RET Ventures Summit and the win-win of Strategic Investors
What would happen if someone gathered the majority of major US residential operators (2.4 million units directly managed!), raised capital from these operators for PropTech innovation, and brought the group together with a small group of PropTech Founders for several days?
RET Ventures did this and from my experience, it results in three direct benefits:
Solving for what Multifamily Operators need today -- (customer-centric model)
Scalability for win-wins -- (thou shalt not disrupt operations)
Discussing the future -- (long-term relationships)
RET Ventures is a venture capital fund backed by a consortium of institutional residential real estate owners/operators. Each year they host an event in Park City, Utah, with dozens of leaders from groups that manage 2.4+ million homes/units. The event spans several days and focuses on connecting Clients, Investors, and CEOs to solve problems.
Amenify, a platform for managed services in hundreds of thousands of homes, is fortunate to have been invited. Each time it was energizing to connect with multifamily industry experts and other men and women that are building impressive businesses. There are three specific categories that I appreciate:
1. Learning what Multifamily Operators need today -- (customer-centric model)
Strategic investors provide direct alignment of resources where they are doubly motivated to share and collaborate on addressing direct challenges in their business. Operating a multifamily residential platform is highly competitive, so having a custom laboratory with technology/product leaders can provide the invaluable edge to outperform.
From our (Amenify) perspective, a good technology effort in the real estate industry is not about pushing a commodity product, but rather listening and then building a product for which the market pulls. For US multifamily and residential real estate, there is no better place on the planet to do this than Park City with RET Ventures. A few examples of people that I respect doing this include
SmartRent - Lucas and the team purchasing SightPlan to quickly respond to automating communications and workflows and growing customer demand.
Moved - Adam and the team are doing a nice job here responding to a pain point around elevators and resident move-in process management.
2. Scalability for win-wins -- (thou shalt not disrupt operations)
Strategic investors help at the beginning, but also as operations expand across an entire portfolio. I usually tell friends that “Disrupt” is a bad word in the PropTech industry. Investors like the word, but to multifamily clients, “Disrupt” sounds like: no water, no power, or some other Force Majeure that is resulting in a negative review every 30 seconds online.
Working with strategic investors to address issues to avoid "the bad kind" of disruption is helpful. It sometimes means slowing down growth or even add-on capital that meets the needs of the numerous stakeholders after the initial launch. This is often sorted by stakeholder on the Client side, including:
Workflows
Onsite Teams
Marketing
Technology integrations
Compliance (legal, insurance, taxes)
Customer Support
3. Discussing the future -- (long-term relationships)
Big picture, it is a phenomenal time to be in PropTech. The market is real -- unlike others, cough- 99% of crypto -- cough, massive, and innovation is just getting started. If one agrees that we are in the ‘early innings’ of PropTech, discussing things with executives from 50+ companies in our space is very exciting.
My two cents? Hearing from thought leaders is great, but getting to do it while having fun, hiking (maybe biking!) is fantastic. I was very lucky to be invited -- thank you to John, Chris, Jameson, and the team!
