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VIDEO: CREtech’s Michael Beckerman Sees Technology Adoption “at a Record Pace”
When Michael Beckerman entered the proptech space in 2017, “there really wasn’t much of a tech sector” in commercial real estate, he told Connect Media CEO Daniel Ceniceros. Beckerman and partner Lindsey Imperatore set out to fill that void with CREtech, a platform for events, research and thought leadership around technology in the built world. The latest manifestation of that platform is the upcoming CREtech New York event, scheduled for Sept 19-21 at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side.
For the first couple of years after CREtech’s launch, all eyes were on the amount of funding going into proptech. “I was always a little suspicious of that,” Beckerman said. “It could be fool’s gold, in a way.”
More important than the level of funding was where tech was being adopted, a view that crystallized during the COVID-19 pandemic, when adoption of proptech ramped up. “More than ever today, you see commercial real estate companies adopting solutions at a record pace,” said Beckerman, CEO of CREtech. “Because they have to.” CRE companies are facing challenges on a variety of fronts, he pointed out, and “technology helps them solve a lot of those problems.”
That leads to another ongoing trend: the presence of CRE companies at events like CREtech New York. The convention began as “tech companies talking to other tech companies,” Beckerman recalled. Today, “a third of the audience, if not more, is real estate companies.”
In the video interview below between Beckerman and Ceniceros, Beckerman also provides insights on the questions of whether capital is flowing into proptech and what he hopes attendees at CREtech New York will get out of the experience.
- ◦Development
- ◦Economy
