Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. For good reason. No matter how humanity progresses, we’ll always need shelter in some form. It behooves us to optimize our shelters– the construction, the operations, and the businesses that operate real estate. The more efficient we are in each of these areas, the more affordable real estate becomes.
Over the life of a building, some use the “1:5:200 ratio” where 1 is the cost of construction, 5 is the maintenance and operating costs, and 200 is the business operating cost. In reality, it’s not that extreme, but this illustrates how even small operating efficiency gains drastically lower the cost of real estate. There are thousands of workflows that go into real estate. The technology running the fundamental processes of real estate have not kept pace with our times.
During Covid, there was a non-profit who wanted to provide free telemedicine consultations to hundreds of thousands of tenants. They wanted to run a basic report that generated
- First name
- Last name
- Gender
- Birthdate
- Address
- Unit #
- City
- State
- Zip code
- Cell Phone #
This wasn’t possible with their existing property management software. They had to hire consultants to go into their software, find the data, and manually enter the data into a spreadsheet. Seemingly basic issues like this are common.
Accounting is the core of real estate operations. It’s the source of truth for any portfolio. All workflows must work with real estate accounting software. Integrations should be a breeze, but that’s not how it works in the real estate world. The legacy systems that control real estate abuse their power.
Incumbents are often compared to an evil app store. Imagine an app store that forces app developers to pay large, upfront fees. The app store offers to acquire apps for cheap and shuts them off when they refuse to be acquired. After shutting down popular apps, the app store releases their own sub par version. It would be like Apple telling Uber to sell to Apple for pennies on the dollar, Uber refusing, Apple banning the Uber app, then Apple launching their own Uber clone. And people wonder why real estate technology is generations behind.
Our core competency is software development. Our goal is to fix what is most broken about real estate. We wanted to build BI tools. Show unique insights into portfolios. Allow for optimal utilization of assets. Allow for custom reports unique to each asset. If we plug into existing systems, we’d be shut down. Building apps on top of legacy systems is not the answer. Replacing them is the answer. To innovate, we need to build from the ground up.
As a startup one chooses between market and execution risk. We’re over indexed on execution risk. We’re building an ERP. Each feature atomitized is simple, but having every feature work seamlessly on a system level is difficult. We aren’t trying to catch lightning in a bottle. We’re doing the simple, hard thing. We’re doing the thing incumbents never thought possible.
It’s not an easy journey, but easy things are rarely worthwhile. We’re honored to have amazing allies on our side. Join us. The enemy’s gate is down.