Uncovering Real Estate Value with Alex Storey of Reomnify

I have had something of a mixed career so far. I studied a Real Estate degree and my first job was working on Real Estate lending risk at Barclays Bank in London, but then spent 10 years as a strategy consultant and running partnerships teams at Google, mostly in APAC.

I stumbled into PropTech when I joined an IoT startup called Disruptive Technologies in 2016. They make tiny sensors for buildings and I was immediately bowled over by their technology and the impact it could have.

I immediately loved working in PropTech and found the whole community to be positive, supportive and ambitious. I quickly resolved to spend the next 10+ years working in this space.

Real Estate is a very late adopter of data science. This not only leaves a huge opportunity to improve decision-making capabilities, but also differentiate vs competition. There is also an explosion in the volume of alternative data sources that can be leveraged, such as mobile phone location, aerial imagery and environmental data.

We work with players across the value chain, but predominantly with developers/landlords to help them market their assets, assess their portfolios and select undervalued sites with the help of data.

It has been enjoyable so far, though we launched in Q1 and clearly 2020 has kept us guessing. Overall, we are lucky in that the current uncertainty has accelerated the urgency of some of our projects and has opened more customers to the idea of more data-driven approaches to try and make sense of everything. We were also fortunate to be supported by two large companies, JLL and DBS bank, on their respective accelerator programs.

For us, geography has become more of an abstract concept in 2020. We are a Singaporean business but I am currently based in the SF Bay Area, my co-founder Girish and our engineering team are in Pune, India and we have live projects in markets as diverse as Australia, Japan, UK and China (with little scope of visiting these places any time soon).

We have generally found that selling to a 10x larger customer doesn’t take 10x the effort, so we have generally focused on targeting the largest players in the markets we are active in. Also, we have tried hard to focus on the key themes that are being discussed at the leadership level, this has greatly accelerated our sales cycle.

Almost every discussion with large Real Estate companies throws up new opportunities and potential use cases, particularly in these increasingly uncertain times. We instinctively want to pursue all of them but have had to try and remain strict about focusing our efforts.

Increasingly it is clear that the future for Real Estate is around “technology-enabled humans”, rather than technology simply replacing everyone. As a startup in this space, this has an important impact on who your end user will ultimately be.

Drop me a line on alex@reomnify.com, I am always very happy to chat with anyone else working in this fascinating space!

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