Kira joined over 30 companies at last week’s Disrupt CRE event in New York to discuss the future of the commercial real estate industry. While the legal industry is often criticized for being the last to adopt technology, until recently commercial real estate was not far behind.
Until now, the process of researching a deal, leasing up a property, and managing the due diligence and lease abstraction process was manual and cumbersome. Today, new companies are continuously innovating to facilitate each part of the process from finding a property to contract review and execution. Hightower’s Brandon Weber discussed how his leasing platform provides beautifully designed software to streamline leasing and asset management for brokers and owners on the go. Daniel Miller, co-founder and President of Fundrise, explained how even established players like Silverstein Properties are benefiting from tech-enabled crowdfunding on projects like 3 World Trade Center.
The fusion of real estate and technology, though in its infancy, is already starting to transform the way the business is done in the industry. From financing, to facilities, portfolio management to marketing, real estate firms are adopting technology to run leaner, faster and smarter than before. Panelists, including executives from top real estate companies (like Cushman & Wakefield and Blackstone) and founders of hot real estate tech startups (such as CompStak, F9Analytics and VTS), cited the consumerization of IT, the effects of increased mobility and new sources of big data analytics for real estate as key drivers of change.
While many of the early companies aimed at transforming real estate were founded by veteran brokers and asset managers, Jordan Nof, Director at Blackstone Innovation, noted that the next wave of companies will likely come from outside the industry. Through Kira Real Estate and Kira Quick Study, we are excited to contribute our machine-learning contract review and lease abstraction solutions to further innovation in the commercial real estate industry.