CRETech x CRETech

I have recently had a major lightbulb moment in my professional life.

For the last few years I have been surprised more by who is not at conferences than who is. I sit in a session and think of who would really get value from it, look around and they are not there. I walk the trade floor and wonder why some amazing companies are not present when their target audiences are in arms reach.

This week I realized it is all in an acronym.

CRE Tech is confusingly the acronym used for both Commercial and Corporate Real Estate

Commercial is more focused on the financial aspects of space - building, buying and selling.

Corporate addresses the needs of management of a portfolio and increasingly addressing the needs of occupiers of space.

Corporate technology aligns with core service delivery areas – FM, Space and Occupancy, Project Management, Lease and Transactions and ESG and interactions with hopefully (please) more and more HR. Building and Workplace Tech add to the complexity of the equation

There needs to be a coming together of the two. People in both spaces need to know about the other. I was embarrassed at the CRETech conference in New York that I had never come across the Tenant Experience application Lane About | Lane Workplace Experience Platform (joinlane.com). Even more so when a few days later they sold for $200 million. But in presenting a session at this weeks CoreNet, I brought up Lane, and only one person in the audience of Corporate Occupiers had heard of it.

I personally found NavigatorCRE Real Intelligence Analytics | NavigatorCRE at CRETech in LA 3 years ago, and over a drink (ok, maybe more than one) spoke to the co-founder about my vision if they could bring the product to the Occupier space.

I was so happy to see them at their first big CoreNet event in Seattle this year. They were one of the most popular booths (an enviable status they also shared at BluePrint and Realcomm as well).

People struggling with processing complex real estate data (of either variety) need to know about products like Cherre Cherre

The success stories of Quadreal Spaces QuadReal presented so openly by Thano Lambrino would have brought the house down at CoreNet.

The session on Buy v Build at Blueprint, which seemed to bore an audience of VC's and Startups, would have been eye opening in front of Real Estate Tech Service Providers, Corporate leaders and IoT experts.

There are many more examples of this, and am sure many I do not know about. I wonder at what we are missing in other parts of the world. UNISSU is driving that bus www.unissu.com

My message is to look beyond your traditional borders, whether you are an Owner, Occupier, VC, Landlord or REIT.

CRE X CRE It is something that my good friend Michael Beckerman and I are going to make happen!