Real estate had ten years and $50B+ to get ahead of AI.
...then watched it go by.
----- Right place, right time but -----
PropTech launched at the perfect time.
...ten years ago, on the eve of what every tech bro says is biggest technological advancement in modern history.
Then it mostly bet on climate tech and thermostats.
----- Background -----
Between 2015 and 2022, the largest PropTech platforms built portfolios of 100+ companies. Their stated mission: bring transformational technology to the built world.
The technology that arrived?
Smart home gadgets, construction management software, IoT sensors.
Meanwhile...
A single legal AI startup that originated by diving into landlord tenant law (Harvey) is worth more than $11B by building a wrapper around an LLM.
Harvey launched in 2022 and is already more valuable than the largest law firm in the world.
And NVIDIA is comparable in size to the ENTIRE commercial real estate equity market. $4-5 trillion.
All of this happened over the last few years.
----- Survey says -----
We're running the first-of-its-kind AI benchmarking study across commercial real estate's workforce.
And early results from 400+ respondents tell a consistent story.
1. Everyone believes AI is critical to the future of their business.
2. But almost no one is using it meaningfully.
The most common use case: hunting and pecking in ChatGPT to help draft an email or review a document.
To be fair, some individuals (and a few firms) are power users. We'll be profiling some of their approaches in the survey release.
However, widespread adoption and powerful use cases from within the industry are slim.
----- The question we can't shake -----
We went back and reviewed more than 150 investments from the largest PropTech platform and scored each company on one question: how central is AI to the core business model?
The average score landed in line with SmartRent and Class Pass.
Maybe the best AI-native real estate companies haven't been built yet.
Maybe PropTech's next wave looks nothing like the first.
Maybe the industry was simply solving for different problems ten years ago.
Or maybe the window opened and quietly closed.
What are we missing?
PS -- It's not too late to share how you're using AI in our survey. Comment "survey" to get a link. Takes five minutes, and you'll get a more detailed version of the findings before public releases.
COMMENTS