Brad Greiwe, Brendan Wallace and Sarah Liu
Co-founders and managing partners; partner on real estate technology investment at Fifth Wall
Fifth Wall’s proptech investment strategy this year has centered around innovation into technologies that once seemed more oriented for the future, but have now become part of our present reality.
Over the last 12 months, the venture capital firm — the largest focused on proptech — has enhanced its global footprint by opening offices in Abu Dhabi and Singapore, and made significant advances into fundraising for climate change adaptability and artificial intelligence tools for commercial real estate companies.
Since its 2016 founding, Fifth Wall has raised more than $3 billion in capital across numerous investment funds and counts more than 100 CRE owners and operators as clients.
“Our guiding light is the nexus of where we can generate the highest financial returns. And that tends to be coincident with where we can deliver the most strategic value for our LPs,” said Brendan Wallace, referring to Fifth Wall’s limited partners. “We’re focused on the big spend categories, the big problems within real estate capital markets and real estate operations, the guts of the real estate business.”
Brad Greiwe said there’s been “a big push” from Fifth Wall’s CRE clients to better understand potential proptech investments at the intersection of the built environment and new regulations passed to offset the climate crisis.
“Decarbonization of the real estate industry is top of mind as folks start to think about how their portfolios influence the climate and how they can play a proactive larger role in helping the industry do a lot better,” Greiwe said.
As 2023 comes to a close, Fifth Wall has also entered into another science fiction sphere full of investors and venture capital opportunities: namely, AI.
“I’ve been doing a lot of presentations to the boards of our LPs, helping them get up to speed and stay on top of the evolution of artificial intelligence, sharing the implications and the low-hanging fruit that they can take from there,” Sarah Liu said. “Real estate was very behind in technology adoption, and there’s a pretty massive opportunity here.”
