Kastle Systems and CREtech have formed a joint research partnership to create and grow a resource database of the top companies in the proptech industry.
CREtech CEO Michael Beckerman and Kastle CEO Haniel Lynn unveiled the new digital catalog called Real Estate Tech360 at the CREtech San Diego 2022 event today at the city’s convention center.
The goal is to give decision makers and investors a way to monitor the development of new tech solutions in real estate, and provide them a tool to discern among the tens of thousands of companies in the proptech field. Real Estate Tech360 will map out companies across the country as they evolve, and highlight those that become particularly relevant at any given period (think, perhaps: a global pandemic?) as Kastle and CREtech update the platform each quarter.
Beckerman said the companies wanted to create a “research report” that would help the industry by organizing the solutions that are leading the way in the proptech sector. To create Real Estate Tech360, the firms researched thousands of proptech startups and selected companies that are leaders of the built environment, based on size and market value. The criteria focuses on aspects like employee count, how much a company has raised, and how much traction it has in the market.
“When I got started in the industry 10 years ago, there were a handful of startups, and not that much money was coming into the ecosystem,” he said at the event. “Fast forward to today, there’s 10,000 startups globally focused on proptech. There’s $30 billion or so being invested into this ecosystem each year.”
With how quickly proptech is growing, Beckerman explained they have found general confusion from clients — which includes owners, investors and operators. Lynn said clients frequently ask his advice on where to hire experts on aspects like tenant amenities and tenant engagement, or where to find perspectives on IoT and covered networks.
Together, Kastle and CREtech wanted to share information about the way the industry is organized, because “it’s so fragmented. It’s messy, it’s unorganized and it’s confusing,”
The real estate industry has also been a notable laggard in terms of investing in technology, Beckerman added. As an industry, real estate typically invests less than 1 percent in research and development, while other industries average 35 percent.
Lynn said the new platform will bring greater clarity and insight to the “increasingly complex proptech landscape, especially as expectations of real estate technology are evolving.”
Washington, D.C.-based Kastle is the country’s largest managed services technology security provider. Lynn said their expertise runs the gamut from property access control, to cloud-based video, parking management and more.
Gregory Cornfield can be reached at gcornfield@commercialobserver.com.
