real estate

030 – Ryan Baxter of PASSNYC – PropTech, Education, and Going Big

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Ryan Baxter

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PropTech, education reform in New York City, and motivating innovation…

Ryan BaxterRyan 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 techRyan Baxter
  • 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 fundRyan Baxter
  • 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

029 – Nathan Hirsch – FreeeUp Your Business to Succeed

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Nathan Hirsch

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Growing a team by utilizing a marketplace with highly vetted freelancers in a gig economy…

Nathan Hirsch, Founder and CEO of FreeeUp (FreeeUp is a marketplace offering pre-vetted freelance talent) joins Thomas Kutzman for a conversation about growing a business with the right talent. MouthMedia Network studios are powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

  • The gig economy, and accepting the fact that entrepreneurs are not equally good at every part of their business
  • How FreeeUp provides access to great talent all over the world to help build business
  • FreeeUp’s original start in ecommerce, then marketing, then real estate agencies (10-15% of their current client are in Real Estate)
  • An example of a virtual assistant
  • What’s driving the trend of freelancing
  • The way FreeeUp provides a lot of vetting, only takes the top 1%, and when they let them in
  • How FreeeUp started with $2k and grew to millions – only using freelancers from their own marketplace, and running a virtual company
  • How they didn’t look at FreeeUp company as a software business initially – looked at it as people who matched people — but when they looked at it as software and kept improving it, the company turned a corner
  • Why freelancing is part of the next wave of the business economy
  • How FreeeUp has a good foothold — pain points tough to fix, and hard to copy when fixed – looking at any competition in the business—and the vetting process is challenging to get right
  • Freelancers have multiple clients each with their own styles, agendas
  • Spending extra time at beginning setting best expectations will help save countless hours of clarification
  • Solid communication, feedback to freelancers is critical when employing them
  • The biggest error: assuming everyone’s expectations are the same
  • Diversifying is important different people for different functions
  • What would you do with extra hours?
  • An important business lesson, and how Hirsch’s entrepreneurial career began with — selling baby products out his dorm

028 – Omid Malekan – Blockchain Explainer-in-Chief

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Explainer-in-Chief

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Blockchain explanation, applications, and possibilities…

Explainer-in-ChiefOmid Malekan, author of “The Story of the Blockchain: A Beginner’s Guide to the Technology Nobody Understands“, blogger, and Explainer-in-Chief at Triple Smoke Stack (a publishing, consulting and educational firm that specializes in bringing the latest advancements in blockchain technology to traditional companies) joins Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

  • Malekan on Blockchain – technology that gives digital items physical propertiesExplainer-in-Chief
  • Physical things can only exist in one place at one moment in time
  • Because of crypto tokens big public blockchains epxploded in value
  • More and more industries are looking at blockchain, including real estate
  • There are many applications beyond crypto currency
  • Before the Internet, restrictions of physical existence worked but blockchain reduces friction or restrictions
  • Digital items are replicable
  • Music is a great example of an application of blockchain that can be of value
  • Blockchain exists on a spectrum, with varying degrees of how to apply it, and is by nature often decentralized
  • A process to keep you honest
  • A consensus mechanism
  • Bitcoin is slow (only a few transaction per second)
  • Losing a key/passowrd to access, the value is lostExplainer-in-Chief
  • Real Estate doesn’t change hands without people knowing about it, likely a blockchain run by government for property in the future
  • Using blcokchain to potentially democratize ownership and mortgages
  • How REITs were like an early tokenization, good step in that direction
  • While REITS are cumbersome and expensive, can take the REIT model and issue tokensi instead, a tradeable avatar
  • A lot of creativity possible
  • Like a co-op model, real estate distilled down to shares
  • A home is an indivisible asset, tokenization can enable that, financing aspect – you go to one bank, one loan, future can offer breaking debt into pieces each with other people
  • Fractional ownership, fractional debt
  • Nomadic lifestyles enabled by fractional ownership shares in properties to live in places not regular residence, like a timeshare
  • Creatively applied can improve on good parts, lose bad parts
  • Airbnb a perfect example of Web 2.0 kind of business, someone builds platform, people use it, and most of value goes to owner of platform.
  • Whether a value of Blockchain can be to mediate disputes
  • How you can determine cryptocoin has value despite being digital
  • Becoming The Explainer in Chief
  • Model United Nations, learning to debate, valuable life lessons that it was a popularity contest, not all about substance, from moment you walk into the room relationships
  • Artifical Intelligence replacing jobs

