For the 25 years that I’ve been a management consultant helping companies in the real estate industry improve their operations, an inconvenient truth has been pervasive; as an industry, real estate significantly underinvests in technology and process. Although the tools and technologies used by real estate operators and investment managers have evolved significantly over the last couple of decades, the use of Excel as THE system continues to be widespread in the industry. That’s not to say that interesting and valuable new tools aren’t being developed and deployed to the market, but analytics, storage and reporting on information are still widely done in Excel. We are, however, at a tipping point that’s likely to see Excel put in its place, new tools emerge, new institutional muscles built, and a new age of transparency in our industry.

What’s behind this? There are a host of drivers, but let’s examine a few important ones.

One of the drivers is the generational sea change occurring as Gen X ascends to leadership positions and Millennials take increasingly senior roles. These generations have lived a digital life and they’re impatient or intolerant of manual processes and effort that can and should be automated. It’s exactly this intolerance that has led to the formation of entirely new technologies in recent years that have disrupted and automated processes that had historically been very manual and laborious.

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