REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVES THAT COUNT

In recent years, there has been an influx of digital solutions aimed at targeting pain points and improving processes across the rental real estate industry. With the implementation of these technologies, stakeholders at all levels — including investors, owners and operators, and residents — have reaped the benefits of greater convenience, connectivity, and accessibility throughout the rental lifecycle, from prospect viewing to seamless lease re-signing.

In the above video, RET was joined by proptech leaders and multifamily experts to discuss some of the growing rent tech solutions that are working collaboratively to revolutionize processes across the sector, further exploring the trends that are driving innovation.

Accelerated by the conditions of the pandemic, the trend toward self-leasing has emerged as a major shift for the multifamily sector in recent years — and it shows no signs of slowing any time soon. Self-leasing technologies have proven to be powerful tools for improving the rental process for prospects and owner-operators alike, reducing the operational costs incurred by leasing teams, while providing prospective renters with a more flexible, seamless, and convenient rental experience.

In this new video, John Helm and Fred Tuomi were joined by proptech and multifamily experts from the RET community to discuss how this trend is expected to develop and continue transforming the sector in years to come.

As tech innovation continues expanding globally and across industries, leaders throughout multifamily and SFR are increasingly turning their attention toward innovative, efficient tech solutions that drive operational improvements. For property managers, leasing teams, residents and other stakeholders, these digital platforms — commonly referred to as “rent tech” — are supporting more connected, convenient processes throughout the rental lifecycle.

In the above video, RET’s John Helm, Christopher Yip and Fred Tuomi are joined by proptech and multifamily experts from across the RET community to discuss opportunities for collaboration and growth within the rent tech sector.

Outdated CRMs for Leasing Teams

In recent years, tech-based products and services have flooded the commercial real estate market as the industry finally acknowledged the world’s inevitable shift to a digital future. However, as this transformation has unfolded, one critical real estate process has gone largely untouched: lead management and effective processes to improve the renter/leasing journey. Even in 2022, the CRM products that enable and guide the apartment leasing process across much of the industry remain outdated, resulting in a frustrating experience for operators and renters alike.

While both renters and leasing teams want to boost efficiency through increased tech adoption, legacy CRMs lack the connectivity and the seamlessness needed to maximize the benefits of each tool. Failing to streamline and integrate the different digital platforms that are exponentially supporting the modern leasing process has resulted in missed opportunities to improve operations and renter satisfaction. If this siloed implementation of leasing tech continues, property management companies and renters will inevitably miss out on the full ROI and will not reap the full reward of new tech tools.

The Problems with the Status Quo

The CRMs that many property managers use to drive the leasing process are property-centric property management softwares — meaning the data in these systems is collected and analyzed from the perspective of each individual building. A quick history lesson: the largest legacy players all began as accounting software. Over time they acquired, attempted to build, or tacked on customer-facing pieces to complete the journey. For owners and operators, this approach has a significant problem: By definition, a property-centric CRM is incapable of linking together multiple residential communities. For operators with several properties in a single market, this translates into significant inefficiencies. The same prospective renter likely has duplicative profiles that are assigned to two or more properties and leasing agents. This prospective renter would also have to perform certain tasks, such as background checks, multiple times. For property management companies, the inability to “cross-sell” properties and present units in their portfolio that the renter was unaware of is a massive loss. While this has always been an issue, it became particularly relevant over the past two years, when the traditional leasing process moved  almost entirely online.

To support the continued shift away from this legacy model and toward an improved approach to rental management, we were proud to recently make one of our largest investments to date, leading Funnel’s $36.5 million Series B round.  

Taking a ‘Renter-Centric’ Approach to Leasing

Funnel’s software helps operators manage their entire portfolio’s marketing, communications, and leasing in a single platform, creating efficiencies and improving processes through a unique “renter-centric” model. They have created an entirely new category: Renter Management Software. This innovative reimagining of the traditional approach to real estate CRMs supports a more convenient rental process for both prospects and operators. With renters at the center of the leasing process, multi-building portfolios can leverage Funnel’s technology to centralize and improve operations across dozens of properties, reducing costs by helping operators staff intelligently, and allowing them to track each prospective tenant’s interactions across the portfolio for a more holistic outlook.

