How Are You Innovating with Technology?

[Ryan Bergeron]

I recently read an article published by Stephenie Stone, an executive at a high-tech design and construction firm, entitled Why Every Company Is A Technology Company.  It was an interesting read.  As an employee at a markedly low-tech construction company and an aspiring real estate entrepreneur, I was wondering how BP members are leveraging new technologies to innovate in the real estate space.

[Trevor Ewen]

@Ryan Bergeron

As a software engineer, my whole world is tech-filled. As such, I tend to go to real-estate to retreat away from that. This is a notoriously a people and relationship business, and given the age of most practitioners, it errs on the less tech-savvy side. In my day job, you pick up the phone for almost nothing. In RE it's the lay of the land. Couple things I am using modern tech for:

1) Communications (obviously, I am here on BP, right).
2) Expense management ( Expensify is a great tool, for instance)
3) Accounting
4) Market analysis. Run all my analysis via Google Sheets, which I can easily throw on an iPad and bring to investors. 
5) I use Rentometer and scraped date from Padmapper to get general rent targets for a market.
6) I have even found Redfin, Trulia, Zillow, etc. useful from the perspective of learning about a market or ZipCode. Don't think it's great for deals, but gives a broad view of the inventory. 

Some of my use cases (which are specific to out-of-state, part-time investors like me). I don't think we'll soon be able to 'tech' ourselves out of old-fashioned hand-shaking and phone calls. Technology helps a lot at the margin, and helps us spend our time doing the things that matter most.