REtech is really competitive for attracting talent, at the time of this writing there are over 1,500 job openings. Before you quit your brokerage job to reinvent your career, let’s take a look at why this industry rocks.

For starters, workflow automation software and smart building technology have proven ROI, startups are flush with cash, real estate is no longer an alternative asset class and is projected by some to reach as high as 20% allocation of institutional portfolios from the 8.89% now, CRE technology spend is approximately 3.0% of revenue and has room to grow before reaching financial technology spend of 5.7%.

At the moment, there’s probably no one more familiar with the current CREtech financing and job market than Rich Sarkis, Cofounder of Reonomy. The company recently closed a $13M Series B financing with lead investors Bain Capital and Primary Venture Partners. Venture capital is clearly saying CREtech has reached the prime time; Rich explains why you should too:

Commercial Real Estate represents the last great bastion of the global capital markets ecosystem. This is a market that has seen very little disruption and innovation through technology. When you combine the sheer size of this multi-trillion dollar asset class, the ability to solve real pain points for thousands if not millions of customers, and the opportunity to get in on the ground floor you have something really special. High talent folks are starting to figure this out and take notice. – Rich Sarkis, CEO of Reonomy

The Reonomy team is wasting no time hitting its user acquisition stride and hiring the best talent. Just a year ago, Reonomy was a 12 person team but now the head count is over 40. Tech industry veterans are catching on too, Chris Fischer formerly of Shutterstock where he was VP of Technology Operations from inception to IPO is now Reonomy’s CTO and Brooks Pettus recently joined as the companies first COO.

For those coming from outside of the RE industry there can be a learning curve to domain expertise. To overcome this challenge, Reonomy has implemented an employee onboarding process whereby company values and product/domain expertise are transferred, plus the employee welcome wagon includes company lunches, sweet Flatiron office space… oh yea and I hear a company bar is on the way.

Now that you’re sold on joining a REtech startup for the opportunity or the perks, where should you work? Well, I have some data for you… I collected ratings from Glassdoor, salaries and equity from Angel List, and openings from company sites. For a copy of the original analysis, hit me up: @tonydominguez or check out the raw data.

REtech jobs by the numbers

Business Development, Finance, DevOps, or Data Science

Airbnb is hard to beat. At a massive scale they have kept a 4.5 employee rating on Glassdoor and above average industry salaries.

Favorite Glassdoor Review:

“The food program is unrivaled and very well balanced. Every meal is made in-house with a variety of options (ie vegetarian, gluten-free, etc). “

Customer Support

Appfolio has a 4.5 Glassdoor rating and slightly above average salary of $42,000. They might have the best Glassdoor review too…

Favorite Glassdoor Review:

“I’m really not sure where they have found THIS MANY upbeat, intelligent, hardworking, and all around awesome people, but it feels like stepping in to the twilight zone of happiness. “

Design, Product

Managed By Q isn’t messing around when it comes to hiring savvy designers at a $140,000 salary and 0.10% equity component but if vested interest is more your thing than FLUX offers $125,000 with 0.30% equity. Can’t go wrong either way when industry average is $100,000 and 0.15% equity.

Product jobs are where things get interesting, $175,000 salary and 0.10% equity vs $137,000 industry average salary and 0.14% equity.

Favorite Glassdoor Review:

“Q is a great place to work if you want to have an impact.”

Software Engineer

RealtyShares and LendingHome are offering $150,000 average salary vs industry $104,000. SWE’s know their worth, so OppSites is offering 1.50% while Snapdocs and WorkOrder.es are offering 1.00% equity for early engineers.

Favorite RealtyShares Glassdoor Review:

“The revenue growth leaves no doubt about the product-market fit.”

Marketing

HomeLight has a perfect 5.0 Glassdoor rating and provides $100,000 salary vs $63K industry average. However, HomeLight is “light” on the equity portion with 0.2% while WorkOrder.es is 1.00%.

Favorite HomeLight Glassdoor Review:

This is a startup, so something new and challenging every day. Probably not for those looking for a “normal” 9 to 5 job.

Operations

TheSquareFoot has a $112,000 average salary vs. $61,000 and yet another perfect 5.0 Glassdoor rating – notice a trend? To make things sweeter, the equity is 0.20%, which is slightly above the average of 0.13%.

Favorite Glassdoor Review:

“Very agile and driven company with talent at all levels.”

Sales

Established CMBS data provider Trepp is offering the best salary in sales at $120,000. If it’s startup equity you’re looking for Snapdocs salary is $100,000 with 1 point of equity, not a bad deal.

Favorite Trepp Glassdoor Review:

“I love that there are a number of women who work in upper management/executive positions, including the CEO.”

Lastly, here are a couple more companies I would still consider given these Glassdoor reviews…

Apto:

The company has a strong leadership team and a unique company culture that goes beyond “we do happy hours.”

