Executive Series #1 ft. Joe White: “Stop selling the feature functions and sell the so what.”

In the first ever episode of the PropTech Talks Executive Series, I spoke with Joe White , Global Technology Solutions and Client Care Lead at 戴德梁行 ross.

If real estate is from Venus and PropTech is from Mars, Joe has made a career “being in the spaceship between the two”. With 15 years of experience in Commercial Real Estate, Joe is passionate about working with clients to digitally transform their strategies and bringing innovation to solve for opportunities and risks in their strategy. Currently, Joe advises Cushman & Wakefield clients as to the appropriate technology platforms that a data, process, capability, and price-optimised CRE department may require.

In this interview, Joe provided invaluable insights into the challenges real estate leaders are facing when digitally transforming their processes, the future of data and AI, advice for PropTech leaders aiming to deploy their technology at scale, and much more.

You can access the full interview through the link below:

https://proptechtalks.buzzsprout.com/share

Interview Highlights

Matthew: What is the key challenge faced in AI and data?

Joe: If a client moves from one service provider to another, it is becoming more important that data is exchanged in a professional and helpful manner that we can utilize it and build upon it. That process has made clients want to bring in their own tech, which is fine but the analogy that I always give on this is: If you were going to get your car serviced, you wouldn't tell them to use your tools and adapt their business processes to your tools, right? This creates an interesting challenge on both sides.

And so what we have seen a lot of clients moving down the angle of is having their own data warehouse and mandating that any of their service providers feed their data into the data warehouse, which I am a massive supporter of. You get the best of both worlds, right? You can still have your service provider bring in their strategic tech that aligns to their business processes. They can still bring innovation. They can still have the data analytics and , business intelligence. But it also means that you have getting a regular feed of the data that you can utilise to manage your business. It's the balance between owning everything and outsourcing everything. And somewhere in the middle is where the sweet spot of the advice we're giving to clients.

Matthew: From your perspective, how are clients taking in technology? Are they taking it with an open mind or is there still resistance?

Joe: If you can show the value and if you can show the return on investment, then most clients are looking at it with an open mind. (...) Obviously, there are security challenges too, and security process can take some time. When we're working with clients, we often have a 90 day transition but the IT security process could take six months. And so we often say to them, before we contract let's have a conversation about IT security. This can be a bit of a hindrance for PropTech because, generally speaking, they’re all secure but they don't have SOC 2 certification. So there's a slightly risk averse piece there, but I think there's a way around it.

Matthew: What would your advice be to PropTech leaders trying to deploy their technology?

Joe: When Ross Hodges , our global emerging technologies lead, and I sit on PropTech demos, we always think that we would want to say to PropTech people offline to tell us the so what, what their technology does that makes it different from all the others. There's so much PropTech out there that the feature functions don't really work for me, and I don't think they work for a company like Cushman & Wakefield or our competitors. I think if you can prove the value and the so what, that is where you can get into these relationships because it just, it changes the conversation. (...) I'm sure there's PropTech unicorns out there, but that's sometimes my feedback to them. Stop selling the feature functions and sell the so what.

Matthew: What needs to happen for the PropTech industry to mature?

Joe: Generative AI has only just started and people are just getting to know it, but I do think it's going to revolutionize the way that we do business. One of the reasons why PropTech is behind is because there are a lot of antiquated processes in real estate, so there is nothing that me, from a service provider perspective, can solve. Clients will often ask us for an AI lease reading solution. We absolutely can, as long as the lease is not in a paper bag and if it has been scanned. A few years ago, we were talking about blockchain, and it could actually play a massive part in this if people embrace it. If people don't embrace it, it will probably continue in the current trajectory. So I think for PropTech, it is all about? making sure that the processes that we have had for many years can be changed. The examples you just gave suggest that the other industries (FinTech, InsurTech) have changed some of those, and so I think that there is hope for corporate real estate.

Matthew: Can you tell us more about the Cushman & Wakefield AI strategy?

Joe: Cushman & Wakefield has just released its AI strategy, which is called AI plus, and so it's AI plus people, partners. It is not looking to use AI for the sake of AI, it is instead thinking about adding AI to existing processes to provide a better service to our clients.

It was a pleasure interviewing Joe and learning about his trajectory to date. Stay tuned for the upcoming Investor, Founder, and Executive Series interviews!