Sure, I am passionate about enabling businesses with Technology! Is this passion about Technology alone? Through my 30 years of experience in creating digital solutions for various industries, it has never been about Technology!  If you are a Technologist reading this article, I am sure you have experienced this. Our community of technologists always hopes, that if you are a business user you have experienced and used Technology solutions, that allow you to take your business acumen to the next level! By tapping into efficiencies by allowing you to work faster, by tapping into productivity by making your work qualitatively better or by tapping into the data analytics and business insights you have at your fingertips to scale your business!

Last 8 years I have worked exclusively in the Real Estate industry. Real Estate Industry has been slow to adopt Technology. The last few years have seen a tremendous shift as the real estate market is getting flipped on its head! There has been continuous growth as we are seeing a proliferation of products and application platforms in the market that are defining the landscape of the new software industry for Real Estate called “PropTech”. And this pace has accelerated for this industry too, at a very rapid rate due to the Pandemic as we are compelled to perform a lot of our business remotely.

As I drove many technical implementations for different teams for different business segments in this world of Real Estate and Construction. Along with my teams we have lived through the pain of evaluating, selecting, and then implementing many such application platforms and developing solutions. Many times, we had to go extra miles to find the right platform and most of the time we could never find a product that will fit our needs and had to customize these solutions heavily. This resulted into a galore of applications which in some cases don’t interface with each other and in other cases lacked the right technical capabilities and in other cases had overlapping capabilities. Due to these challenges the teams had to churn to bring all the business insights into one place. I have seen the unique challenges of this industry and have helped create enterprise technology strategy focusing on the digital transformation.

On the other hand, we are also dealing with the boards, executives, business leaders, stakeholders, teams and users who traditionally have not used Technology as a business enabler. For them, the Technology has always been an accessory, a support system, an overhead, and an expense! They have not experienced a modern software/product development, which is an empirical process, that call for following Agile or SCALE framework. It is very hard to get them to understand how technology solutions should be co-owned and delivered together as a team where we understand each other’s worlds.

This new modern world is all about Technology. Advances in Technology like Smart Mobile Devices, Wifi/5G and cloud based/social media platforms and apps can be accessed anywhere, and no one is able to escape this world. Gen Zs and Millennials are expecting the same experience in their workplace, Gen Xs are trying their best to adopt and baby boomers are fearing to get left behind. The new and modern workplaces have a mix of all these generations and add to that the state of Real estate industry which was slow to adopt this modern world.

With the backdrop of all this, for the Technology Executives of this industry, the scope of work has widened and heightened covering all the hierarchies of the organization’s chart. It is not just limited to enabling Technology solutions. They are compelled to expand and evolve and play multiple roles of teachers, mentors, coaches, partners, listeners, change-agents, champions, people-persons and then technologists.

We will be focusing on various such issues from the lens of a Real Estate Technology Executive, who has been there, done that! Who has failed, learned, and got up and improved and ready to fail again, so we can improve and pivot again, so we can work together, so we can compete in this digital business world – to offer the best experience and value to the “consumers” of Real Estate/Spaces.

Stay tuned, as we explore the world of Real Estate and life cycle of this asset as it is incepted from Land and matures to be a particular product type as a Commercial or Residential real estate space which has a particular objective of providing a particular service to its consumers. We will get into different dynamics/factors that have played in enabling technologies for these different business segments such as Land Sales, Development and Construction, Leasing, Tenant coordination, Property Management and services related to that.