This year there’s been some chatter about CREtech reaching market saturation and with that a lot of buyer confusion among decision...
Where Should You Start a RETech Startup?
AnthonyI call New York home but recently spent a lot of time in the Bay Area meeting with founders and funders. Quite often the conversation transitioned into where is the best place to start a REtech start-up? To most, the obvious place to start a tech company is in the Bay Area or New York. Certainly no one will fault you for founding your company in either city. So why would someone locate his or her REtech company elsewhere? No better way to find out than asking a recently funded company. Being that REscour just raised $1.5M to expand their market intelligence feed for CRE professionals, I asked Jake Edens the company’s co-founder and CEO. He had a lot to say…
“Most people probably know a majority of CRE tech startups are coming out of New York or San Francisco. What they don’t realize is there are a cluster of CRE tech companies here in Atlanta. There have been multiple CRE tech startups started in the last 2 years. To me, this makes sense since so many CRE companies have offices or even regional and national headquarters in Atlanta.
I think the reason Atlanta gets overlooked is people don’t realize that Atlanta has a phenomenal tech startup community with more than 700 tech companies, over $300 million per year of venture capital flowing into town, and 11 top ranked engineering programs at Georgia Tech. Needless to say we aren’t lacking talent around here and the tech startup community is so strong in Atlanta due to the help of great incubators and coworking spaces like Tech Square Labs and ATDC, which is one of the top 12 incubators in the world and headquarters for REscour. Atlanta is also home to 16 Fortune 500 companies for close access to large customers, 270,000 college students, a low cost of living, and low labor costs. It seems to me Atlanta is actually one of the best places to start a CRE tech startup. “
Jake makes a compelling argument and REscour is doing big things, so I don’t take his words lightly but another smart friend of mine put it like this, “The population of San Francisco is 800,000 and New York City is 8,000,000; you do the math.”
Being the geek I am and having recently created a map of the CREtech ecosystem, I crunched the numbers.
This is not designed to be 100% comprehensive. If I missed something, tweet me at @tonydominguez.
As always, my research is open source.
Observations:
- Airbnb is responsible for 90% of California’s REtech funding.
- Auction.com is one third of the funding in Greater L.A. but even still, who knew that was a great place to start a RE startup?
- While Cali may have funding on lock at over $4.5B, New York has the largest amount of companies AND most funding when you back out Airbnb.
- There aren’t enough companies abroad attacking the REtech space, but Bangalore is still number five.
- Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the Midwest has the most bootstrapped startups.
- NYC has the most sophisticated real estate investors per Real Capital Analytics
“If I got to choose a coast, I got to choose the east. I live out there, so don’t go there.”
I’m going with what Biggie said. So, if you’re bold and working in REtech, come visit me in NYC.