On Tuesday evening, dot.LA hosted a Proptech Salon to create space for proptech founders and investors to discuss how Southern California real estate startups are disrupting the industry. The conversation about the proptech future ran from the data silo problem behind JoyHub, soon to be renamed Revolution RE, to fundraising in a tightening market and whether virtual homes in the metaverse are worth anything. This recap covers what was said and why it still matters for anyone building on real estate data.
The salon was an invitation-only evening for the Southern California proptech community. Over 70 invited guests gathered at WeWork’s Century City location. Attendees included Michael Martin of Avenue 8, Nick Marino of TruLiv, and Andrew Swerdloff of StayOpen.
The format was conversational rather than a pitch night. dot.LA CEO Sam Adams and Executive Chairman Spencer Rascoff hosted, and the evening moved through three threads that together sketch a proptech future: the data behind real estate operations, the capital environment founders were walking into, and virtual real estate. dot.LA published its own recap of the Proptech Salon, which is the source for the quotes below.
The event kicked off with a conversation with JoyHub co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Braman. She announced that the data aggregation and business intelligence platform would soon change its name to Revolution RE. Prior to starting JoyHub, Braman spent time at crowdfunding real estate platform Realty Mogul as senior managing director. That background, on the investing side of rental property, shaped what she chose to build next. The company’s story since is on the Revolution RE about page.
Braman said the inspiration for creating JoyHub came from the problems she saw in the real estate industry. Two problems in particular: the lack of data consistency, and the overwhelming amount of data that operators of apartments and rental properties have to make sense of. She saw a need for a tool that could simplify the data for real estate companies so they could use it effectively.
“I learned that legacy technology created a lot of problems,” she said. “Proptech and all these new innovative solutions were compounding the problem by creating massive amounts of data silos.”
That is the uncomfortable part of the proptech future. Every new tool an operator adopts solves one workflow and creates one more system that holds part of the truth. Leasing lives in one place, accounting in another, maintenance in a third. None of them describe a property the same way. The operator ends up with more data and less clarity.
A tool that simplifies real estate data, in the sense Braman described, has three jobs. Each one addresses a piece of the silo problem:
Consistency is the hard part, and it is the part legacy systems and new proptech tools alike tend to skip. Our note on what makes a multifamily-specific data model different explains why a generic approach breaks on apartment data. The mechanics of the collection and standardization work are in our overview of the extraction and standardization process.
With any new venture or startup, there is always a risk of it failing, Braman said. “Anyone who tells you that starting a company during a pandemic is easy is not being truthful,” she said. She added that she was lucky to be able to work with a team she already knew well from her first startup experience.
For much of the rest of the startup community, times were looking more challenging than they had been not long before. “The high-gross C, D unicorn-type companies are having a very challenging time raising up rounds,” dot.LA Executive Chairman Spencer Rascoff said. “And A and B—not so great.”
Rascoff offered some advice to young companies hoping to weather the storm. “Realistically, you should try to tighten your belt as much as possible to extend the runway as long as possible so that if you can’t get a round done this year, you prioritize survival over growth,” he said. “Because there’ll be time for growth later.”
For proptech specifically, that advice lands on a sector that sells into a slow-moving industry. Real estate operators adopt carefully, and sales cycles are long. A founder who cannot reach the next round on the current one is betting that customers move faster than they usually do. Runway is what buys the time for the proptech future to arrive on the customer’s schedule rather than the investor’s.
Another hot topic in proptech was virtual real estate. The concept of the metaverse has grown in popularity as new virtual environments go online. Celebrities like Snoop Dogg already own land in some of these new worlds. In December, one of his fans purchased a plot of land for $450,000 just to be the rapper-entrepreneur’s virtual neighbor.
As an investor, Rascoff said he is skeptical about buying land in the metaverse. “The big reason why I’m overall skeptical of this is for some of these things, you need counties to play ball,” Rascoff said. “But it’s fun and interesting to talk about how title might be disruptive through blockchain.”
The distinction he drew is a useful one for reading the proptech future. Virtual land as an asset depends on a market agreeing it has value. Title on a blockchain depends on counties, the institutions that actually record ownership, agreeing to participate. The second is a data and records problem, which is the kind of problem proptech has historically been good at. The first is a question of taste.
The night was capped with a question from dot.LA CEO Sam Adams: “If given a million dollars to invest, where would that money go?”
Braman said she would have to diversify and choose cannabis along with venture funds. Rascoff admitted his answer was less exciting, but said he would use the money to buy a “basket of growth tech stocks that are at two-to-five-year lows.”
Read together, the two answers say something about the moment. One bet on new categories still being formed. The other bet on proven companies temporarily priced for a downturn. Both are wagers that the proptech future, and the technology sector around it, would look better in a few years than the fundraising climate of that spring suggested.
Proptech is the category of technology companies building software and services for the real estate industry, from leasing and property operations to investing and transactions. At the dot.LA salon it was discussed as a set of Southern California startups disrupting how real estate is bought, managed, and analyzed. Its side effect, as Elizabeth Braman noted, is that each new solution can add another data silo.
Real estate operators generate an overwhelming amount of data across legacy systems and newer proptech tools, and the lack of consistency between them is the core problem. The shift is toward platforms that aggregate that data, make it consistent, and present it as business intelligence operators can act on. That is the gap JoyHub, now Revolution RE, was founded to close.
At the salon, Spencer Rascoff said he was skeptical of buying land in the metaverse, because many of the interesting applications need counties to participate. He did find the idea of blockchain-based title worth discussing. The distinction is between virtual land as a speculative asset and blockchain as a records technology, and only the second depends on real-world institutions.
Rascoff said later-stage companies were having a very challenging time raising up rounds and that earlier rounds were not much better. His advice was to tighten the belt as much as possible, extend runway as long as possible, and prioritize survival over growth if a round cannot get done this year. There will be time for growth later.
Every system an operator runs, collected and standardized into one model, so the data silos proptech created stop hiding the picture.
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