I’ve written a number of posts over the years discussing the state of CRE technology and, in hindsight, they may seem largely negative. I’ve talked about CRE Tech being stuck in the early 2000’s. About how there is no such thing as CRE Big Data. How it may not be possible to do CRE Technology right.
None of this means I’m not a big fan of technology’s impact on our industry. I’m a huge user of real estate systems such as LeaseHarbor and several proprietary systems. But more than that, general technology has a huge impact on everything that we do. Tools such as Skype, IFTTT, Wunderlist, Google Docs and many others are daily productivity enhancers. I also see huge potential for Slack and Github for a lot of what we do in our industry.
Our biggest weakness in CRE historically is our desire to silo communications and protect our data and networks. Most of the top tools in the industry still focus on the individual and controlling communications. Systems like Slack and the new Microsoft Teams will continue to urge us to break down our artificial communications barriers. Shared information makes people significantly more productive and makes our solutions significantly more robust.
It’s unfortunate that the way most money in our industry flow is through landlord paid commissions. That one single fact is what sets so much of everything else back. The ultimate disruptive tool will be the one that fixes the money flow.