How Startups Are Making Real Estate Businesses More Efficient

Advances in information technology have generated enormous efficiencies in many industries, including manufacturing, transportation, communications, entertainment, retail and financial services. Yet in real estate, the largest industry of them all, innovation has lagged as agents and brokers have been slow to adopt new technologies.

This is because real estate is often considered a relationship business. Indeed, the markets for commercial, multifamily and residential real estate could not function without networks of human professionals who have built trust working with each other over many years.

However, real estate also is an information business, where transactions depend on the steady flow of data between buyers and sellers, and brokerages with the best data ultimately make the most money.

There is no good reason for real estate businesses to operate without the benefits of faster and more accurate data, or the efficiencies afforded by workflow automation and online collaboration.

Fortunately, things are changing. On the consumer-facing side of the business, companies like Zillow, Trulia, HomeAway and Rent.com launched as startups in the early 2000s to provide online access to home and apartment information.

Meanwhile in the B2B arena, legacy software companies such as CoStar, Yardi and RealPage have updated their platforms to be more feature-rich and user-friendly, and startups like LoopNet (now part of CoStar) have democratized commercial real estate information by providing online access to buyers and sellers of commercial real estate nationwide.

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