RealtyMogul:

The stock has gone up 50x since I started and is going to make me pretty wealthy. I even got an unsolicited second stock grant from the CEO for my performance.

Matterport:

(Revenue + Funding + Talent) x (Lots of Unsolved Problems) = Huge Opportunity

Now get your resume out there and tell them I referred you

Airbnb
AppFolio
Apto
Aquicore
Architizer
Argus Software
AssetAvenue
Auction.com
Brevitas
CommonFloor
Compass
CompStak
CoreLogic
CoStar
coUrbanize
CrowdStreet
Curbed
DebtX
eBrevia
FieldLens
Floored
FLUX
Fundrise
Genea
Hightower
HomeLight
HonestBuildings
IndoorAtlas
IrisVR
Lenda
LendingHome
LendInvest
LiquidSpace
Lovely
Managed By Q
Matterport
MetaProp
Mission Capital
MRI Software
MyVR
officespace.com
Opendoor
OppSites
onefinestay
Patch of Land
PeerStreet
PiinPoint
Pillow
PlanGrid
propertybase
PropertyShark
ProspectNow
Real Capital Analytics
RealDirect
realogic
realpage
RealtyMogul
RealtyShares
Redfin
Reesio
REIS
RentHop
Rentlytics
Reonomy
REscour
ResiModel
REthink
Roomi
ShareDesk
SiteCompli
Snapdocs
Storefront
TheRealDeal
TheSquareFoot
TransitScreen
Trepp
triplemint
VTS
VivaReal
Voyanta
WeWork
WiredScore
WorkOrder.es
Xcelligent
Yardi
Zoopla
Zumper
Zillow

The post Who’s Hiring? – REtech Jobs Edition appeared first on Anthony Dominguez | CREtech.

“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.

The post Where Should You Start a RETech Startup? appeared first on Anthony Dominguez | CREtech.

People are resistant to change and once change is adopted, people swear they will never change again. It’s understandable. To adopt new technology is to admit you aren’t any good at something, possibly incompetent, or at least technology can do it better. We often think of technology as separate from ourselves, as something you don’t have a relationship with, it does its job and your life goes on.

Cars at one point represented freedom, the open road offered vast opportunities for suburban developers. Today the definition of freedom for young urbanites is a carless lifestyle, heavily reliant on ridesharing. Ownership of a car is considered nonessential and even prohibitive. Once a network of self-driving cars is created, car ownership will be unplugged entirely. To get from A to B, we no longer have a relationship with our car but a smartphone. On demand anything is not a generational gap or fad and is here to stay.

As you probably have heard, WeWork is creating co-living communities to extend their brand to apartments. For traditional real estate professionals it’s easily dismissible; it’s what every other developer is trying do. Make a buck developing and leasing space. Perhaps you’re right and time will tell but I believe they may be on to something…

It’s well known that the experience economy is flourishing. What’s less well known is that people want flexibility even in what is usually considered long term. WeLive will likely offer a membership for living a lifestyle as they do now with WeWork spaces. As a member of their residential community, I can go anywhere I please, unbounded my changing needs and geographies. If I want to try out the Bay Area, I can just move to the Market Street community, no key money, no new lease, no moving furniture. A couple years later, I fall in love and decide to start a family, now I move to the WeLive Palo Alto community just by booking on my smartphone. The relationship isn’t with my dwelling but with technology.

It won’t be too long before the copycats nip WeLive’s heels. Equity Residential could get on this trend early and turn itself into an innovator but that is unlikely, as traditionalists prefer the status quo. Before we get amped up to scale this idea; let’s stop for a second and think if we should. Uber doesn’t own cars and Airbnb doesn’t own rooms. As I said earlier, WeWork is on to something but not entirely.

In true hacker ethos we should seek to create the greatest societal change with the least amount of resources. Software managing a network of long term apartments for residents to move about with as little friction as possible is a much more zenful approach. My space needs will inevitably change, as will my relationships, and as it does, my space will become fluid.

The benefits are clear for the customers. What about for the property owners? Well just as Handy cleans Airbnb rooms, property management companies at scale will manage apartments in the network. The network handles rent collection and credit risk, the landlord can be absentee in a good way. Perhaps offering a zenful experience for the landlord.

What about cities? The network will guarantee property upkeep and property tax through asset diversification. A vast network will have diverse income streams something a small landlord will not.

Of course there will be those that are resistant to change; people well above my pay grade outline Airbnb and Uber’s growing pains very well. I can see it now, housing departments, unions, and real estate brokers – all very pissed off. People often get mad when there is an intrusion on their reality.

Change may not become evident for many iterations but hacker ethos always finds a way. In the mean time, rethink your relationships.

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