Curated daily by our industry experts. Stay informed on how tech is shaping the real estate industry with these important headlines.
CRAINS NEW YORK
Longtime Google engineer Chaim Fried built his first surveillance system, around his Brooklyn home, five years ago, after his family lost all its valuables in a daytime burglary. Then his bicycle was stolen from his fenced-in backyard in plain view of a camera, which taught him another lesson: The system was sending him so many alerts that he had stopped paying attention….
WSJ
WeWork Cos. has a plan to shore up confidence in its business before it goes public: offer billions of dollars in debt that would fund its growth until it can turn a profit. The money-losing office-space manager is seeking to raise as much as $3 billion to $4 billion in coming months through a debt facility that could grow as big as $10 billion over the next several years, the people said. This debt offering would be independent of the money WeWork raises in its initial public offering and co…
GLOBEST
Property management software company AppFolio has launched a new artificial intelligence tool for property managers. The new AppFolio Property Manager Plus tool includes an AI leasing assistant. Lisa, the name of the tool, will automate the leasing process, including responding to requests by email or text in real time and tracking leasing performance. The result is aimed to help drive better occupancy in residential properties.
WSJ
STARTING THIS MONTH, you can summon a chopper with the tap of an app to whisk you from a lower Manhattan heliport to John F. Kennedy Airport in just 8 minutes. But Uber Copter isn’t for the average traveler fed up with gridlocked roads to Kennedy. Initially, the service is limited to Uber’s Platinum and Diamond members, the top tiers of its loyalty plan, and will cost an average of $200 to $225 one-way, or more depending on demand pricing. The choppers are owned and operated by HeliFlite, based …
WSJ
As food delivery expands across major U.S. cities, a handful of startup companies are trying to use the latest e-commerce technology to liberate restaurants and grocery stores from pricey, street-facing retail space. The new breed of startups are opening shared kitchens in industrial buildings, hoping to persuade restaurants to quit their storefronts, move to the new spaces and switch entirely to delivery. Although these companies are still small, some observers say they could leave their mar…
THE REAL ESTATE INNOVATORS
Andrea Jang is the Head of Growth, Americas at JLL Spark JLL Spark is an independent division of JLL that operates a global venture fund of $100 million to invest in proptech companies transforming commercial real estate. JLL has structured JLL Spark to operate independently and without the typical constraints of most corporate “innovation” or venture arms, providing the nimbleness and speed of a startup backed by JLL’s expertise and resources….
THE REAL DEAL
The Edge in Amsterdam is widely considered the smartest building in the world. Since the 15-story office property opened four years ago, its 28,000 sensors have collected roughly 55 terabytes of data on everything from the air’s CO2 levels to workers’ daily coffee orders. If that information were stored as music files, it would play continuously for more than 100 years. And the more info the glass-encased building collects, the smarter it gets….
CREtech
In June 2019, investments in private real estate tech companies continue to set new records. For the fourth consecutive month, dollar volume in real estate tech surpassed the billion dollar mark. Total dollar volume reached an estimated $1.1 Billion. Month-to-month, total dollar volume decreased by 45 percent. However, year-to-year (June ’18 & June ’19), venture capital investments in real estate tech has increased by 69 percent….
BISNOW
For the past few years, coworking and flexible workspace have been something of a one-way bet for the companies getting into the business. Supply has risen rapidly but demand has risen faster, and so prices have continued to increase. Not anymore. Demand remains robust, but the huge spike in supply has caused the prices flexible office operators can charge to drop in the world’s largest cities including the major gateway cities of the UK and U.S., according to a report from flexible office sp…
VENTUREBEAT
Can sightless robots reconstruct a room well enough to avoid endlessly bumping into walls? That’s what scientists at the University of Technology Sydney set out to discover in a study published on the preprint server Arxiv.org. They claim their approach, which employed a speaker and a microphone-sporting robot tasked with following a path-planning strategy, drove the robot from a random starting position in such a way that the room’s geometry was “guaranteed” to be revealed….
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