Real estate has always been a late adopter. For most of its history, the industry resisted the technology investments that transformed other sectors, and it paid a price. But a decade of dedicated venture capital — and a new wave of artificial intelligence — is rapidly changing that.
Dan Wenhold, a partner at Fifth Wall, a venture capital firm focused on property technology for the built environment, says the urgency real estate executives feel today mirrors the existential reckoning the industry went through roughly a decade ago.
“What we saw with this existential crisis around technology at the board level a decade ago is happening again today with AI,” Wenhold says. “There’s a lot of data that these real estate organizations are sitting on, and that data today is being used, but in some instances, sparingly, and it’s very disjointed.”
The opportunity, he argues, has never been larger.
Property technology, or proptech, is a broader categ
