What innovations can be brought to the Commercial Real Estate industry?
I currently work in CRE and am curious as to what applications can be brought to the market? Its consistently been mentioned that CRE is constantly in the stone age in regards to technological innovations. A few areas - Data, Analysis, and Reporting. I work in institutional real estate and we still heavily rely on legacy data providers (Costar and Brokerages), do most of our analysis in Excel, and Reporting in Word and Powerpoint. Financial instruments have been largely unchanged for the past 20 years, and perhaps new ways to fund debt and equity could be areas for change. By and large though, new ways to get data that is meaningful and ways to analyse it could be winners. Also, CRE has changed a lot in the last couple of years. First movers like VTS, Hightower, the crowdfunding companies, and even brokerage companies are starting to embrace technology beyond email and phone calls. We use Costar almost exclusively. When you discuss new ways of getting data, how would that be something materially different from Costar? What about innovations for a contact management system?