Funnel is also rolling out a powerful fintech integration to empower renters to verify their financial status through their banks — removing the necessity for analog processes like collecting W-2s and pay stubs.

Prior to this Series B investment, RET led two funding rounds for Funnel in 2019 and 2020. Since our initial investment, with the help of several of our strategic partners, we have assisted in guiding the platform’s evolution and witnessed its dramatic growth into the CRM of choice for 5 of the NMHC Top 20 owners (including many of RET’s strategic investors). This evolution has been driven by product development conducted in collaboration with several of our strategic investors, ensuring that the final tool being used today has been validated and sculpted to directly address the needs of the market.

Connecting The Resident Journey

As Funnel offers the market’s first-ever renter-centric CRM, it also serves as the ideal hub for a robust tech stack aimed at engaging with residents throughout every stage of the leasing process. Funnel also intends to build out new resident tools, including onboarding, resident portal, and renewals.

The platform fits seamlessly into RET’s ecosystem, and Funnel is quickly establishing itself as the premier foundation for rent tech integration and resident experience. Touring a property? Funnel can support property navigation and unit accessibility via Engrain and SmartRent.  , Need to source a dog walker for your new neighborhood? Funnel can connect you with local service providers via Amenify. Ready to move out and lease a new apartment? Funnel again can play a critical role by connecting renters to sister properties within the portfolio, thus building brand loyalty by providing an excellent renter experience.

Funnel is unique in this ability to provide direct benefits to allconsumers in the rental lifecycle, from prospect through long-term tenant.

The Future for Leasing CRMs is Here

We firmly believe that Funnel represents the future of leasing technology for enterprise and mid-market operators, and it is that confidence that pushed us to lead another round of funding for Funnel and significantly increase our stake in the company. By doubling down on our investment in Funnel’s unique platform, we are strengthening our commitment to the renter-centric future of leasing, which will benefit leasing teams as well as renters for decades to come.

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A Roadblock for Property Managers

With the rise of rental technology, solutions have been developed to manage essentially every aspect of the market, from amenities to insurance to rental payments. However, even as many of these solutions have permeated the market, the process of requesting maintenance and liaising with external vendors remains overwhelmingly dependent on antiquated, inefficient systems and has proven to be a roadblock many property managers struggle to overcome. And while this is accurate with regard to multifamily operators, it is especially true for single-family rental (SFR) investors, who, according to recent census data, make up 72.5% of the market. Unlike multifamily operators whose residential units are centralized within a single building or garden-style community, SFR operators may have to maintain a hundred units across a sprawling metropolis. These distributed portfolios and the wide variety of layouts, appliances and components — such as flooring, paint and HVAC — make the task of SFR maintenance even more challenging.

Bringing Maintenance to the 21st Century

As the SFR asset class continues to attract massive amounts of capital, identifying technologies that make it easier for investors of all sizes to manage their properties is one of RET Ventures’ primary goals. We are always looking to expand our rent tech portfolio with new solutions capable of addressing long-standing inefficiencies in the market, which has led us to our most recent investment in Lula.

An intelligent property maintenance platform primarily serving SFR owners, Lula reduces time spent on maintenance by nearly 60% – integrating with prominent property management software systems to streamline the complete maintenance process. It allows for easy and seamless communication between tenants, property managers, and contractors, ensuring a job can be easily requested and monitored until it has been completed. Lula is a solution-centric platform, providing de-escalation services for requests that do not actually require an outside vendor to address - improving communication, reducing costs for property managers and increasing tenant satisfaction. If a request does require a maintenance coordinator to be dispatched, Lula has a large network of quality and fully-vetted contractors to complete the work.

We are extremely bullish on Lula’s platform and the broader implications of such a tool for single family investors and property managers. We constantly hear from our strategic investors about the need for a product to modernize antiquated real estate maintenance operations, and believe Lula – based on its unique technology and smooth user experience – is the most impactful solution on the market.

Lula’s Significant Potential

Our investment in Lula comes at a time where macroeconomic trends are driving capital flows into SFR and many institutional pools of capital are beginning to announce single-family rental funds. As the SFR asset class continues to grow, the platform’s ability to simplify the historically convoluted maintenance process will bring tremendous value to all stakeholders in the space.

We are confident that Lula has the potential to become a major solution across the real estate industry in the years to come, and we look forward to supporting them as they continue to grow their team, expand their platform, and roll out their innovative technology in new markets across the US.

The Antiquated CRE Transaction Process

U.S. commercial real estate is a $20-trillion asset class, yet – even as technology has enhanced other aspects of the sector — the transaction process for buying, selling, and financing commercial property has remained highly analogue. Most deal-related data is collected by third-party intermediaries in offline channels, with disconnected spreadsheets, emails, handshakes, and other manual processes continuing to dominate workflows.

Despite the real estate industry’s size and scope, it has never benefited from what many other large financial markets enjoy: a technology infrastructure that centralizes the disparate counterparties, workflows, and datasets at play in every deal.

A Comprehensive Capital Markets Platform

Historically, RET Ventures has focused heavily on the operational side of real estate technology, with numerous investments in smart buildings and property management tools focusing on maximizing the operating efficiency of properties and portfolios. As we grow, our strategic approach has expanded accordingly across the CRE value chain, with a keen eye toward how owners build and finance their portfolios. A significant priority is bringing greater efficiency and transparency to the processes surrounding acquisition, disposition, and financing of projects, properties and portfolios; to that end, we’re excited to announce our investment in Revere.

Revere presents a novel concept for the institutional CRE market, combining a verified professional network, listing marketplace, and deal execution venue into a true ‘one-stop-shop’ for market participants. Revere enables brokers, developers, owners, lenders and investors to expand their network; identify potential counterparties; and buy, sell, or finance an asset all in one place.

Revere aggregates and stores vast amounts of relevant information on the people, companies, and transactions that comprise the institutional CRE market, making this data easily accessible to platform subscribers. Furthermore, Revere is unique among real estate transaction marketplaces as a subscription-based platform that does not take commission from any deals facilitated on the network — this model was designed deliberately, motivated by Revere’s mission to bring greater efficiency and transparency to the existing market structure, with brokers very much included. Revere provides a valuable turnkey tool for brokers throughout the transaction lifecycle helping them ensure best execution for clients on the buy and sell side of any deal.

Revere’s Incredible Potential

As a seed stage company, Revere is younger than our typical investment. But we see incredible market opportunity in the prospect of aggregating the different components of the CRE market onto a single comprehensive, collaborative platform. Just as importantly, we have tremendous confidence in the company’s leadership team, which includes sophisticated CRE professionals and ex-Googlers who understand the inner workings of a CRE transaction and how technology can improve it.

The company has already gained significant traction from several prominent institutions — including our co-investors Related Companies, Holland Partner Group, The Feil Organization, Driftwood Capital, Davis Development and Essence Development — and it is poised for rapid growth in the near term.

The Future of Real Estate Capital Flows

A platform like Revere is long overdue, but more timely than ever. With macroeconomic trends and inflation driving investors to real estate, the asset class is one of the most attractive destinations for institutional capital. In this climate, Revere’s ability to bring together all aspects of the capital stack – investors, developers, debt and equity — will simplify the transaction process and allow users to build business partnerships with investors across the country.

Revere is a valuable addition to RET’s current portfolio of real estate technology investments, and we look forward to providing the company with resources and support as they expand their team and continue to refine their product in the years ahead.