Casey Berman and Jake Fingert
Casey Berman and Jake Fingert
Managing Director and General Partner; General Partner at Camber Creek
Camber Creek, a venture capital firm with a commanding presence in proptech, hit an enviable wall back in October, when it closed its most recent fund.
“Camber Creek Fund III had a target of $120 million,” Casey Berman and Jake Fingert said in a joint email. “Unfortunately, we had to turn investors away once we reached $155 million.”
The pair credit the success of such funds to Camber Creek’s long-term relationship with its limited partners over the past decade-plus. The firm basically plugs these LPs into a network that includes the companies in which Camber Creek invests.
There’s another reason for the success, according to Berman and Fingert: “The pandemic also accelerated a trend we’ve seen for some time of real estate technology solutions becoming more essential to operational efficiency, moving from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have.”
Indeed. Proptech is more ubiquitous than ever and so is investment in it. In 2019, VC investment in the space hit a record high of $31.6 billion, with $18.96 billion going to commercial real estate companies, according to analyst Ashkán Zandieh. It would clock in at a still-robust $23.8 billion during the blighted 2020.
Camber Creek before, and during, the pandemic poured money into startups, such as smart-lock maker Latch, online notarization platform Notarize and property management company Darwin Homes. The last of which happens to work mostly in single-family rentals, an asset class that has boomed in popularity the past year among investors (and Latch has a pending public debut that values it at $1.56 billion).
Going forward, Berman and Fingert say that two trends mean their firm has no intention of taking the foot off the funding gas: One is an accelerating integration of the proptech that has emerged; the other is what they describe as “a democratization of access” to these technologies, among even smaller real estate owners and operators.
“The current environment for investing in real estate technology is the best it has been in the 10 years since our founding,” according to Berman and Fingert.
Like we said, enviable.—T.A.
