On Innovation: Do We Have the Correct Goals?
Reflections after a wonderful dinner at Blueprint
Let’s try to get back to real estate industry related topics, shall we?
A couple of nights ago, I attended the annual GEM Community Dinner at Blueprint, the real estate tech and finance conference. Drew Meyers does a wonderful job of bringing together proptech and fintech startup folks with investors and the like, and these in-person gatherings are one of the best things GEM does. I have been pleased to help organize a couple of these things in my home city of Las Vegas, to get people off The Strip whenever possible.
In any event, while I did not get to talk to everyone in the room, I did speak to quite a few. Plus, it isn’t as if I haven’t been going to real estate conferences for 20 years now. I think I am reasonably informed as to the state of proptech, especially in residential real estate.
We have to discuss the high level state of proptech in the industry.
The founders and entrepreneurs you will meet are almost uniformly smart, driven, focused on creating something new, and deeply knowledgeable about the industry. They are brilliant men and women, typically young though not always, and they have some really great ideas. I love startup founders, and much of what I try to do revolves around trying to make their lives a little bit easier in this crazy industry of ours.
Almost all of the conversations, however, were about data, about AI, about new and creative ways to get, structure, deliver information to make things faster, cheaper, and easier. That mirrors what I have seen for quite a few years now. The overall thrust of technology innovation in our industry today is all on efficiency. It’s on automation, on AI, on doing more faster. Technology, after all, doesn’t make things better; it makes things more efficient.
Those are laudable goals, and from a business standpoint, efficiency is almost always better. Doing more with less, more revenues for less expense, efficiency is the goal for most businesses.
The question is… is efficiency the correct goal for the real estate industry to have in the first place?