Digital transformation in the real estate business
*Photo by Gavin Whitner
The last two weeks we have been in the US again. Apart of plenty of discussions with potential customers and partners, we’ve also scanned the real estate market. More precisely: We were having a deeper look at some start-ups that are active or moving into that industry. There is much more activity in the digital space in the last two years around real estate than ever before, and combined with the fact that this industry is a fairly traditional business, it’s pretty clear that real estate is one of the next big things regarding digital transformation.
Here is an overview of some interesting and exciting companies we’ve encountered. We’ve focused solely on those companies that help optimize the usage of space, those who are in the data acquisition, aggregation and visualization business and those who offer services in order to make life of people at home easier.
UTILITIZATION OPTIMIZATION
Storefront
Want to open a pop up store for 2000 USD, within12 days and make 4 times more sales than a traditional store? Then you have to go to storefront, which helps you find and rent short-term retail spaces. https://www.thestorefront.com
Roommates.com
Roommates.com is a roommate matching service in the US: Roommates matches people who wouldn’t be capable to rent an apartment on their own due to high prices with others who would like to share the rent.
http://www.roommates.com/
Wework
Wework is a four year old co-working space organisation worth 5 bn USD. They outpaced Regus (worth 2.8 bn) by building up communities of entrepreneurs in shared office spaces.
Thewalltalk (alpha stadium)
Maybe a new kid on the block: Thewalltalk wants to turn unused office or retail space into temporary, affordable advertising space.
http://www.thewalltalk.com
DATA AGGREGATORS AND VISUALIZATION
Compstack
Compstak is a marketplace for the exchange of lease comps (= complete records of a lease transactions that have taken place) for brokers, appraisers, researchers as well as lenders, landlords and investors. Data acquisition relies on a crowdsourced approach, where everybody contributes and advanced machine learning is used to verify the data.
http://compstak.com/
Reonomy
Reonomy offers a research platform enabling commercial real estate investors and lenders to conduct quant-based analyses on property and market-level data.
https://www.reonomy.com
Rentlytics
Rentlytics helps provide real estate investors and managers with better insights into their property and portfolio performance.
http://rentlytics.com/company/
SERVICES TO MAKE LIFE @HOME EASIER
Angie’s list
Angies list is about finding trustworthy local services providers like plumbers and mechanics with the help of ratings and reviews. Angies list curates more than 700 different service categories and receives more than 60’000 reviews about service providers each month.
Guesty
Guesty helps you manage your rentals on platforms like Airbnb, from responding to guest inquiries to cleaning to providing support for your guests.
https://www.guesty.com/
Honest Buildings
Honest Buildings offers owners professional bid management and workflow tools, and professionals a real estate owner community.
http://www.Honestbuildings.com
Updater
Updater started by helping people inform all relevant contacts (banks, insurance companies, etc.) once they moved to an other place and now turned into an organization that helps organize all moving-related tasks on one website.
http://app.updater.com/welcome