Disruption is a term that you may have heard getting thrown about lately, particularly in the tech industries. However, it’s not something that you hear very often in the commercial real estate industry. But all that is changing as technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in commercial real estate. We are already seeing a huge increase in interest. In 2010, $30 million was invested in real estate technology. Fast forward to 2017 and that figure has increased to $5 billion!

While the term “disruption” can seem scary, and it definitely comes with changes that some may consider negative, there are a ton of advantages that technology offers to those in the commercial real estate industry.

For example, no longer do the larger real estate firms control the market research and access to national investors.  With technology, boutique firms are as competitive and even more so as they have a more local knowledge and able to adapt to their market’s needs.  Traditionally, it was up to these brokers to hit the ground and obtain this data through a lot of legwork and manual research. However, with the emergence of centralized databases, they are now able to save time and have greater access to more information about buyers, sellers, properties, and more.

This technology will continue to improve. Already there are advances in self-guided property tours. Apps such as Rently allow renters to search for apartments on their platform and then guide themselves through the property. This saves valuable time for brokers who spend countless hours traveling from property to property to show listings.

Companies such as Lyra Intel are enabling property owners understand tenant needs through data collection at industry, portfolio and occupant levels.

Over the next few weeks, we will be reviewing some of these key players in the commercial real estate tech space, so stay tuned!