The "Big Six" Takeaways of Realcomm 2018
Welcome to Fabulous Realcomm
Last month, we had the awesome opportunity to once again attend Realcomm, one of the most powerful gatherings for the commercial real estate, facilities, and technology industries in the world. The five-day event in June, held at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas was an impressive 20th anniversary celebration of the annual conference.
This premier real estate tech event is the only conference that truly brings together everyone in our space: real estate software vendors, consulting firms, and a great variety of real estate clients. The event, which was held June 4 to June 8, attracted more than 2,000 attendees from more than 20 countries. Realcomm bolstered 180 sponsors and exhibitors—ourselves included as a CIO Roundtable break sponsor—and 125 sessions with 330 speakers.
What Happens in Vegas… Goes Directly on Our Blog
It might be Sin City, but it would be an even bigger sin if we didn’t report back our findings from RealComm Las Vegas! Here are our top six takeaways for your learning pleasure:
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Don’t Gamble with Cyber Security
One major trend we are seeing—which was a big theme at Realcomm—is an increased emphasis on cyber security. Real estate companies are growing more and more concerned about protecting their data and intellectual property. This was made evident at the pre-conference cyber security session where 250 attendees signed up to learn what necessary steps they should be taking to stay secure. For our insights, make sure to read our blog on real estate cyber security.
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Robo-Real Estate
Robotic process automation—along with machine learning and artificial intelligence—was a big topic at Realcomm 2018, identified as a major area of growth. We, too, are exploring how this future-focused technology will advance our industry and how we can use it to our advantage. For deeper insights, check out our blog on CRE tech!
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The RE Tech Solutions Showdown
At Realcomm, we learned that there has been an explosion of real estate technology solutions with an inventoried 3,000 products that have entered our space and $1.5 billion in new capital this year alone. But, there’s a showdown ahead. The market is becoming saturated—and with companies that lack real estate domain knowledge and are just creating software without fully understanding the biz. They’re trying to compete with companies that came from the real estate space and later matured into technology firms like HonestBuildings and VTS. Who will survive the showdown?
Another point that we took away from Realcomm was that our clients are seeing adoption challenges. Despite this onslaught of technology flooding in, our clients may not be able to readily absorb such waves of change as quickly as it’s becoming available.
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Jackpot! So-long, Silos
Realcomm also confirmed some great news: CFOs and CIOs are now partnering when it comes to real estate technology, rather than operating in silos. In fact, we are finding they are now attached at the hip and making decisions together. Jackpot!
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Managed Services: All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Style
Today we are seeing more and more real estate firms looking to bundle and manage all their IT functions, accounting functions, and applications under one roof, outsourcing their business processes. We see an opportunity to better serve our clients with a “one-stop shop” and plan to expand our current IT and business application managed service offerings.
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Rolling the Dice on Investment Management
Realcomm’s Investment Management Track gets better every year. What originally attracted about one dozen people now garners nearly 100! The investment management sessions are also something to write home about, especially this insightful interactive networking workshop that covered the top four barriers we see when trying to get a project approved—why prospects see investment management implementation as rolling the dice.
- They can’t quantify the ROI or strategic value of the project.
- They have resource constraints. They don’t have the time, people, or money to take on the project.
- They are concerned about the security of their data, moving it from their closed spreadsheets which they control to the nebulous cloud.
- They struggle with managing the project, the vendors, and the change management required to successfully implement a new system.
Getting Lucky in Las Vegas
If you weren’t lucky enough to make it out to Realcomm this year, we hope this quick overview gave you some great insights on what’s new and happening in the real estate technology space. If you’d like to hear more about what we learned, we won’t hold our cards too close to our chest, so give us a ring and we would be more than happy to fill you in on this tremendous event! We hope to see you there next year!
About the Author
Josh Malinoff
Josh joined the REdirect team as a Principal in 2007. He brings over 28 years of real estate technology expertise to REdirect and is often a go-to source for any complex projects.
Josh spearheaded REdirect’s involvement in Investment Management software, creating a dedicated …