Technology

By virtually all accounts, commercial real estate was late to the technology revolution.

A variety of reasons explain the CRE tech lag, beginning with the fact that income-producing real estate assets aren’t homogeneous in the same way as single-family homes.

That makes standardized solutions, be it devices or software applications, challenging to develop… especially by people outside the commercial real estate industry. Nonstandard building systems and the lack of industry data standards also have been major impediments to CRE tech advancement.

In the last five years, however, commercial real estate has caught up and leapt ahead in many ways. Tech developers borne of the real estate industry have brought to market very customized, sector specific applications for everything from building operations and management to investor relations to broker prospecting.

At the same time, a number of first-generation real estate tech and information services companies have matured, reached new heights of adoption, and generally hit their stride through continual innovation and focus on real estate. Some, daresay, have become “standards”… recognizing that in the digital age status as a standard can be short-lived.

As a real estate PR firm and marketing agency serving commercial real estate for a long span, we’ve seen CRE tech evolve and intuitively understand the context, including the challenges of marketing and selling into the real estate industry.