Curated daily by our industry experts. Stay informed on how tech is shaping the real estate industry with these important headlines.
GLOBEST
Over two days, thousands of startups, entrepreneurs, investors and commercial real estate professionals from around the world will attend the CREtech Los Angeles Conference at the historic Shrine Expo Hall. All of the major tech trends in office, industrial, retail and multifamily including CoWorking, Data, A.I., ConTech and more will be discussed by those leading the tech revolution in CRE. …
VTS
New York, NY – March 19, 2019: VTS, the commercial real estate industry’s leading leasing and asset management platform, was recently recognized as the ‘Tech Platform of the Year’ at the prestigious Real Estate Finance & Investment (REFI) Magazine’s 2019 Commercial Real Estate 20 Awards. This award follows a number of previous honors where VTS’ market-leading leasing and asset management platform was recognized for outstanding innovation and excellence in technology. In its Tech Platform …
THE REAL DEAL
OJO Labs — which has developed an artificial intelligence-based assistant for the homebuying process — just raised $45 million in a Series C funding round. The Austin-based company will use the money to expand and speed up its product development, the company said in a statement. Investors in the funding round include LiveOak Venture Partners, Realogy Holdings, Royal Bank of Canada and Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures.
BISNOW
WeWork continues to gobble up space in metro Denver, making it the largest user of office space in town, but not all building owners welcome the coworking behemoth with open arms. WeWork has leased large blocks of space in a number of high-profile downtown buildings, including seven floors in Tabor Center at 16th and Lawrence streets; five floors in Wells Fargo Center, also known as the cash register building, at 1700 Lincoln St.; and two floors in the Triangle Building at 1500 Wewatta St.
WSJ
A co-living company whose dormlike accommodations have become popular with single 20-somethings has a new customer in mind: families. Common, which rents out furnished rooms in shared, serviced apartments, is teaming with New York real-estate developer Tishman Speyer to launch this new product on Tuesday. Under the new brand Kin, buildings will feature playrooms, family-size units and on-demand child care through an internal mobile app that also helps connect families looking to share na…
FORBES
Most startups can only dream of a beginning like Openpath’s. Founded in 2016 by serial entrepreneurs Alex Kazerani, James Segil, Phil Goldsmith, Rob Peters, and Samy Kamkar, Openpath was privately funded until its product launched in summer 2018. The team weren’t planning to raise money, but were immediately inundated with term sheets and ultimately raised an eyewatering large round lead by Emergence later that summer. Oh, and they have sold out of their inventory three times since launch….
BISNOW
After introducing itself to New York City with a major $450M co-living facility in Brooklyn, The Collective’s first U.S. location will actually be in Queens. The Collective has paid $58M to acquire The Paper Factory Hotel in Long Island City, and will spend the next few months and millions of dollars converting it into a “short-stay co-living” facility, where guests will be able to stay up to 29 days and take advantage of the shared spaces and community programming that a co-living project en…
QZ
The company behind the WeWork real-estate empire is starting a “future cities” initiative and has hired former Waze and Google executive Di-Ann Eisnor to run it. According to the We Company, Eisnor and her team of engineers, architects, data scientists, biologists, and economists will create products and partner with local groups around the world to help address problems spurred by globalization, urbanization, and climate change….
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
Boris Katz, a principal research scientist at MIT, isn’t that impressed. Over the past 40 years, Katz has made key contributions to the linguistic abilities of machines. In the 1980s, he developed START, a system capable of responding to naturally phrased queries. The ideas used in START helped IBM’s Watson win on Jeopardy! and laid the groundwork for today’s chattering artificial servants. But Katz now worries that the field suffers from a reliance on decades-old ideas, and that these ideas …
COMMERCIAL OBSERVER
Knotel signed two leases for a total of 19,974 square feet on Eighth Avenue in the Garment District, Commercial Observer has learned. The flex office company inked a five-year deal for an 11,400-square-foot lease at East End Capital’s 580 Eighth Avenue, where they’ll occupy the 15th, 16th and 18th floors of the 21-story building.
Subscribe to CREtech to get our monthly newsletter curated by our editors and special event discounts and announcements.
or sign in if you're already a member