Episode 15: Nikki Greenberg – Technology and the Future of Real Estate

From autonomous vehicles to on-demand everything, technology has woven itself into the fabric of our lives. But what about its impact on the real estate industry? And, more importantly, what’s next?

In Episode 15 of REAL TIME, futurist and real estate thought leader Nikki Greenberg explains the breakthroughs and benefits of a rapidly evolving trend: property tech. Learn what prop-tech is, its potential to modernize residential and commercial development, and how it’s redefining the ways in which we interact with our homes, office spaces, and more.

Transcript

Erin Davis: Welcome to REAL TIME, a podcast especially for and about REALTORS® brought to you by the Canadian Real Estate Association. I'm your host, Erin Davis. Today we have a guest who's going to open the doors and open our minds to the possibilities of PropTech. Think you don't use it? Think again. Nikki Greenberg is a PropTech entrepreneur, architect and real estate futurist. She joins us now on REAL TIME. Welcome, Nicki, joining us from Sydney, Australia tomorrow.

Nikki Greenberg: Thanks so much for having me. Yes, it's tomorrow from me already with the time differences.

Erin: You're in Sydney, Australia, and we're in Sydney, British Columbia. We're just one wrong airline ticket from being together.

Thank you so much for joining us. I know this is going to be enlightening. You're a passionate advocate of property tech. Let's start by defining it. What is PropTech?

Nikki: That's a great place to start and I am very passionate about PropTech. It really is an emerging field and to some of the listeners, if they haven't heard about it before or if they've only started hearing about it recently, there's a reason for it because the term actually really came to its own maybe about three, four years ago. There were different versions being thrown around. Is it Cretech, is it Retech, is it PropTech? PropTech is the term that essentially stuck around being short for property technology.

Now, there's a few things that I just want to explain to your listeners just to essentially set the stage because there are concepts that I will be referring to later in just understanding exactly what PropTech is. The thing about PropTech is that it's really made up of three different verticals. You have real estate, you have technology and you have venture capital and where those communities converge is where you have PropTech.

What's quite interesting about this is that because you have these three different communities, they also come with different languages and different ways of working. That's one of the challenges, especially for real estate professionals coming into this industry and trying to understand the whole PropTech ecosystem is not necessarily a language or a way of thinking that we're used to because we're often used to talking to engineers and real estate agents and other real estate professionals. That's one of the things that is often a barrier to people initially becoming involved, is that it is quite a different ecosystem.

The second thing that I want to just point out is that purists believe that PropTech does actually need to be a technology, which means that it's something that is a hundred percent pure tech, no hardware, no spaces. It's not about the physical, it's about the digital, but for most people within PropTech, there's an understanding the ecosystem essentially has two sides.

There's the technology itself, pure technology and then there's another side which is essentially tech enabled real estate. What that means is that it's real estate that is operated through technology and that it wouldn't be able to operate in such a way if there wasn't this new generation of technology that's come out. Examples of this co-working or co-living because these are actual spaces, but it's the technology that allows them to work.

The third thing that I want to just point out also is just an understanding about PropTech versus regular technology in real estate and why there's a bit of a differentiation. We have obviously working in real estate, there's always been technology at our disposal. This is nothing new. Then we pose the question about, okay, well, if we've always had technology, then why is this whole area called PropTech? Why is there a whole different field? Is it just a buzzword or what's going on?

The thing about PropTech is that PropTech really describes this new generation of technology that's come out using AI or machine learning or very user-friendly interfaces that's not talking together, that work on the cloud that embrace IOT. It's essentially this new generation of tools that we get to use in our industry that just has a fresh approach is user first and is super smart. I know there was a very long explanation that I just really wanted to set the stage for your audience.

Erin: Thank you for that. I appreciate it, especially with the focus on the real estate industry and the relationship of PropTech and the real estate industry. How does real estate influence other aspects of PropTech?

Nikki: With real estate, what we're talking about it's really about having fixed assets. What you're talking about in PropTech is you're talking about technology. We're having this relationship that goes on that's symbiotic and reliant upon each other. As I described before, what we can have happening is that you can have take enabled real estate that relies on the technology, but then on the flip side, you also need to understand that the technology itself and technology providers also need to have space around them. In the real estate industry, we also want to be thinking about the needs and the spatial requirements for those tech companies.

Erin: How has PropTech evolved over the last decade or so? You've even talked about the different conversations. Well, what are we going to call it? It's so new that it's still got that new baby smell to it. How have you seen it evolve over the past decade or has it been with us longer than that? Now we just have a name for it and we're able to put it in a column, Nikki.

Nikki: I think that's great. I love the idea of the new baby smell. There's a few things that have happened in the past few years that really differentiate this new generation of technology. Some of them being the move to us using smart phones for everything and having these as devices. Our traditional technology has been operated through a desktop computer and it might be on the windows operating system, for example, whereas with PropTech, what just starting to do is understand that a lot of the technology is working off our smartphones and devices.

Another move is also using the cloud increasingly. That means that we're not having to be storing our documents in a fixed location. Then of course around the cloud, there's all that hard infrastructure that's needed in terms of data centers. This new generation of technology is-- and as the internet has really come into its own is that it's all internet first. We're not talking about local technologies, we're talking about networks and devices and information being able to connect across geography, which is something that's quite interesting and definitely wasn't part of the earliest software.

One of the other big trends we've seen over the past especially over the past decade is the rise of the shared economy. This tech enabled real estate that's come through. A lot of it has existed before but this is a formalization of some of it such as before there was co-living, there were roommates and before there was co-working, there was sharing an office space, but now what it is it's about really formalizing the brands and creating productizing what's available to benefit the consumers

Erin: Just to dumb it down for me anyway, Nikki, what is the difference between co-living and roommates since you brought up that example?

Nikki: With co-living, there's some great brands around it and essentially what's happened there is that the operators have created consistency. There's always been a demand and a market to share a space with someone for various reasons, an obvious one being students wanting to share the costs of renting a place where they could get a nicer three-bedroom place rather than a one-bedroom place to have a sense of community.

Now there's always been these benefits, but what happens is that when you do have an informal setup, there's disadvantages to it. Number one being consistency. You don't know what you're going to get, being able to find what you need. Again, in informal economies, you might be able to find a flat-mate, but where are you really going to look? You're looking at a few different places.

In formalizing and productizing some of these concepts such as co-living, there's certain advantages that come out and then by building brand loyalty and understanding the customer and creating beautiful products that compete with each other and do so in an elegant way that puts the customer first. Then there's also ways of then expanding upon the offering to keep getting better and better and better. The flip side of that is that if you have a share house with say, five people living in it, there's no incentive for the share house to get any better, but when you have a co-living situation, there's always learnings and data that comes through to be able to offer a more and more optimal experience.

Erin: When you talk about embracing PropTech for the workplace and sharing workspaces and that sort of thing, how much do you think PropTech has been fueled by so many people working from home during the pandemic? Is this it's moment? When yo