RET in the News: Christopher Yip Profiled in The Real Deal

Inside the rental tech ecosystem, with RET Ventures’ Chris Yip

In proptech, the early bird doesn’t always get the worm.

It can take a lot of time to overcome owners’ reluctance to bet on a new product, and those long sales cycles have been the undoing of many a startup, according to Christopher Yip.

“Historically, there’s not been a first-mover advantage because the worst thing you want to do is deploy a new technology in your portfolio and have the startup fail,” said Yip, a partner at RET Ventures, a venture-capital firm that focuses on the rental sector and counts major landlords Essex Property Trust, Invitation Homes and Starwood Capital Group among its investors. “We think what we’re doing is working, because we can get a group together, vet and validate a solution, and build that solution.”

RET led the Series A round for SmartRent, which went public in a SPAC merger this summer, and has also invested in Amenify, Kasa and Measurabl. The firm raised $165 million for its second fund in June. The Real Deal caught up with Yip, who joined RET after over a decade at private equity giant TPG, to talk about the game-changing opportunities in the rental space and to break down some of the thornier issues that the industry needs to tackle around affordability, sustainability and institutionalization.

There’s been a big shift over the last few years in how Wall Street sees the rental housing asset class.

We’re in the golden age of investment and innovation in proptech, and the institutional rental ecosystem is a good microcosm of that. Participants in the industry are looking at their operations and saying we are behind — in terms of the percent of revenues we spend on technology and innovation and in terms of centralizing business intelligence and process. And how we use that data and analysis to drive decision making, whether it’s on the acquisition and underwriting side, the asset management side, or in property management.

We think there is, frankly, a generational opportunity here....

Read the full article at The Real Deal.