Universities Are Taking Varied Approaches to Proptech Studies

As the importance of proptech grows throughout real estate, it is also a growing subject of study in the academic world.

From Ivy League schools to other leading U.S. universities with tech and real estate-centric programs, proptech is being studied within and across both disciplines.

Universities such as Georgia Tech, MIT and Texas A&M, to name but a few, approach proptech studies from a number of different perspectives.

One approach can be found at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, said Bryan Boyer, founding faculty director of the urban technology degree program at the school.

“We have architecture degrees, urban planning degrees, and we offer real estate as a minor and a certificate, so basically we represent the full spectrum of traditional built environment professions and disciplines,” said Boyer of his program. “And what we acknowledged about five years ago when we started working on this urban tech degree is that there are lots of other ways to think about how we shape buildings and cities, and one of those is proptech.”

Real estate’s architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) sectors are all “going digital native,” Boyer said. His program, which commenced in 2020, has 170 students whose career interests range from government services to real estate, including working at the latter’s more established firms, as well as becoming proptech entrepreneurs themselves.

“We just graduated our first cohort of students from the bachelor of science program in the spring, and those students have already gone off to two positions in industry,” Boyer said. “One of them is at a real estate firm, and the leadership came and said, ‘Hey, you studied urban technology. Tell us how we can use AI in our pipeline of development.’

“So, it’s very early, because we only have that one graduating class, but we feel validated in this belief that people can work with data and code in the context of the built environment, including real estate. It’s a growing need and opportunity because of the way the world is moving.”

A number of Boyer’s students are obtaining a bachelor’s degree in urban tech with a minor in real estate, with the current split slightly more toward established real estate firms, Boyer said. “But I think that’s maybe more reflective of where the broader economy is at the moment. The froth of investment in proptech has slowed down a bit. Tech investments in general are a little bit less confident than perhaps in prior years, I think in part because of the way that AI is introducing new questions in the market.”

For David Stifter, co-founder and CEO at PredictAP, a Boston-based, AI-driven real estate invoice coding software company, the connection to academia came through the Massachusetts AI Jumpstart Program. Launched in 2021, the program is designed to encourage collaboration between government, academia and the private sector. For PredictAP, which was founded in 2020 as one of the first AI-native proptech firms, it became a turning point, said Stifter.

Through AI Jumpstart, the company partnered with professor Mirek Riedewald of Northeastern University, an expert in databases, scalable analytics and query visualization. Riedewald contributed cutting-edge academic perspectives, research process and rigor, while PredictAP’s engineering team, led by Chris Antenesse (formerly of Apple), brought deep industry experience in software as a service, development and operations tools, and real-world delivery, said Stifter.

“The State of Massachusetts was a bit ahead of the game,” Stifter said. “They had this AI Jumpstart program fairly early on, well before this current Chat GPT large language model was happening. They looked to match up academic professors with businesses and good ideas. We presented our idea about using AI to help with this coding of invoices for real estate companies. Most professors liked the larger ideas of using AI to cure cancer or solve global warming, so it was crickets. But Mirek was someone that was interested, and thought, ‘Hey, this could be an interesting problem.’”

Over a few months of Riedewald consulting with PredictAP, the two parties realised they had a great marriage, in which Riedewald could bring this scientific, research-oriented process together with PredictAP’s real world understanding of a business problem. In that way, they can build software and develop techniques that can actually implement a marketable product at scale much faster than possible otherwise, said Stifter.

“From our experience, there’s so much change that’s happening so rapidly that getting that academic view of what’s there and what’s coming allows us to be much more responsive technologically,” Stifter said. “Also, to be able to solve much more complicated questions that, as a startup, we don’t have the resources to spend millions of dollars on research and keep up to date with that. It allows us to gain an understanding of the tools available to solve our problems in a much more direct way than we’d have if we had to spend money to develop that understanding ourselves.”

Although that collaboration is not designed to bring students to work with PredictAP, Northeastern’s co-op student program fosters a symbiotic relationship between academia and proptech, Stifter added.

Another proptech in academia connection can be found at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, where former real estate technology consultant and proptech fund manager Robin Barone is an adjunct professor teaching a proptech and digitization course in the graduate program.

Barone emphasized the importance of understanding technology as a tool for real estate professionals. She has seen significant interest in her course since it started in 2022, with more than 100 founders and 20 venture capitalists visiting the class.

“At Schack, they learn how to buy buildings, build a building, but I try to teach them to understand how technology companies are built,” said Barone. “I see technology as a tool for their jobs, and I prepare them to embrace technology as a tool and to actually be a good technology customer that engages with and adopts it. So in my class we learn about how technology companies are built, from ideation to growing, to sold and integrated. We cover all asset classes and workflows, from leasing to tenant experience, operations to capex.”

Barone said one of her goals is to create a “Gartner-type” technology resource to license out, which would provide transparency and an actual value-add in bringing tech data into a real estate portfolio.

“At my core I’m very skeptical, but I still see the potential and possibility in certain areas,” Barone said of tech in real estate. “I see technology as solving all these tiny, annoying problems, or just making things a bit more streamlined and easy to navigate, especially around data and access to insights.”

Last week, Barone and another adjunct also began a class to educate tech students about the real estate industry.

“A lot of customers, real estate professionals, are really frustrated by how they’re inundated by employees who have no clue how real estate works,” she said. “Just basic fundamentals. Yet they’re trying to sell products into that space. We designed a Real Estate 101 seminar for proptech employees to have a basic understanding, so they can communicate and engage better with professionals.”

Josh Panknin, the director of real estate AI research and innovation at Columbia University’s engineering school, has taught proptech studies there, but now finds himself skeptical of concentrating solely on that discipline to bring technology to real estate.

Panknin’s program focuses on tech-heavy, financial engineering aspects of proptech, rather than business models or operational tasks. His graduate students have strong math and machine learning backgrounds, and are building complex technology for strategic real estate problems like portfolio management and capital allocation, he said.

“Larger [real estate] companies are looking at things that are more systemic rather than operational, more strategic,” said Panknin. “How do we build tools that will help us do portfolio management and capital allocation, not will help us manage a deal flow or reserve conference rooms? There’s a whole world of real estate out there like portfolio management, asset management, mortgage-backed securities, real estate investment trusts across the larger capital markets that are not being addressed effectively by the proptech world. That’s more of what we’re focusing on — things that are more strategic, more systemic.”

As for the students he encounters in his program, Panknin said, “One of the problems we have is that engineering students don’t have a real estate background, so they don’t have an intuitive view of the problem. The real estate students have a good understanding of those, but don’t have the technical skill set. So bringing these things together is where I think the value is going to be. But I also think it’s going to be very challenging to do that, because typically those students come in with different skill sets.

“Perhaps it’s more about instead of creating engineers on the real estate side, it’s creating people that are translators,” he said. “To understand enough to be able to communicate well with engineers and to be that go-between, versus having high-low skill sets where you know real estate or you know the technical side. But the ability to communicate between the two sides makes it difficult for many of these applications to get developed and implemented effectively.”

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.