As Virtual Reality Comes of Age, Senior Living Providers Dive In

After a decade of whispers, trials, pilots and promise, virtual reality (VR) now seems on the precipice of a boom in senior housing and senior care settings. A bevy of companies have cropped up over the past five years to tailor VR solutions directly to senior living, addressing age-old challenges including resident isolation, dementia care and pain management. The VR usage expansion is the result of a convergence of trends.For one, boomers are more comfortable with technology than previou…

This crowdfunding firm just picked the carcass of RealtyShares

The remnants of RealtyShares — the now-defunct crowdfunding platform — have been scooped up by another real estate firm. New York-based iintoo acquired RealtyShares’ assets, Inman reported. The move boosts the company’s portfolio size to $2.5 billion assets under management from $1 billion, according to the company. Current and former investors in RealtyShares will be able to access iintoo’s crowdfunding platform, the report said. The deal — terms of which were not disclosed — is a joint v…

How This Tech Exec With $1 Billion In Backing Wants To Fix The Broken Construction Industry

CREtech CEO Michael Beckerman to Present “PropTech Evolution” at ICSC’s RECon

The Global Retail Real Estate Convention to be held on May 19 – May 22 in Las Vegas   New York, NY (May 15, 2019) — CREtech (CREtech.com), the largest event, data and content platform covering the commercial real estate tech industry, has announced its CEO Michael Beckerman will deliver a presentation on The PropTech Evolution at ICSC’s RECon on Sunday May 19, 2019 at 2:15pm – 3:45pm at the Pavilion 9-10 located at the Westgate Hotel. With the PropTech industry experiencing extraordinary ov…

Pay Attention: Co-Living Will Not Disappear into the Night

Commercial real estate has an entirely new asset class to contend with: coliving. When my peers and I first heard talk of coliving, most of us sneered.“Only millennials could live like that!,” we thought. Coliving would, like the ill-fated Webvan, become nothing more than an industry footnote. Both ideas didn’t make sense to many of us—we could scarcely imagine ordering groceries online as see cohabitation taking root in our industry. But the more I studied it, the more I spoke with the pe…

Funding Has Skyrocketed As PropTech Firms Raise $4.5B In 3 Months

Money talks, and it is saying a commercial real estate technology revolution is coming. “From our point of view, what we’re seeing is the sector isn’t really used to innovation at this sort of a pace,” Leyton Senior Vice President Craig Hale said Thursday at Bisnow’s Boston CRE Tech Summit event. “You have to just pick a horse almost and bet who will go forward.”

Occupier Raises $1.4M to Modernize How Businesses Make Real Estate Decisions

NEW YORK, May 9, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Occupier, the NYC-based startup building software to help businesses make better real estate decisions, has raised $1,400,000. The round is backed by commercial real estate veterans and angel investors. Founded by former VTS employees Andrew Flint, Matt Giffune, and Erik Pearson, Occupier allows teams to make rapid, strategic real estate decisions. The current choices for managing a company’s real estate decisions are antiquated lease administration syste…

Silver Lake-backed startup Lightbox makes even more RE Tech acquisition noise

Months after paying over $200 million to acquire real estate data firms EDR and ExactBid, a tech startup that’s attempting to create a Bloomberg Terminal-like platform for real estate just picked up two additional companies. New York-based Lightbox, backed by venture capital firm Silver Lake Partners, said Monday that it had acquired Real Capital Markets, a commercial real estate marketplace, and Digital Map Products, a cloud-based location and mapping platform. The firm did not disclose the …

Take a look at the vision for the world’s first 3D-printed neighborhood

This summer, massive 3D printers will begin building homes in the world’s first community of its kind–designed not for the usual early adopters of technology but for some of the world’s poorest people, who currently live without safe shelter in Latin America. New Story, the nonprofit behind the new neighborhood, released a new video today that shows renderings of the layout of the homes, which were designed in collaboration with the local community and Yves Béhar’s Fuseproject. …

Unlocking The Two-Sided Market For Commercial Real Estate Services

In March 2009, Uber was born. Over the subsequent decade, the company became more than a controversial transportation company; it proved the scalability of the two-sided market. Though Uber was not the first company to deploy this model, it did so with unmatched pace and veracity, evidenced by its place in common vernacular. Overnight, VC offices were swarming with new startups pitched as the “Uber for [insert industry here].” The two-sided market is genius in its simplicity. Companies li…