How to Innovate Real Estate? Challenge Accepted

ReTech (Real Estate Tech) recently held its first hacker challenge, gathering a group of real estate executives and technology professionals.

Pushing aside listing sites and online maps, the judges looked into new applications that allow real estate companies to improve services, increase sales and save money.

Jared Kushner, CEO of a diversified real estate organization called Kushner Co, was the featured judge of the night and was quoted saying that building owners should “start behaving like technology companies.”

“We work in [a real estate] industry that isn’t technology forward, but that’s what we need,” he said.

Interestingly, a keycard managing system called Kisi bagged the top award. Their keycards can be tracked and managed online by landlords and tenants. BetaBeat said the company’s “fun presentation helped win approval from the whole audience.”

Winning second place was EZbldg EHS, which allows property managers to go through a checklist on what to accomplish to ensure that they are not violating the law.

“Legislative compliance may not scream “hot tech product,” but when the team put the potential savings in real dollar amounts, they had the judges’ full attention,” BetaBeat’s report said.

Coming in third was Vrban, which allows builders to use Oculus Rift, a virtual reality head-mounted display, to explore possible developments in an area. It allows people to see the potential impact of a new infrastructure to the area around it, such as blocking the view or the night sky.

The past months have been interesting for the real estate industry, with more and more companies embracing technology to make things easier for agents or to improve services and attract more buyers.

Among the notable companies that had successfully married real estate and technology is RealBiz Media Group RBIZ, which caters to 60,000 real estate agents and brokers. Through its proprietary video processing technology, it is able to create virtual tours for prospective buyers.

The video tours allow customers to get an accurate representation of the property, saving them time and money instead of traveling to the location.

The company recently launched its Nestbuilder Agent and MVA video platforms which is not being used by more than 15,000 agents. More than 24,000 videos are being published daily through its video based marketing platform. Meanwhile, virtual tours have resulted in 113,092 published listings.

RealBiz Media also has a consumer site called Nestbuilder.com, which hosts 1.6 million videos and has increased it page views by 196% earlier this year.