Scott Rechler (clockwise from left), Matt Boras, and Andrew Min.
Scott Rechler, Matt Boras and Andrew Min
Chairman and CEO; managing director of venture capital activities; senior vice president of strategy and digital initiatives at RXR
“We’ve been involved in technology and proptech for a long time now,” RXR’s Andrew Min said. “We think our differentiator is our ability to analyze and operationalize data, and so this past year we’ve continued to build our own technology, which I think is pretty unique, having our own in-house software development team and data science team.”
The RXR team immersed itself in customer insights this year, analyzing how residents in their multifamily portfolio interact with their building.
“We’ve actually made a lot of decisions — and adjusted decisions — based on that, including some development decisions around future amenities, but even things like learning what amenities are valuable in a building informs programming,” Min said. “There is one building in Downtown Brooklyn where the gym was a huge driver of satisfaction, and so now we do more fitness lessons there.”
RXR also utilized digital twins this year to identify if unit lines were out of whack on the rent side or underperforming, drilling into key metrics and alerting team leaders to the results. Lastly, it’s been focusing on taking advantage of AI advances and realizing it doesn’t have to build everything itself.
“We can start democratizing technology, if you will, and putting it in the hands of our people,” Min said. “We’re rolling out a bunch of different initiatives, including ChatGPT enterprise, but spending a lot of time connecting it to our data sources so we’re not just asking random questions. You can ask questions about occupancy last quarter at an asset, and compare it month-over-month. And rather than just dumping ChatGPT into our teams’ laps, we’re helping our teams by coaching them on how to prompt it.”
Matt Boras describes the year as an “exciting” one.
“We continue to expand what we do on the early-stage investment side out of our venture capital fund and part of the reason why this year has been an exciting one is what we do in the context of the broader macro trends and the technology cycle that we’re in from an AI perspective,” he said.
RXR has also been focusing on robotics. But, if you’re envisioning a robot version of CEO Scott Rechler right now, we hate to disappoint you. RXR is spending less time on humanoids and more on designing robots focused on specific tasks within construction or property management.