026 – Doorbell Communities and VeryApt – Bettering the Rental Experience

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miami

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Two startups sharing their company visions on providing a better rental experience…

Benjamin Pleat, CEO/Founder of Doorbell Communities (supercharging apartment living through curated event experiences) and Ashrit Kamireddi, CEO/Co-Founder, and Scott Bierbryer, COO/Co-Founder, of VeryApt (a trusted apartment review community for people who want to make sure their next apartment really feels like home) joins Thomas Kutzman on location at The Future of Real Estate Summit in Miami,FL. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

  • Conferences as a great opportunity to discover new ideas/innovators

Doorbell Communities

  • Looking at the experience side of things, not changing real estate, don’t redesign spaces, how the use of space is a platform for community creation
  • Leverage existing spaces from lobbies to community spaces
  • Creating meaningful experiences to cerate sticky communities
  • Work in best in class providers including local businesses, good to support local businesses and get them in building
  • Skepticism that neighbors don’t want to interact in a place like NYC, content gets them out
  • The business model, and expense structure
  • The value of software and analytics
  • Offering experiences from psychic mediums, pastrami tastings, coding classes, and more.
  • Currently in Boston and downtown Wooster
  • Challenges are in the real estate finance world, recurring fee treated as different kind of expense, and Class A vs. Class B
  • Avoiding technical debt, and how software augments experience without inhibiting, and enables community building and personal interaction
  • Affordable housing, offering the same experience or hurdle distribution and acceptance by community

VeryApt

  • A data-driven concierge rental platform that makes finding the perfect apartment effortless
  • Having very accurate data and content, making the ecosystem transparent
  • Not just scraping listings, accurate [ricing/inventory, data from tenants talking about experiences in apartment
  • Unique IP on recommendation engine, able to highlight buildings
  • Concierge replaces much of the value of traditional agent
  • Owning listings, not just scraping and taking data feed
  • Trying to instill same culture and processing several markets
  • Building out the brand, opportunities tangential to what they’re doing now ,rental insurance, figuring out moving
  • Taking infrastructure and help solving problems beyond the immediate rental part

025 – Vincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton of “Make Real Estate Great Again – Real Estech in Europe

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Vincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton

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Real estate technology disruption…

Vincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton Vincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton co-authors of the book “Make Real Estate Great Again”, focused on real estate technology disruption and is co-founders of the Real Estech community in Paris, France, join Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios in New York, powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

  • The show’s first guests from continental Europe, who are building a community in real estate tech
  • Bridging the gap between offerings those who want to buy goods and services
  • The community’s first days, three friends created website produced articles on startupsVincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton
  • The consumers are changing and companies have to pay attention to user experience
  • The need to be merging pieces of a value chain and control quality, like automotive industry
  • Making real estate great again
  • Tech makes buildings fitted with people’s needs
  • Urbanization, more people living in more cities than before
  • Making a city denser to attract more people
  • Density leads to productivity, wealth requires different types of people with different skills put together
  • Next, thinking of how you move them all around efficiently
  • The perfect city for all social classesVincent Pavanello and Robin Rivaton
  • The importance of creating buildings fit for real people now, while respecting history of city
  • Cities that exist today vs. the kind of cities that can exist 100 years from now
  • Considering climate change, population change, culture, economy, and when people will/would start migrating
  • Direct access to the sea as a factor in city creation and growth
  • When a city becomes toxic
  • A classy snack inspired by a birthday
  • Political influences can cause major shifts in people, Brexit as an example
  • Trends seeing, action to fund entrepreneurs to make changes happen, several funds currently support this
  • How they are building the first venture capital fund for real estate in continental   Europe, with $60M
  • Hip areas of Paris people are moving to
  • The importance of a larger presence of women in real estate tech