A few months ago, I joined a panel at the Inman Conference here in NYC with Brian Hirsch from Tribeca Venture Partners, Joanne Wilson from Gotham Gal Ventures, and Amy Wu from IA Ventures to discuss venture capitalists' views about real estate startups. There's a good review of that panel posted here.
I've been bullish on opportunities around real estate technology for several years and certainly since I began investing professionally in 2013. We've made several investments that touch real estate at SoftBank Capital, including Reonomy, FieldLens and Updater. Real Estate is probably the largest asset class still left largely unaffected by the power of the internet and technology. With the exception of residential listing services like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin that have done well, the market continues to operate in similar fashion as it did 100 years ago. Opacity and protected relationships continue to drive key segments of the real estate market including: vendor/trade discovery, product discovery, project management, commercial brokerage, data and analytics. This will change. My bet is that it will happen sooner rather than later and we're betting our money on it.
After the panel, several of us were asked to record so-called webisodes in the recording studio. Here is mine: