REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVES THAT COUNT

While most VCs focus on capital and operating experience, RET Ventures also brings a unique benefit though its close working relationship with our LPs. RET Ventures has made this an important focus of our fund, carefully selecting our investors, and fostering tight relationships with each one. We are particularly proud of the group of top-tier multi-family organizations that we’ve brought together to help us identify and support emerging rent tech category leaders. We believe that these relationships will help us deliver value to our portfolio companies far beyond capital. We also believe that a fund’s LPs are good indicators of the health and quality of the fund. As such, we are honored to include five major multifamily real estate investment trusts (REITs), Aimco, Boardwalk, Essex, MidAmerica, and UDR, as well as leading private owners Starwood Capital Group, Cortland, and GID among our initial group of LPs.

Our partnership with these well-respected organizations, along with our proven experience as both investors and entrepreneurs, presents significant benefits for RET Ventures portfolio companies. Our LPs collectively own or manage nearly one million rental units and make up the largest single group of institutional multifamily owners in North America. Combining our LP ecosystem with RET Venture’s unique experience generates value for all parties in the following ways:

Navigating Industry Sales Cycles

The real estate industry has proven to be a difficult market for technology companies to break into. Its complexity and unique cost considerations lead to a large inherent lag between startup founding and revenue creation. This is due to the industry’s long sales cycles due to the often-high operational complexity of tech adoption to owners and operators. Even the brightest entrepreneurs with the strongest ideas are dismayed to find slow adoption in the space.

Thanks to my experience scaling up and successfully exiting two rent tech startups with investors that include several of our current LPs, I have unique insight into navigating these challenges. Our fund can leverage our staff’s collective experience to give entrepreneurs concrete advice, which they can use to help keep burn as low as possible while navigating through these complex sales cycles.

On the LP relationship side, our Fund also can help expedite owner / operator decisions. The strong relationships we’ve forged within the industry allow us to present tech providers to their potential customers with a level of trust that’s far beyond the industry norm.

Keeping the Industry’s Pulse

RET Venture’s LPs represent the cutting edge of the multifamily industry. Our LPs’ portfolios are large, modern, and sophisticated. Because our LPs have such breadth of coverage throughout North America, it is easy to predict the market’s needs from theirs. RET can in turn point out opportunities for growth to our portfolio companies, whether they be expansion into new markets, additional product features, or new pricing schemas. Having an investment from RET ensures more rapid feedback and iteration than would otherwise be possible.

Access to Major Multifamily Organizations

As I mentioned above, the real estate industry has notoriously high tech adoption costs for property owners and managers. While this is due to a long list of industry quirks, reasons include the large number of emerging and unvetted providers in the space, natural skepticism towards new in-home tech from residents, operational and staff adoption friction, building retrofit cost and the resident’s limited propensity to engage with their landlord. Given these risks, it is natural that multifamily owners and operators are cautious when engaging with emerging rent tech providers.
Our expertise allows us to walk side-by-side with technology companies, helping them avoid these pitfalls, and our LPs trust us to identify the emerging companies that have taken action to mitigate these risks. The result is a mutually beneficial relationship, where better rent tech startups are brought to the table sooner, creating revenues for the startup and value for our LPs more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

Thanks to our proven track record of delivering value to all parties, I am proud to say that RET Ventures has built a reputation of trust among both entrepreneurs and multifamily owners and operators. This reputation helps maximize the value of an RET investment for entrepreneurs, by going beyond provided capital.

Industry Expertise and Knowledge

Our LPs represent a wealth of industry knowledge, experience, and expertise. RET’s close relationship with its limited partners allows the Fund to leverage our LPs’ experience to guide entrepreneurs or technology companies that may have valuable tools, but not be so intimately acquainted with the multifamily industry. Gaining feedback from some of the largest multifamily players in the world is invaluable in tailoring a product, sales strategy, or marketing campaign for the broader market and pulling ahead of competitors.

We are honored that so many leading multifamily organizations believe in our vision and are committed to helping us transform on the rent tech market. Throughout the coming months, we will provide readers with an in-depth look at each of our LPs individually and discuss how technology is benefitting their operations and helping them differentiate from their competitors.

RET Ventures Value-Add

While most VCs focus on capital and operating experience, RET Ventures also brings a unique benefit though its close working relationship with our LPs. RET Ventures has made this an important focus of our fund, carefully selecting our investors, and fostering tight relationships with each one. We are particularly proud of the group of top-tier multi-family organizations that we’ve brought together to help us identify and support emerging rent tech category leaders. We believe that these relationships will help us deliver value to our portfolio companies far beyond capital. We also believe that a fund’s LPs are good indicators of the health and quality of the fund. As such, we are honored to include five major multifamily real estate investment trusts (REITs), Aimco, Boardwalk, Essex, MidAmerica, and UDR, as well as leading private owners Starwood Capital Group, Cortland, and GID among our initial group of LPs.

Our partnership with these well-respected organizations, along with our proven experience as both investors and entrepreneurs, presents significant benefits for RET Ventures portfolio companies. Our LPs collectively own or manage nearly one million rental units and make up the largest single group of institutional multifamily owners in North America. Combining our LP ecosystem with RET Venture’s unique experience generates value for all parties in the following ways:

Navigating Industry Sales Cycles

The real estate industry has proven to be a difficult market for technology companies to break into. Its complexity and unique cost considerations lead to a large inherent lag between startup founding and revenue creation. This is due to the industry’s long sales cycles due to the often-high operational complexity of tech adoption to owners and operators. Even the brightest entrepreneurs with the strongest ideas are dismayed to find slow adoption in the space.

Thanks to my experience scaling up and successfully exiting two rent tech startups with investors that include several of our current LPs, I have unique insight into navigating these challenges. Our fund can leverage our staff’s collective experience to give entrepreneurs concrete advice, which they can use to help keep burn as low as possible while navigating through these complex sales cycles.

On the LP relationship side, our Fund also can help expedite owner / operator decisions. The strong relationships we’ve forged within the industry allow us to present tech providers to their potential customers with a level of trust that’s far beyond the industry norm.

Keeping the Industry’s Pulse

RET Venture’s LPs represent the cutting edge of the multifamily industry. Our LPs’ portfolios are large, modern, and sophisticated. Because our LPs have such breadth of coverage throughout North America, it is easy to predict the market’s needs from theirs. RET can in turn point out opportunities for growth to our portfolio companies, whether they be expansion into new markets, additional product features, or new pricing schemas. Having an investment from RET ensures more rapid feedback and iteration than would otherwise be possible.

Access to Major Multifamily Organizations

As I mentioned above, the real estate industry has notoriously high tech adoption costs for property owners and managers. While this is due to a long list of industry quirks, reasons include the large number of emerging and unvetted providers in the space, natural skepticism towards new in-home tech from residents, operational and staff adoption friction, building retrofit cost and the resident’s limited propensity to engage with their landlord. Given these risks, it is natural that multifamily owners and operators are cautious when engaging with emerging rent tech providers.
Our expertise allows us to walk side-by-side with technology companies, helping them avoid these pitfalls, and our LPs trust us to identify the emerging companies that have taken action to mitigate these risks. The result is a mutually beneficial relationship, where better rent tech startups are brought to the table sooner, creating revenues for the startup and value for our LPs more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

Thanks to our proven track record of delivering value to all parties, I am proud to say that RET Ventures has built a reputation of trust among both entrepreneurs and multifamily owners and operators. This reputation helps maximize the value of an RET investment for entrepreneurs, by going beyond provided capital.

Industry Expertise and Knowledge

Our LPs represent a wealth of industry knowledge, experience, and expertise. RET’s close relationship with its limited partners allows the Fund to leverage our LPs’ experience to guide entrepreneurs or technology companies that may have valuable tools, but not be so intimately acquainted with the multifamily industry. Gaining feedback from some of the largest multifamily players in the world is invaluable in tailoring a product, sales strategy, or marketing campaign for the broader market and pulling ahead of competitors.

We are honored that so many leading multifamily organizations believe in our vision and are committed to helping us transform on the rent tech market. Throughout the coming months, we will provide readers with an in-depth look at each of our LPs individually and discuss how technology is benefitting their operations and helping them differentiate from their competitors.

Building on the momentum RET Ventures gathered at the end of last year, we decided to update our website and brand to more accurately reflect our values, mission, and network.To ensure an accurate portrayal of the fund (and to keep us honest) we gathered feedback from our LPs and portfolio companies throughout our rebranding process. We are now very excited to officially launch our new website and brand.Unlike many other funds, we know that our value as investors goes far beyond our capital and expertise. To highlight our unusual value prop, we included several important features in our new website that we’re excited about:

Interactive Limited Partner Map

Our home page hosts an interactive map of North America, offering a detailed look at our LP holdings by state. Texas currently leads with more than 140,000 units owned by our LPs.

Portfolio Company Job Board

This is just another way for us to support our entrepreneurs. Tapping our network to identify key talent is the least we can do to fuel our portfolio companies’ growth. Browse exciting job openings in rent tech here.

Limited Partner Spotlight

In addition to the interactive map, we’ve given our LPs their own page where we highlight the companies and individuals giving RET Ventures unparalleled access and industry expertise.

Investments

Our investments page offers a quick snapshot into the entrepreneurs, technologies, and companies RET Ventures backs. Click on their logos to learn more about these rent tech leaders and their mission.

Contact

One of the website’s most important features is our contact page where founders, owner-operators, industry experts, and more can reach out to us directly.We invite you to take a look at our new website and share your feedback either in the comments below, or directly via our contact page.

Over the past few years, real estate technology has matured significantly. This has caused a major shift in preferences and demands from residents, and the multifamily housing industry as a whole. Thousands of property owners that own more than 40 million apartments are currently undergoing a tech transformation, and smart apartment technology is quickly becoming a must-have amenity for multifamily and single-family rental operators. Residents, along with both property owners and managers, crave technology that makes the apartment experience more efficient, automated, and enjoyable from initial resident interest all the way through move-out.

Prior to the New Year, we announced RET Ventures’ investment of $5 million in the smart apartment automation platform, SmartRent. Our investment is helping to fuel the company’s accelerated growth and large-scale national deployments, increasing its current 15-state footprint to over 40 states. In thoroughly evaluating the smart apartment space, RET Ventures and our LP group saw SmartRent emerge as a consistent outperformer across every key metric, and their platform offering has proven so impressive that nearly all of our limited partners are in some stage of discussion with the company for pilots or broader national deployments.

Here are a few reasons why we are so excited to be a part of the SmartRent story:

Resident Friendly

Technology is ubiquitous within our society and residents now demand a fully integrated experience in every facet of their lives, especially at home. From enabling prospective residents to conduct secure self-showings of available units, to empowering current residents to remotely control the climate, lighting, and access of their current unit, SmartRent’s automated platform provides a comprehensive and seamless experience for current and potential residents. As automation and self-service continue to be major trends in the multifamily industry, the SmartRent platform will provide lasting value to residents for years to come.

Optimized Operations

By combining connected devices with its web and mobile platform, SmartRent can help identify leaks or faulty equipment, eliminate energy waste, and provide remote access control for door locks. These functions are especially valuable when managing vacant units, where leaks or needless energy consumption can often go unnoticed and lead to unnecessary costs.

Overall, SmartRent’s platform is an efficient and secure way to automate maintenance and other responsibilities of the property while driving down expenses and long-term operating costs.

Easy and Flexible Deployment

The SmartRent platform is flexible and easy to implement in any rental property type at any stage, including ground-up developments, retrofits, high-rises, garden style properties, and more. SmartRent offers a complete turnkey deployment service, including equipment specification/ordering, device installation/pairing and resident /staff onboarding.

Industry Pedigree

SmartRent is the brainchild of accomplished real estate industry veterans. This, combined with the clear benefits of the platform, are some of the main differentiators of the company and reasons why we chose to invest.

SmartRent has incredible momentum as it completed over 14,500 installations in 2018 and already has an additional 50,000 apartments committed for 2019. We look forward to continuing to play a role in the company’s growth as it leads the multi-family industry in safely, securely, and profitably embracing technology to automate multi-dwelling units.

I’m very excited to welcome you to the first installment of the Real Estate Technology Ventures (RET Ventures) blog on Medium. On this platform, we will share updates and information about the Firm, portfolio companies and our team’s perspectives on the biggest trends in real estate technology and the multifamily industry. To start things off, I’d like to outline our vision and why we’re unlike any other VC you’ve ever met.

Billions of dollars have been flooding into proptech in the past five years and with good reason. The $31.8 trillion real estate industry is undergoing a significant digital transformation and the investment community is quickly ramping up their involvement in the space. But proptech is a broad term that, depending upon who you ask, can involve everything from 3D modeling software to listing services for real estate agents. While we invest in all real estate technology verticals, our primary focus is on a market category we call rent tech.

There are currently 40+ million rental units in North America and, according to a MarketWatch report, American renters collectively paid a total of $485.6 billion in rent in 2017, up $4.9 billion from 2016. We believe there is an incredible opportunity for multifamily owners and operators to leverage technology to both improve the resident experience and more efficiently and effectively operate their portfolios. This is the market that we see great potential in, and we’re making bold moves to solidify our position to help create category leaders.

Recently, we announced Real Estate Technology Ventures I, a $108 million fund complex whose limited partners (LPs) include five major multifamily REITs (Aimco, Boardwalk, Essex, MidAmerica and UDR), as well as leading private owners like Starwood Capital Group, Cortland, and GID. That brings us to our most important differentiator: RET Ventures’ network.

Our LPs, with close to 1 million total rental units under management, are the largest single group of institutional multifamily owners in North America to ever back a venture fund. Because of our deep roots within the MF industry, RET Ventures has an unmatched ability to help innovative rent tech companies shorten their sales cycles and gain traction within a market known for its extended sales cycles. Rather than working in hypotheticals such as: “We think multifamily owners would love this technology,” we simply consult with some of the biggest multifamily property owners on the continent. Fortunately, they just happen to be our LPs and thus potential owners of the company we may back. If the product or platform makes a positive impact on our LPs, we know we’re on the right track. It’s a win-win situation: LPs get access to innovative technology that helps them improve their operations and increase revenues, while entrepreneurs are able to leverage our extensive network to leapfrog their competitors.

RET Ventures is more than an industry-backed early stage venture capital firm. We believe we’ve developed a truly unique model that provides tremendous value for LPs and entrepreneurs alike. We’re excited to see what the New Year brings us and hope you join us for the journey.

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.