A Tweetstorm - Analogue Real Estate:(

A quick Tweetstorm from yesterday as I realised #PropTech really hasn’t changed the real estate industry very much at all:

Talking with someone selling high end investment data into the commercial real estate industry today. Honestly did not know whether to laugh or cry.

Biggest issue? Large % of Customers insist on pdf reports. Quarterly. Why? Because they don’t use tablets, or even laptops much and have no interest beyond headline numbers.

Never use the online system but demand endless customisation - all of which is available online. Thus data is late, static, inert and expensive to produce.

Worse than that; many then get PA’s, juniors or interns to take numbers from PDF’s and enter manually into presentations or other documents.

And guess what? Most of the data has to be manually pulled out of 3rd party source systems and re-keyed into research db’s

In summary: many ‘prestige’ CRE investment funds run as if in the Stone Age. The end reports look impressive but it is all mainly guesswork or a pig’s ear dressed up as a silk purse.

As I say, should we laugh or cry? Or frankly, IMHO, get really angry that this farce is acceptable and accepted. So much innovation will be stopped in it’s track because of this pathetic analogue behaviour.

The sooner the fantasy of investment professionalism is outed the better. This world serves a tiny few and disadvantages the rest of us. The misallocation of capital must be vast. Time for it to end.