changing
- The need to understand that there are only five value propositions
- A limitless opportunity for the human imagination
- A $230 Trillion and growing opportunity worldwide
- Developers should lean into PropTech
- Why PropTech is years behind FinTech, yet broader than any other tech vertical we’ve seen
- Is PropTech only one part of it, and a low hanging fruit, and limiting lens?
- MetaProp
- Starting with community building approach as a new fund
- Why learning the language across the industry is crucial
- Promoting better educational access and equity using community organizing and coalition tactics
- Why the tip of PropTech spear should be public schools, and how they can design the future
- Enabling schools to be specialized, motivating participation and resource provision, and working toward continual desegregation
- The debate on why specialized schools have value
- The Empire State Building, Jay-Z, and a great restaurant
Vincent Pavanello
The real estate industry is antiquated. For most people they think of the residential real estate first, and that’s lagging enough. But technology and innovation in the commercial real estate space? That’s twenty years behind residential. An exception to this is Squarefoot, an online brokerage platform that enables companies to find commercial properties without going space to space.
Jonathan Wasserstrum
The state of affairs of commercial real estate today, two decades behind residential real estate, comparative sizes of residential vs. commercial
Harley Courts
Courts discusses the impact that the company’s atypical management and structure has contributed to its success, what he took from running a skateboard company, leadership, building a collaborative, mission driven team, how his skateboard company failing led to becoming the super of a building, then meeting numerous real estate brokers and realizing he can do that, starting Nooklyn as a blog, and having so much success that he had to hire agents. How when giving listing data away you have nothing, as it’s a core asset. How Nooklyn is giving renters control over process, plucking away at removing friction for renters, the majority of the country is still on Craigslist for rentals, and why the highly regulated nature of the real estate industry, and the fact that this is the largest purchase most people will make, means brokers will remain.
Wallace shares the mission is to accelerate innovation in the Built World to improve how we live, work, sleep, consume, move, create, connect, and play. He comments how the company envisions a future where technology is seamlessly integrated into the physical spaces around us, creating a shared environment that is more accessible, efficient, and delightful than ever before. He covers his successes as entrepreneur and an exit, arriving at real estate tech, the marriage of the first half of his career (real estate banking and private equity, witnessing the boom and bust) and the second half of his career (going to business school, starting a data analytics business for recruiting and targeting the right kind of workers, raising $35 million as students, then creating the largest ride sharing platform in Latin America, and finally angel investing). How real estate tech offers low-tech risk because innovation is usually technically simple. Real estate is the largest asset class and lending category and store of consumer wealth—so why have there been no funds? What if one could raise capital from the largest buyers of real estate technology themselves, then collaborate and understand or influence what they are going to do, allowing them to make better investments, while supporting portfolio companies. This approach offers the best of traditionalist and generalist VC and corporate VC. How Fifth Wall is like an outsourced recruiter for companies to invest, and on the side of the companies, playing translator between major real estate incumbents and innovators, and partnering with generalist funds. And, how Fifth Wall has relationships deep into every subsector.
Is Fifth Wall inciting change or making change themselves, and how the demand for real estate tech is growing. Playing a role in translating needs to specific solutions, a focus that is more on commercial real estate, less on residential brokerage, and concentrating on what partners are looking for. Big drivers are energy efficiency and building data assets, why more companies haven’t had a huge impact on the real estate industry with data, and the challenge with collecting meaningful data. Looking at brick and mortar retail and learning. Does Amazon know its business model? The meaning of retail is changing, and the line between online and offline. Plus how there must be more consideration of the physical store in online purchases, and how this relates to Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods.