Picking Winners and Losers in Property Technology (PropTech)

Harvard Real Estate Review
Harvard Real Estate Review
20 min readSep 9, 2020

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Iryna Papalamava, MBA ’18, Harvard Business School

As old business models fail and new ones emerge in a time of rapid innovation, investing in PropTech (property technology) presents a challenge and an opportunity for investors in real-estate enterprises. The amount of capital flowing towards PropTech is higher than ever, but the risks of deploying it effectively — so that it can withstand a potential downturn — are high. Unless PropTech follows established rules of innovation and commercialization, the industry’s promise to transform the 217 trillion asset class of real estate will stall.¹

PropTech, also known as real estate technology, is a broad term that describes application of information technology, multi-sided marketplace economics to real estate markets.² PropTech is often thought of as a subset of financial technology, or fintech, because it aims to streamline transactions and eliminate paperwork. However, PropTech includes much more: smart home technology, 3D modeling spaces and data collection to digital dashboards for property management, crowdfunding of real estate projects, and hardware. PropTech also comprises collaborative consumption or shared economy businesses, such as Airbnb, which coordinates the renting of space and/or services by individual owners to individual customers.

As one of the remaining major sectors to be revolutionized by technology, real estate is bound to be challenged and disrupted by innovation. “With 60 percent of people worldwide projected to be concentrated in urban areas by 2030, now is the time to make systemic changes through public/private ventures and entrepreneurs with creative ideas,” said Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity at the Davos Economic Forum in 2018. While the demand for housing continues to rise, the availability of construction labor is declining and labor shortages show no signs of improvement. There is also a serious productivity challenge in the construction industry: global productivity has been growing on average at 1% a year over the past twenty years, compared with growth of 2.8% for the total world economy and 3.6% growth in manufacturing.³ In fact, construction is the only industry where productivity has decreased since 1960. As a result, new technologies, such as prefab homes and 3D printing, are no longer construction science fiction, but a desirable reality for many investors and developers.

Fig. 1: Number of retail stores closing in 2018.
Fig. 2: Number of retail bankruptcies from the start of the year to mid-June, all years (excluding auto-companies.)

Significant changes are also happening to traditional commercial real estate. Department stores are shuttering as online shopping becomes widespread across all classes and demographics. While U.S. retail sales continue to grow at 4.0% to 4.5%,⁴ many physical stores struggle as foot traffic declines. More than 8,000 stores will close in 2019, continuing the staggering rate of store closures from the previous few years (Figure 2).⁵ Retail bankruptcies are on the rise and are projected at 19 as of June 2019, compared to 14 during the same period last year.⁶ In the past two years, once storied brands such as Sears, Payless, Gymboree, and Barneys have all filed for bankruptcy, as did recently Forever 21, the popular teenage clothing business.

Fig. 3: The number of co-working spaces worldwide was projected to cross 20,000 by 2020.

On the office front, the rise of a mobile and remote workforce has created a movement towards mixed workspaces, creative commons and communal work spaces that boost productivity. The number of co-working spaces globally will soon cross 20,000 and reach 25,968 by 2022, an increase of 42% from 2019, which means an average annual increase of 2,595 new spaces since 2015.⁷ These numbers do not come as a surprise, as WeWork and boutique co-working spaces can be found in almost any major city in the world today. And while almost no other anticipated IPO drew as much scrutiny and notoriety as WeWork’s did, co-working is here to stay. In August 2019, two WeWork rivals announced new funding rounds. Knotel announced a $400 million round led by Wafra (Sovereign Wealth Fund of Kuwait),⁸ bringing its valuation to over $1.3 billion. A day later, Industrious announced it had raised $80 million in investment funds.⁹ Workplace trends are disrupting commercial real estate more than ever before pushing developers towards flexibility, green design, and tech innovation.

The ability to create sustainable cities, rebuild infrastructure, and reimagine retail is intimately linked to employing technology to deliver services, extract efficiency, reduce costs, and crowdsource resources. The missions of property developers and the tech community in addressing the challenges mentioned above are aligned more than ever.

PROPTECH BOOM

With global real estate worth around $217 trillion (2.7 times the world’s GDP in 2015)¹⁰ and $900 billion of property assets traded in 2017 alone, we are now seeing the explosion of interest in PropTech from city officials, investors, developers, and entrepreneurs. Real estate is easily one of the biggest industries in the world, making up roughly 60% of all global assets.¹¹ It is the lucrative and unique asset class that has the power to influence national and international economies. According to Steve Weikal, a professor at the MIT Center for Real Estate, PropTech “has its origins in the frustrations concerning the large, unmoving, illiquid asset class and the vested interests of the business which control it, plus unprecedented breakthroughs in technology — cloud computing, leaner coding, mobile devices, sensors — and much lower costs, plus ubiquitous connectivity driven by broadband, Wi-fi and 4G telephony. ”

The PropTech field is complex and diverse. A recent analysis by Andrew Baum, a professor of business at the University of Oxford,¹² is helpful in understanding the varied dimensions of the PropTech phenomenon. As shown in Figure 5, Baum identifies three sectors of PropTech (vertical axis of the chart) as real estate fintech, the shared economy, and smart real estate. To these, I have added another category, sustainability, because the increasing concern about climate change and sustainable living has led the real estate industry to start to incorporate technologies to provide efficient and sustainable energy use.

Baum also lists three impetuses for adopting PropTech, information, transactions (or marketplaces), and management,¹³ which I have supplemented with a category for hardware and construction materials such as sensors, solar panel bricks and manufacturing methods such as 3D printing, offsite manufacturing.

In the first six months of 2019, $12.9 billion was poured into real-estate tech startups by venture investors, which surpassed the $12.7 billion record for all of 2017.¹⁴ For comparison, total venture capital investment in the first half of 2019 was $55 billion¹⁵ with health-care and mobile/telecommunication startups receiving $8.8 and $5.9 billion in venture capital, respectively.¹⁶

Fig. 4: PropTech sectors and drivers.

Two of the top five top funded companies in 2019 in the US, WeWork ($6.6B) and Airbnb ($3.4B) are in real estate tech vertical (Figure 4). Several real estate technology companies are now publicly traded: Zillow, Trulia (acquired by Zillow), Redfin, GreenSky, and American Homes 4Rent in the U.S.; and Purple Bricks and Zoopla in the U.K.

Fig. 5: List of PropTech VC’s.

Several specialized PropTech venture funds emerged with the purpose of focusing exclusively on real estate startups. One of them is Fifth Wall, a Los Angeles based fund raised $503M sophomore fund (the largest of its kind to date), following its $212M debut fund in 2017.¹⁷ Camber Creek, another venture capital firm focused on real estate tech, is targeting $120 million for its largest fund to date (following the initial $20M and second $30M funds). New York-based MetaProp, a VC fund and incubator, is raising $100 million for its third fund, the largest to date. Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Brick & Mortar Ventures, launched a $100 million fund focused exclusively on construction tech. In 2018, JLL announced the creation of JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, investing $100M.¹⁸ JLL Spark is one of the newest PropTech funds and the only major fund managed by a commercial brokerage. Navitas, founded in 2009 and among the first to focus on then nascent PropTech sector, raised $80M to date. And finally, there is RXR PropTech Fund, officially launched by RXR realty earlier this year and planning to raise $50M by the end of 2019.

Fig. 6: Venture capital investment across sectors (US $ Billions, H1 2019.)

With SoftBank leading the massive round for WeWork and Google, along with Technology Crossover Ventures, driving Airbnb’s fundraise, there is also a list of the most active real estate tech investors in the US. According to Venture Scanner, there are 1.8K PropTech startups today with ~3K investors and total of $80B raised globally.¹⁹ For comparison, in 2016 Venture Scanner recorded total of $28 billion in across 1,258 Real Estate Technology companies in 12 categories from 61 countries (Figure 6).

INVEST AT YOUR OWN RISK

With the great momentum of investment activity and favorable macro trends, there is still no guarantee that PropTech innovation will provide a positive return on investment.

Fig. 7: Top 5 funded U.S. companies in Q2 2019.

Take, for example, a young company , 42 Floors, which had a strong start but hit a wall. The San Francisco-based online commercial real estate listing platform has raised $17.4 million since its founding in 2011. In January 2013, two months after raising $12 million in a second Series B funding round, it laid off half of its staff, shut down a year-old brokerage business, and refocused on its core product, partly due to the challenges that come from bridging the online platform with traditional brokerage.²⁰ 42 Floors is still around, but instead of functioning as a broker, it uses search engine optimization to collect commercial real estate (CRE) listings from the World Wide Web, which it cleans up and aggregates.

Another PropTech company, Campus, launched in 2013 and began renting mini-dorm-type apartments in Manhattan and San Francisco, but soon closed due to cash flow management problems. During its two-year run, 23-year-old CEO Tom Currier, a Thiel Fellow (given $100,000 by famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel to drop out of Stanford), attracted a lot of attention from the media when he opened 30 co-living houses with 150 residents. “Despite continued attempts,” Currier later wrote, “… we were unable to make Campus into an economically viable business”.²¹

Similarly, New York City-based Retail MLS, multiple listing services for retail market, went under in 2015 after five years of operations. “Because it was a free service, we needed investors to fund it until we could get to the point where we could charge people,” said founder Benjamin Zises, a former broker at Mogull Realty.²² Another New York startup, Clean Cube, which installs lockers in non-doorman buildings for laundry drop-off and pickup, is still around, but the core founders have left. According to James Dearsley²³, partner at PropTech Consult and author of “Everything PropTech” blog,²⁴ too few PropTech entrepreneurs understand the real estate business. “I feel the lack of actual industry knowledge may be the fundamental reason their seemingly great ideas fail. Most will never have got involved with buying a commercial property or leasing one — let alone being a commercial agent.”²⁵

Fig. 8: Real estate technology funding over time (data cumulative through June 2019).

Yet good quality real estate data can be hard to come by. Data from a popular CRE company, for example, relies on calling brokers, who may or may not want to share full information about a listing. It remains to be seen what innovative PropTech startups will be able to unlock sustainable product-market fit and growth. However, it’s obvious that getting to profitability and scale in real estate tech is complex due to information asymmetry between insiders and investment markets. If VCs and institutional investors pour large investments into PropTech, they run the risk of backing technologies and business models that are fundamentally flawed.

This question also extends to WeWork, the beleaguered office space rental company that initially associated its brand with the disruption it brings to real estate industry through technology and innovation. At the time of publication, the company’s IPO collapsed after months of preparation, and the expected $47B valuation fell by tens of billions of dollars in a matter of weeks. After seeing its S-1, investors and analysts turned bearish given the company’s bleak financial outlook, its tangled corporate structure and lack of corporate governance and ludicrous behavior of its flamboyant founder, Adam Neumann, who was ousted as CEO. Softbank took over majority ownership at WeWork. At the time of publication Softbank was trying to pick up the pieces and move forward by divesting WeWork from its non-core businesses.

According to Professor Nori Gerardo Lietz of Harvard Business School, WeWork took advantage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012 (the “JOBS Act”) to present its financials in such a way that, in aggregate, could be considered misleading.²⁶ It presented the most favorable outcomes, without providing counterbalancing offsets to one-time concessions and initial discounts. For example, WeWork presented “contribution margin” instead of a GAAP-compliant EBITDA as the basis of how to analyze their unit economics. The “contribution margin” metric incorporates the benefit of free rent and other concessions it receives from landlords on the front-end without disclosing the future costs the company will incur when these concessions will not apply.

Fig. 9: SoftBank’s high profile investments in PropTech.

SoftBank leader Masayoshi Son admitted that it was a mistake to have invested in WeWork. During an earnings conference, Son said that WeWork’s troubles resulted in “quite a large impact” on SoftBank and its Vision Fund. “My judgement in investment was not right in many ways,” Son said, according to SoftBank’s translator, adding that he regretted the decision. The complexities of analyzing business strategies accurately further illustrates the potential risks and uncertainties associated with investing in real-estate related ventures.

WHY NEW TECHNOLOGIES OFTEN FAIL

What separates those who didn’t get it right in PropTech and those who are poised to succeed? Research shows that there are four main reasons why advanced technologies fail: technical challenges, systemic complexity, head-on competition, and because customers don’t want it.²⁷

Although a relatively less important right now, technical issues will probably challenge PropTech ventures in the future. As of now, smart buildings/ Internet of Things (IoT) technologies face technical limitations related to connectivity, compatibility, and longevity, with many different technologies competing to become the standard. For example, when networks grow to join billions of devices, centralized systems will turn into bottlenecks. Hardware capabilities for capturing real estate images are limited. Developers are forced to either use low-quality images or develop the images themselves at a substantial cost, often pricing the bulk of the virtual reality market out of reach. 3D and Virtual Tour space companies, like Matterport and their large number of competitors, face extreme challenges due to using expensive, and at least for now proprietary hardware.

The use of blockchain technology in real estate also faces technology barriers. For example, blockchain is limited in handling large amounts of concurrent users, which makes it less competitive compared to traditional solutions. Blockchain technology used by Bitcoin and Etherium is designed to handle 7–15 transactions per second,²⁸ which creates network traffic jams and drives costs per transaction up.

But the main barrier for adoption of blockchain to trade CRE assets is that none of these blockchain companies have a critical mass of assets actually available to trade on their platforms. For example, a blockchain CRE marketplace company called BuildingBits has been around since 2016 with very little traction: there are only three buildings on their platform.²⁹

An even greater threat to PropTech enterprises is systemic complexity. Property is a real asset where the supply side is controlled by planning or zoning regulations and is highly price inelastic. The returns delivered by the property are heavily influenced by appraisals that are based on subjective opinions and pricing of comparable. Real estate is highly illiquid and substantial in terms of capital required to develop, operate or buy. It is expensive to trade real estate, and there can be a vast bid-offer spread (gap between what buyers will offer and sellers will accept). Research and due diligence costs are significant. Therefore, players work with each other based on relationships, trust, and both objective and subjective decision-making. One of the primary resources that the new entrants do not have is relationships and track record. Therefore, they will not be successful in getting deals done in time to return money to venture capitalist investors as they will likely get stuck in “procurement purgatory.” For this reason, even large companies such as Cisco and IBM, who had invested in IoT and Smart Buildings, had difficulty obtaining PropTech contracts.³⁰

The existing value chain is already lucrative and generates high margins. Incumbent players do not have an incentive to switch to new vendors, solutions or partnerships. When new startups enter the space, they come in with several features but not a full stack solution. In other words, startups tend to be prematurely modular, before their product is “good enough” and they most likely will fail when trying to sell a modular feature to an established market or set of relationship-based players. Startups in PropTech would be better off by providing a full vertically integrated solution to whatever problem they are solving, which they can execute from soup to nuts. Disruptive products require disruptive channels because existing channels don’t have the motivation to use these new products.

Another cause of the commercial failure of advanced technologies is head-on competition with established technologies or processes.³¹

Whenever new technologies compete head-on with established players, they face the challenges of performance gaps and higher costs. For example, crowd-funding and equity-raising platforms are being deployed in competition with existing $120B per year investment from private equity funds and pension funds.³² In addition, investors can invest in REITs to get access to commercial estate, so crowdfunding startups come against an established investment instrument of REIT backed by multi-billion investment firms. Similarly, shared economy and co-living startups bring new models of co-living to the market to compete with traditional residential real estate investors. Competition for investing in residential real estate in particular is brutal, given that this asset class is favored by countless large investors as for most recession proof investment vehicle, which builds wealth like no other instrument. Digitizing appraisal software will compete with live appraisers who bring many years of experience in a given neighborhood and relationships with residents and municipalities. These appraisers are not interested in giving up their livelihood to software. However, if startups working on appraiser software (e.g., Reggora, Bowery Valuation) find properties that are not attractive for appraisers due to low revenue or inconvenience of access, these ventures can build up their business over time.

A fourth reason technology startups fail is that their technology, however superior technically, does not help customers do the job that they want to get done. Many great technologies were originally glorified but ultimately rejected by consumers — Google Glass, Amazon Fire Phone, Segway, QR codes, to name a few. To avoid their fate, real estate startups must see their offerings from the vantage point of B2C and B2B customers, especially the latterBrokers offer a service that is an integral part of the transaction process. The success of the real estate transactions depend on regulatory, personal, and even weather variables. The human in charge must juggle the tenuous psychological and emotional variables of a transaction, making many technologies that are coming to market “not good enough.”

Fig. 10: Comparison of real estate property technology across four main blockers.

As much as investors and executives love looking at customer, product and competition data, real estate shares many tenets of behavioral economics, with complex psychological, social and emotional factors affecting decisions in the space. This means investors and founders have to apply rigor to analyzing qualitative insights as much as quantitative in their approach to selecting what companies to start and invest in PropTech space.

LESSONS FOR THE PROPTECH INDUSTRY

Entrepreneurs, investors, and institutions interested in deploying real estate technology should follow a few simple rules in order to maximize their chances of success.

Go after the fringe, not competition. Understand that in a relationship-based “club” of real estate players, fighting for incumbents’ core markets will be fruitless. Find markets of non-consumers and bring your product or service to them at a fraction of a price. For example, PeerStreet is a platform focused on democratizing access to real estate debt. The company provides investments in high-yield, short term, real estate backed loans. PeerStreet’s unique marketplace allows investors to diversify their capital in an asset class that has been traditionally difficult to access.

Don’t offer prematurely modular “features” as your product. Having the best site with property listings, however brilliant, will not be enough to motivate brokers and consumers to use it. Instead, solve property search and purchase transaction end-to-end, without relying on third-party appraisers, brokers or bankers. Remember that disruption products require disruptive channels. Therefore, owning a solution soup to nuts will allow you to move faster and go directly to consumers. For example, Opendoor set out to reinvent life’s most important transaction with home sellers and buyers in mind. They’ve helped thousands of people sell their homes online in minutes, removing all of the headache, uncertainty and risk from the transaction.

Beware of holding on to interdependency for too long before allowing certain divisions to become modular. With capital-intensive products, like 3D viewing, for example, customers might want to pay only for a specific part of the service or types of images. Once product reliability is achieved unbundling to best fit customer needs can create new lines of business and revenue growth. Another example could be building businesses in building flexible workspace and amenity platforms. As the industry matures, complexity also goes up as tenants demand experience, community, hospitality, and not just a place to work. Landlords might benefit from partnering with existing service providers that can launch a scalable solution in a matter of months, such as Convene.

Analyze motivation of stakeholders — not everyone will want to adopt your technology, even if it makes things faster, better, cheaper. Real estate brokers, appraisers and bankers derive direct and indirect value from existing processes, however manual, and will not jump onto a new automated AI tech platform.

In the end, new real estate technology products must conform to well-established rules of disruptive innovation if they are to succeed in the market. It would be a mistake for investors to pour large amounts of money in PropTech without understanding the legacy rules of the real estate game, the power of long-term existing networks, competition from incumbents, and acceptance of new markets.

Commentary by David Gerster

David Gerster (AB ’92) is an investor with the JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, a $100M early stage proptech fund. Before moving to VC, David led teams in business intelligence, A/B testing, and machine learning, with specific focus on the consumer web. At Yahoo, he led the project to collect billions of anonymized Toolbar clickstreams, which were used to create new features for production web search ranking. At Groupon, he built an elite data science team that trained the first machine-learned ranking models for the Groupon mobile app. He recently led JLL Spark’s investment in OpenSpace, a construction technology startup.

Today’s enthusiasm for proptech stems from the (seemingly sudden) realization that commercial real estate, an enormous asset class, is hugely overdue for a tech upgrade. Everywhere you look, there are opportunities to dramatically improve the experience of landlords, tenants and investors.

Some of the most visible changes will happen on tenants’ smartphones, such as Bluetooth-enabled access control or apps that organize all of a building’s functions in one place. Behind the scenes, landlords and property managers can now track actual utilization of every room in a building, rather than simple “occupancy” from counting leases. Security cameras will receive a much-needed AI upgrade, to the relief of the guard tasked with monitoring a dozen video feeds. Even the electric motor is getting a makeover, with highly efficient switched reluctance motors driving cost savings of 50% or more in HVAC systems. Finally, for owners and investors, new software tools are replacing ancient, spreadsheet-based workflows, reducing errors and removing silos.

As Iryna Papalamava points out in her essay, Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework is highly relevant to the fast-evolving proptech sector. Under “tech challenges”, you find those problems that are simply too hard to solve (for example, creating individual temperature zones in a large open office). Under “systemic complexity”, you find companies who underestimate the economic and logistical realities of the built environment in their quest for a tech multiple, with WeWork as the most obvious example. “Head-on competition with established players” describes several proptech startups I’ve seen, with the added twist that the established player is also their own customer.

But I find the fourth reason — the customer simply doesn’t want it! — most relevant to my daily work as an investor. I have seen brilliant teams offer fantastically creative solutions, only to learn that no one wants to buy it, or that the problem itself is slowly going away as the general state of technology improves. This is an easy trap to fall into for both entrepreneurs and investors: the technology itself is so cool, you forget to ask how useful it actually is (and will be in the future). Proptech investors would do well to remember Clayton Christensen’s famous question: “What is this product being hired to do?”

Endnotes:

1. Sheeraz Raza, “Real Estate By Far The Dominant Asset Class — Full Report”, www.valuewalk.com, 28 January 2016

2. Guttman, Jonathan (2015). “The Impending Opportunity In Real Estate Technology”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2019–05–25

3. McKinsey Global Institute, Reinventing construction: A route to higher productivity, February 2017

4. Kevin Brass, “Future of Retail Is Brick-and-Mortar Stores and E-Commerce Working Better Together”, urbanland.uli.org, 3 May 2018

5. Hayley Peterson, “More than 8,000 stores are closing in 2019 as the retail apocalypse drags on — here’s the full list.”https://www.businessinsider.com, 14 August 2019

6. Mamta Badkar, “US retailers file for bankruptcy at swift pace in 2019”,https://www.ft.com, 19 June 2019

7. Global Coworking Survey, 2019

8. Kyle Wiggers, “Knotel raises $400 million to lease and manage flexible working spaces.” Venturebeat, 21 August 2019

9. Gillian Tan, “Another WeWork Rival Lures Cash, Tapping Brookfield and Equinox.” Bloomberg, 22 August 2019

10. “World real estate accounts for 60% of all mainstream assets”, Savills, 25 January 2016, http://www.savills.com/_news/article/105347/198559-0/1/2016/world-real-estate-accounts-for-60--of-all-mainstream-assets

11. “World real estate accounts for 60% of all mainstream assets”, Savills, 25 January 2016, http://www.savills.com/_news/article/105347/198559-0/1/2016/world-real-estate-accounts-for-60--of-all-mainstream-assets

12. “proptech 3.0: the Future of Real Estate,” Andrew Baum, April 2017, https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-07/proptech3.0.pdf

13. Not all segments seem likely to be populated.

14. Peter Grant and Konrad Putzier, “Commercial Property Joins Tech Revolution as Spending Soars.” WSJ. 2 July 2019

15. The second highest recorded total since the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000

16. PwC / CB Insights, MoneyTree™ Report Q2 2019

17. Kate Clark, “Fifth Wall Ventures raises $503M for second real estate fund”, TechCrunch, 17 July 2019

18. “JLL Spark announces $100 million global venture fund”, JLL Newsroom, 5 June 2018

19. https://www.venturescanner.com, retrieved in May 2019

20. “Welcome to Real Estate Tech Graveyard”, https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/welcome-to-real-estates-tech-graveyard/

21. “Campus Co-Living in San Francisco and New York Closes”, http://www.businessinsider.com/campus-co-living-san-francisco-new-york-closes-2015-6

22. http://retailmls.com/

23. http://www.jamesdearsley.co.uk/about-james/

24. http://www.jamesdearsley.co.uk/uk-property-technology-companies-ecosystem/

25. http://www.jamesdearsley.co.uk/the-problem-with-proptech/

26. Nori Gerardo Lietz, “WeWork — the IPO that Shouldn’t?” HBS Working Knowledge, 18 September 2019

27. Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business,

28. “Obstacles Currently Facing Blockchain Technology”, https://www.inc.com/arcblock/five-obstacles-currently-facing-blockchain-technology.html

29. BuildingBits Website, https://buildingbits.com, retrieved on 10 Septemebr 2019

30. “proptech: Next Big Thing”, https://e27.co/proptech-next-big-thing-complex-think-20170608/

31. Clayton Christensen et al, “What is Disruptive Innovation?,” Harvard Business Review, December 2015

32. “Private Equity Funds Focused on Property Raising Less Capital”, https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-funds-focused-on-property-raising-less-capital-1514909299

Sources of Illustrations:

1. Cheng, Jenny. “Retail Stores Closing in 2018.” April 7, 2018. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/stores-closing-in-2018-2017-12

2. Badkar, Mamta/FT, S&P Global Market Intelligence. “US retailers file for bankruptcy at brisk pace in 2019.” June 19, 2019. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/4e3a2138-9282-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271

3. CoworkingResources. “Number of Coworking Spaces Worldwide.” May 15, 2019. CoworkingResources. https://www.coworkingresources.org/blog/key-figures-coworking-growth

4. Baum, Andrew, with modifications by author. “PropTech 3.0: The Future of Real Estate.” April 2017. https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2018-07/PropTech3.0.pdf

5. Vander Capital Partners. “Major PropTech VCs in North America.” 2019.

6. By author.

7. PwC. “Top 5 Funded U.S. Companies — Q2 2019.” 2019. PwC Insights MoneyTree™ Report Q2 2019.

8. Venture Scanner. “Real Estate Technology Funding Over Time.” 2019.

9. Vander Capital Partners, with sources from Crunchbase, The Real Deal, Wired, Bloomberg, Bisnow. “SoftBank’s High Profile Investments in PropTech.” 2019.

10. By author.

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