Essential tech for real estate: Books

June 2015

No tech will ever kill books. The paperless office is at last coming to pass, mainly because of the prevalence of tablets and online data, but with even Mark Zuckerberg running a book club, those wonderful physical objects are here to stay.

And there are some great books to help you speak digital. For me Nicholas Negroponte’s 1996 Being digital was a clarion call, and last years Zero to One by Paypal founder Peter Thiel is great on what it means to think big in a digital world.

Thomas Davenport’s Predictive Analytics is very good in explaining why this is a fast growing technology, with great potential in Property, as is The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver.

Hooked by Nir Eyal explains how to make products that are addictive and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is a cracking tale of managing a digital company.

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder will help you appraise whether your business is well positioned in the marketplace and Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail & others will give you endless ideas about how that position may change.

Smart Cities by Anthony Townsend & Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser are both good on this huge and important topic.

And if you only read one book in this list make it The Second Machine Age by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. If that doesn’t get you fired up about becoming digital nothing will.

Antony

This first appeared in Estates Gazette on the 13th June 2015