REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVES THAT COUNT

Today’s real estate technology market is highly saturated, and many startups must compete for attention. Through our deep industry experience and strong relationships with leading owners and operators, we cut through the noise to back solutions that address real operational pain points and deliver immediate, measurable impact.

Here are a few of our recent investments that are transforming the real estate industry:

• Billee: An AI-driven utility management platform purpose-built for multifamily operators and property managers, overhauling outdated manual processes, improving billing accuracy, and unlocking significant cost savings.
  
  • Why RET Invested: RET Ventures backed Billee because we believe the utility billing sector is ripe for disruption and Billee’s agile, AI-first solution is perfectly positioned to succeed. Their experienced management team, with a strong track record of building and scaling successful tech solutions, is focused on top-tier customer service and building a product that solves property managers' problems through automation, transparency, and accuracy.
  • Billee in Action: Early adopters of the platform have experienced up to 52% in cost savings and avoidance. In one early deployment, Billee proactively identified a critical billing error that resulted in over $200,000 of incremental recovery.
• Crew: A home services platform designed to simplify property management by providing trash-can-to-curb services and on-demand trash removal for short-term rental owners and operators. The company, born out of founder Cameron Lam’s personal frustrations as a short-term rental owner, combines professional services with the flexibility of gig work.
  
  • Why RET Invested: RET Ventures recognized the immense operational value Crew was already delivering to short-term rental owners. The startup’s early traction is remarkable, and the platform has the potential to become a foundational service across a range of property types, including multifamily.
  • Crew in Action: Crew, which served just 100 properties at this time last year, now services thousands of short-term rental units nationwide. The platform currently has a strong presence in 240 cities across 30 key metro areas.
• Property Shield: An AI-enabled platform that empowers multifamily and SFR owners and operators to prevent fraud and protect their assets. Helping detect fraudulent activity from fake listings to incidents like squatting or vandalism, Property Shield provides portfolio-wide risk scoring to help owners prioritize resources, reduce losses, and build brand trust.
  
  • Why RET Invested: Cybercrime in real estate is on the rise and poses a significant threat to owners and operators. RET Ventures backed Property Shield because of its ability to turn data into actionable, portfolio-wide insights and the measurable impact it delivers in preventing fraud and reducing risks for owners.
  • Property Shield in Action: Property Shield has helped clients save over $1 billion for U.S. renters and homebuyers.

RET Ventures recently welcomed its extensive network of multifamily, single-family rental (SFR), and real estate tech professionals to Park City for the seventh annual RET Summit. With 100+ strategic investors and 25+ portfolio companies in attendance, the three-day event underscored how quickly innovation is accelerating across the industry and highlighted the biggest challenges owners and operators are most focused on addressing today.

Key insights from the event include:

AI Continues to Reshape the Space: The real estate industry is adopting AI quickly, and innovations are moving from experimentation to real, practical use cases. For owners and operators, the focus is on AI-driven tools that support centralization and help teams do more with less through automation. What felt like “frontier days” a year ago is now embedding itself into daily workflows.
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• Where it’s working: Operators are seeing measurable gains from tools like leasing assistants that field prospect questions, conversational bots that handle resident correspondence, and “copilots” that can take on 80–90% of analyst workloads. These tools are acting less as human replacements and more like “super-analysts,” augmenting staff capacity and improving outcomes.
• Why it matters: Nearly every new proptech solution now has an AI component. Lower startup costs and faster iteration cycles mean more companies are hitting the market, but differentiation will come from trust, accuracy, and the ability to plug into existing workflows.
• RET’s take: RET is leaning into AI as a core driver of change, but with discipline. We look for solutions built on strong data foundations, with a clear ROI for owners and operators, and the ability to scale beyond pilots.

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‍Streamlining the Tech Stack is a Top Priority: After years of rapid adoption post-pandemic, many owners are left with a patchwork of point solutions, each with its own separate pricing and platform. The result is redundancy, rising costs, and “app fatigue” across teams.

• Where it’s working: The focus is shifting from experimenting with dozens of pilots to consolidating around solutions that integrate seamlessly and provide immediate value. The days of layering tool after tool are giving way to smarter, bundled approaches.
  
• Why it matters: Owners are now laser-focused on efficiency and cost reduction. The companies that succeed won’t be shiny point solutions, but those that are embedded into workflows, boost efficiency, and deliver consistent ROI. As consolidation in the market picks up, operators are narrowing their tech stacks and doubling down on trusted partners.
• RET’s take: RET is focused on backing companies that “own the workflow” and minimize change management — platforms that easily weave into the fabric of operations. These solutions are up and running with limited costs or delays and become indispensable, streamlining tasks across portfolios and reducing costs while improving the user experience for teams and residents alike.

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Resident Experience Cannot be an Afterthought: From apartment search to lease renewal, renters encounter too many steps and disconnected systems. Owners see this friction as a key barrier to retention and a critical area for improvement.

• Where it’s working: Operators are streamlining day-to-day interactions with residents through tools that centralize maintenance requests, amenity scheduling, billing, and other communications. Automated systems can now handle routine inquiries, while dashboards give staff a single view of resident activity, enabling faster issue resolution and more consistent service.
• Why it matters: With rent growth slower than in past years, renewal and retention are top priorities. Operators want technologies that make the renter journey seamless — fewer roadblocks when finding an apartment, smoother onboarding, and easier renewals. A positive resident experience is now viewed as a direct driver of financial performance.
• RET’s take: RET is backing companies that streamline touchpoints across the renter lifecycle, making interactions more efficient without disrupting residents’ lives. This means eliminating redundant steps – for example, using back-end insights so a resident who has already been screened for leasing does not need to be screened again for renters insurance. In today’s environment, the winners will be solutions that deliver convenience, build trust, and strengthen the long-term resident–operator relationship.

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RET Ventures recently welcomed its network of multifamily, single-family rental (SFR) and real estate technology leaders to Park City for the seventh annual RET Summit. The event once again brought together investors, operators and entrepreneurs for three days of discussion and insight into the technologies revolutionizing the real estate industry.

This year’s conversation underscored just how quickly innovation is accelerating across the sector. From the expanding role of artificial intelligence to new approaches in centralization, data integration and resident experience, the pace of change is only increasing, and the collective RET network is playing a central role in driving this transformation. The Summit offered a unique forum for operators to share operational perspectives, and for startups to showcase how they are solving the industry’s most common challenges.

As always, the Summit highlighted the power of collaboration – demonstrating how insight from leading owners and operators can translate to industry-wide progress. We look forward to continuing this momentum in the year ahead as we work with our investors and portfolio companies to shape the future of real estate technology.

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Real estate technology has faced some growing pains of late, but these challenges also highlight the sector’s potential for continued evolution and innovation. While the struggles of a few high-profile startups have sparked questions, many sub-categories of real estate tech remain strong, and are helping reshape the industry in meaningful ways. These include:

Resident Self-service

• What it is: Tech that empowers residents. Self-service technologies eliminate friction points associated with leasing, WiFi setup, utility setup, etc., by bypassing middlemen and putting residents in the driver’s seat.  
• Why it’s hot: Self-service helps both owners and residents, especially in a post-COVID world where flexibility is king.
• Case Study: Tour24 allows owners to create a curated self-guided tour experience. This lets residents conduct tours at their convenience – including after hours and on weekends and holidays.
  • It gives owners insights into how tours are performing, enhancing the leasing process while centralizing operations.
  • Tour24’s software revenue has grown 75% YoY.

Sustainability

• What it is: Technology that helps monitor and optimize building resource efficiency, which can often lower electricity, heating, water, and waste bills.
• Why it’s hot: Operators are pursuing efficiencies in every aspect of their operations. That extends to resource efficiency. Many ESG technologies present major cost-saving opportunities, yielding a strong ROI.
• Case Study: Parity is a remote HVAC optimization and service company for multifamily and hospitality. It manages the daily performance of HVAC systems by automatically optimizing control adjustments in real-time.
  • By limiting energy waste across properties, Parity improves building efficiency and guarantees savings back to owners with payback as little as 2 years.
  • Parity successfully closed a $20M Series B this past July to support market expansion efforts.

Artificial Intelligence

• What it is: Tech that utilizes generative AI and machine learning across a wide range of different applications
• Why it’s hot: The AI trend is here to stay, and these tools are poised to make a tremendous impact on operations — from resident communications to market analysis to back-office work.
• Case Study: PredictAP, a machine-learning-enabled invoice ingestion and coding solution for real estate accounts payable, leverages AI and historical invoice data to code new invoices more accurately and efficiently.
  • The platform reduces the time needed to process each invoice by 80-90%.
  • PredictAP has grown recognized revenue 250% YoY.

As venture investors, we’re obsessed with figuring out which companies will be the bright spots in the next few years. Typically, the perfect startup blends innovation and functionality, which for us means high-potential startups that meet the needs of our strategic investors. We favor companies with:

Easy Owner Implementation

• Cost savings are paramount. Owners are deterred from adopting technology with high upfront costs or lengthy onboarding that requires reconfiguration of their tech stack.
• We favor solutions that are no- or low-cost for the owner, both in terms of pricing and the load internal teams have to take on.
• In the RET Ecosystem: GetCovered, an insurtech company that streamlines the purchase and tracking of property and casualty insurance, has a free-to-owner model – and it's working.
  • Not only does the product provide a valuable service, it incurs no costs for owners — in fact, it gives them a new revenue stream. It also takes less than one day to deploy.

Seamless Integration into Existing Workflows

• Inertia is real - operators do not like to change how internal teams execute daily tasks. They want tools that fit seamlessly into existing workflows while providing superior outcomes
• Startups that minimize the disruption of existing workflows and create new efficiencies consistently outperform more disruptive solutions.
• In the RET Ecosystem:
  • Falkbuilt leverages tech to make prefab interior walls offsite. The company intentionally aligns with conventional construction methods, making installation intuitive and seamless for trade workers on site. Falkbuilt also virtually eliminates on-site waste, making it easier for boots-on-the-ground teams to complete their jobs.
  • Turno connects with short-term rental calendars to automatically schedule and delegate cleaning services. It works alongside Airbnb and other rental sites without altering the posting or booking process, saving hosts time by removing the hassle of coordinating with cleaners directly.

Clear ROI

• In theory, most people like radical new technologies with revolutionary potential.
• But in an uncertain economy, owners favor tech that provides demonstrable ROI. Products with obvious returns – cost cutting, time savings, new revenue streams – naturally experience more success at this stage in the cycle.
• In the RET Ecosystem: GiGstreem installs and operates ubiquitously available WiFi in multifamily buildings and semi-public infrastructure to allow ease of access, lower costs, and better performance. The company helps generate additional revenue for multifamily owners while streamlining WiFi set-up and service for residents.
  • Owners are realizing an uplift in NOI per unit of $20-$40 with returns on capital invested north of 20%.

The multifamily space has seen a surge of technology tools in recent years, each of which has promised to reshape the industry. For many owners and operators, identifying the right solutions and securing buy-in for portfolio-wide deployments from dozens of onsite teams can be difficult to navigate.

During RET Ventures’ second annual “Multifamily Kickoff Summit” at the Blueprint event in Las Vegas, RET Senior Advisor Shawn Mahoney moderated a panel entitled “From Concept to Reality: Operationalizing Innovation in Apartment Properties,” featuring panelists Saharsh Chordia, Director, Strategy and Analytics at Cortland; Rowland Hobbs, CEO and Co-founder of Stake; and Brandon Tobman, CEO and Founder of GetCovered.

Panelists emphasized the transformative power of data in property management, highlighting its role in boosting efficiency, improving the renter experience and reducing onsite staff workloads. They also addressed the importance of a nimble tech rollout strategy, stressing that while pilots can offer a valuable opportunity for learning and innovation, they must be done thoughtfully to avoid frustration and resource strain for owners. The panel also stressed the importance of integration between different technologies and encouraged startups to position themselves as true partners for multifamily owners and operators.

The session concluded with the panelists highlighting key factors for successful technology implementations, including open communication, ongoing optimization post-rollout and a strong focus on efficiency. Attendees left the session with actionable insights into leveraging innovation to drive measurable results in multifamily operations.

Watch the full session below: