Curated daily by our industry experts. Stay informed on how tech is shaping the real estate industry with these important headlines.
COMMERCIALOBSERVER
In a conference call with reporters on Monday afternoon, Sarva said the four-year-old startup has “profitability very much in sight” and released some financial figures, providing a rare look at the firm’s inner workings. This marks the first time that Knotel — which was crowned a unicorn last year after it closed on a $400 million funding round — has invited outsiders to look at financial details about its company.
DALLASINNOVATES
RealPage is expected to retain Modern Message’s employees and operations but move the company from its current downtown Dallas location to RealPage’s corporate headquarters in Richardson, according to a statement. “Modern Message provides a unique boost to our already powerful resident engagement platform,” Jon Pastor, Senior Vice President of Consumer Solutions at RealPage, said in a statement. “The two solutions joined together enable our clients to give residents a rich rewards experience, bo…
GLOBEST
Survey respondents, some 90% of global executives, think consolidation is needed for PropTech to prove its ROI and more effectively deliver on the needs of the commercial real estate industry. In fact, 33% of US executives predicted that consolidation will be well underway within the next 12 months. Specifically, areas of PropTech most likely to experience consolidation include property management, property transactions and listing services, and financing and lending firms.
NYTIMES
London’s police department said on Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China. The decision is a major development in the use of a technology that has set off a worldwide debate about the balance between security and privacy.
BISNOW
Traknprotect CEO Parminder Batra is glad that the emergency service device she created worked. How did she know? Because recently, a man had pushed a housekeeper into a guest’s hotel room, Batra said, and she believed she was about to be assaulted. Equipped with a Traknprotect safety button, the housekeeper immediately used the device to call for help.
BISNOW
No one is eager to be the next WeWork anymore. Startups in the real estate industry have spent the months surrounding the collapse of the coworking monster’s valuation adjusting their growth plans to focus on sustainability, rather than grabbing as much market share as possible, The Wall Street Journal reports. That change in strategy has come even as venture capital investment into real estate startups more than tripled from 2018 to 2019, when CRETech estimates that total equity and debt invest…
COMMERCIALOBSERVER
Proptech firm SquareFoot lured another real estate vet to join the digital brokerage, this time hiring Transwestern partner Jonathan Tootell to head up its New York City brokerage team, Commercial Observer has learned. Tootell joined SquareFoot at the beginning of the month and will become the company’s New York Market Lead where he will work to bring SquareFoot’s brokers “up to speed at what you would see at a traditional brokerage firm” and bolster its ranks, Tootell said.
VENTUREBEAT
The micromobility market consolidated a bit today in what might be a harbinger of wider contraction. Coinciding with a $75 million extension to Bird’s series D funding round that brings its total raised to $350 million (up from $275 million as of November 2019), the Berlin- and Santa Monica-based electric scooter and bike company confirmed it has acquired escooter operator Circ (formerly Flash) for an undisclosed amount. Over 300 employees from Circ’s offices in Europe will join Bird in its ongo…
TECHCRUNCH
If a thousand companies make their own smart light bulb, do a thousand companies also have to design a light switch app to control them? Kraftful, a company out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 class, doesn’t think so. Kraftful builds the myriad components that an IoT/smart home company might need, puzzle piecing them together into apps for each company without requiring them to reinvent the light switch (or the padlock button, or the smart thermostat dial) for the nth time….
VENTUREBEAT
GM’s Cruise is launching the Origin electric autonomous vehicle and sliding doors today, the product of 3 years of work between General Motors, Cruise, and Honda. The Cruise Origin is designed without a combustible engine or a driver, decisions which Cruise CEO Dan Ammann says give people more space. The Origin can seat up to 6 people, with 3 passengers on each side looking toward each other in the rear-wheel drive vehicle.
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