This week's virtual pitch showcase featured emerging real estate tech startups HomeOpenly, VHomes, and JoyHub.
Brad Inman, founder of Inman, the leading real estate news source along with Spencer Rascoff, co-founder, executive chairman at dot.LA will be leading the discussion as the two leading active investors and experts in this space.
Startup Pitch Showcase: Real Estate Tech youtu.be
HomeOpenly helps our users to make the opportunity of homeownership transparent, affordable, and an open experience. HomeOpenly is an innovative and young Internet company that designs, builds, and maintains a series of online marketplace solutions with focus on home search, automated valuation modeling (AVM), home buyer's and seller's representation services, mortgage origination, refinance, home insurance, renovation, design, staging, home inspections, home security, moving, home maintenance, title, escrow, cash offer stand-in programs, home warranty, and other real estate products and services. HomeOpenly utilizes Open Systems Design and Privacy by Design principles behind the unbiased information we provide and the value-added Open Marketplace™ that we maintain.
VHomes is disrupting the antiquated motel / affordable housing industries. A proptech startup that strategically identifies distressed and vacant housing opportunities, leveraging these assets and turning them into nightly, weekly, or monthly budget rental options. By providing travel or living options to those that need it most we are able to provide significant impact for our customers' lives. VHomes provides the best budget accommodation in the Sun Belt United States.
JoyHub is developing an open platform to connect and automate existing multifamily operator systems to improve operating performance, increase revenue opportunities and enhance resident engagement.
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<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMyNjY2Ni9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNDM4NDkzMH0.v5tfVFcyFVen8Rbrw6eaei4A3PqVjwnA7loioFZAR6w/image.png?width=980" id="e1ee0" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8122ff13df54fa353a7929a9f837e41f" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Brad Inman, founder at Inman
Brad Inman, Founder at Inman
<p>Award-winning journalist and publisher, Brad Inman is the founder and owner of Inman, real estate's leading name in news, information and innovation since 1983. In addition, his Inman-branded real estate business and technology conferences bring thousands of thought leaders together each year to share best practices and promote innovation. Countless new products and companies have been launched at Inman conferences.</p><p>A native of Carlinville, Illinois, and a graduate of Boston University, Inman began his career as a housing policy analyst and community advocate who parlayed a weekly real estate column in the San Francisco Examiner at the dawn of the Internet era into a series of entrepreneurial ventures. In 1999, Inman founded HomeGain.com, an early provider of online marketing programs. HomeGain was sold to Classified Ventures, LLC, in 2005. That same year, Inman founded TurnHere, an online commercial video platform and, in 2008, founded Vook, an online e-publishing platform. He also was an early investor in Curbed.com and served as chairman of the board before it was sold to Vox Media. A compelling speaker, he is a regular at real estate events around the nation and has been a visiting lecturer in the School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.</p><img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzMyNjY3NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxODI1NDY1N30.yjUCIE8Z16_yPW-8nNnSrs13pueF2m_9XoQ1B47d4eM/image.jpg?width=980" id="c54d2" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="924666e8437e4f21c7043e2abc6875f9" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman
Spencer Rascoff, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman
<p>Spencer Rascoff is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire and dot.LA, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. He is currently executive chairman of dot.LA and a board member at Zillow and TripAdvisor. In fall 2019 Spencer was a Visiting Executive Professor at Harvard Business School where he co-taught the "Managing Tech Ventures" course. In 2015, Spencer co-wrote and published his first book, the New York Times' Best Seller "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate." Spencer is the host of "Office Hours," a monthly podcast on dot.LA featuring candid conversations between prominent executives on leadership, diversity and inclusion, and startups. </p>Related Articles Around the Web
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Offices will be bigger and oriented around creating a sense of community, omnichannel retail will be more important, brands will have dozens of stores instead of thousands, and cities will provide incentives to lure employees rather than companies. Those are some of the predictions about what will happen in the next few years as the world recovers from the coronavirus, according to Brendan Wallace, co-founder and managing partner at Fifth Wall, Justin Bedecarre, co-founder and CEO of HelloOffice and Jen Nguyen, founding partner of TEAMWERC.
Fifth Wall is the largest venture capital firm focused on real estate tech, known as proptech. It announced the close of its second real estate technology fund last year, with $503 million in dry powder, making it the largest VC fund in Los Angeles. HelloOffice is a technology-powered commercial real estate brokerage that started in the Bay Area and expanded to L.A. last year. TEAMWERC is a San Francisco-based commercial real estate consultancy.
<p>Wallace, Bedecarre and Nguyen spoke to dot.LA in advance of an <a href="https://dot.la/fifth-wall-hellooffice-strategy-session-2646099591.html" target="_blank">executive strategy session Tuesday at 11 am PST</a> about the future of real estate after the novel coronavirus. Here are some excerpts from the conversation:</p><p><strong><a href="https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/05/26/retail-stores-reopen-la-county/" target="_blank">Retail shops have been opening in Los Angeles and elsewhere.</a> How quickly do you think people will want to go shopping?</strong></p><p>Wallace: I think there's probably two considerations. One is that you actually have some pent-up demand. So, I think you will see a surge, and I think you actually have seen that in cities like Phoenix. What I'm not clear on is if that's a false positive, and what we're likely to see going forward because we haven't seen the second peaks occurring in cities and how the public will react to that. We're in the very early innings of probably a surge in retail bankruptcies. As stores go dark that just drives down foot traffic, and I think alongside that you have this forced adoption of e-commerce that just occurred over the last 75 days. That experience is going to have a long-term effect and I think about it like we pulled the future forward. Whatever was going to happen in 2022 or 2023 is happening now in 2020, and the confounding variable on top of that is the uncertainty around COVID and the public response to it so the one thing I feel confident in saying is it is not going to go back to business as usual.</p><p><strong>That sounds like a lot of uncertainty, which is understandable because no one really knows what's going to happen in terms of the health considerations. But as someone who has this big retail fund, what, how are you deploying that?</strong></p><p>Wallace: Our retail fund is focused on brands that are omnichannel, so those are brands that are selling both online and offline. This crisis has underscored is that to really have resiliency in circumstances like this, a brand needs to be ubiquitous. You need to be able to reach consumers where they are and that can be on their computer, their phone or in a store. I think the more omnichannel a brand is, the more durable they are in a situation like this so we are still actively looking to invest in those brands. I think the other distinction about how we invest in retail versus how retail is traditionally conceptualized is that some of the brands that are out there today — like Old Navy and Gap — you're talking about hundreds in some cases thousands of stores. I don't think even the largest, most prolific omnichannel brand is ever going to have 1,000 stores. I think that era is over. What you're seeing is just smaller real estate footprints and a concentration of those footprints in higher-quality real estate assets. In many ways this crisis is hurting the weakest assets. The malls in the shopping centers that were already struggling are going to struggle more in this crisis and this could be a body blow. But I think the stronger assets, the assets that were always desirable, and the high streets in retail real estate that were always desirable to many brands are going to come back for no other reason then there's still going to be a street life in cities. I don't think that's going away.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQyMzEyMS9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwMTg5MDM2M30.1NUlj_9c_wOBv-5KjRVBTc_DaX2iYwCduUV3Of94fow/image.png?width=980" id="2805c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="64b8b3ef154f375270e4c0262a4973cd" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Left to right: Justin Bedecarre, co-founder and CEO of HelloOffice, Jen Nguyen, founding partner of TEAMWERC, and Brendan Wallace, co-founder & managing partner at Fifth Wall.</small></p><p><strong>Just looking at cities in general, there's this whole potential ripple effect from people not working as much in big cities. Do you see that actually happening, lots of tech workers moving out of San Francisco?</strong><br/></p><p>Wallace: I think you can generalize more broadly than tech workers and make it knowledge workers, who are less required to work in cities than they were in January of this year. The experience of many companies is that working remotely has been surprisingly productive. But the reason cities formed in the first place was to accommodate businesses and people and create a social dynamic which drove people together where you had to go to the market square to buy things. What's happened with technology – e-commerce being a prime example – is we virtualized much of that meaning. So, we've stripped away many of the commercial benefits of concentrating businesses and people together. And so what I think cities are left considering is because there's no longer the commercial magnetism of pulling everyone together it really has to come down to the social magnetism, that we like being around other people. I'm curious to see how much people want to go back to cities.</p><p><strong>Justin, how much work do you see returning to the office once the threat from the pandemic subsides?</strong></p><p>Bedecarre: Offices are really going to be built around what they're meant to be built around, which is collaboration. In the short term, square footage per person is going to go way up. The way that we're thinking about our spaces at HelloOffice is that we're going to be doing a phased-in approach to bring in key members and desks are going to be spread out significantly. Fewer people are going to be coming into the office at any given time. Whether it equals out for how many people are in the office versus how many square feet per person is is hard to predict with certainty. But square footage per person will trend upwards, not downward as it has been for over a decade.</p><p><strong>Jen, are you seeing a similar trend? </strong></p><p>Nyugen; Oh definitely. It's really typical for a lot of tech startups that we work with, their standard square foot per person is 100 square feet per person. But what we've seen in doing the six foot social distance studies is a lot of the companies we work with need extra space, so instead of 100-square-feet per person they're needing at least 300 square feet, at a minimum.</p><p><strong>Are you hearing from clients that they want to go back to the office?</strong></p><p>Nyugen: We're hearing more of we're going back to the office in some shape or form but in a phased approach.</p><p><strong>Is there a specific timeline you're getting from most companies about when they want to come back?</strong></p><p>Nyugen: The timelines are consistent with specific regions. For example, in San Francisco a lot are looking towards the end of Q3. A lot of them are also identifying within their own or organization which functions they deem critical.</p><p><strong><span></span>Justin, it seems like there has been something specific about startups that they need to physically work together. Do you think that will change now?</strong></p><p>Bedecarre: I do think overall, especially in the early stages, having everyone together working in one place has significant advantages. But it's not for everyone. Gitlab and WordPress have built some phenomenal companies being 100% remote, but that certainly isn't where most companies will end up.</p>
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LA Tech Updates: LA's Largest VC is Now a Public Benefit Corp; Treehouse Games Raises $2.6M
Jun 24 2020
Here are the latest updates on news affecting Los Angeles' startup and tech communities. Sign up for our newsletter and follow dot.LA on Twitter for more.
Today:
- LA's Largest VC is Now a Public Benefit Corp
- Treehouse Games Raises $2.6M
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'Collaborative' Game-Maker Treehouse Games Raises $2.6M
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vbWVkaWEucmJsLm1zL2ltYWdlP3U9JTJGWVc4cDBCbS1seTVyU3REc2J4T0Niem1QemV0YlRsZUNHZ1J3MkdURnhkLWhRaERKSW5yTXIxb19jN1FLTlI2Um5Vbld4UHlBbkRsWFNMRTdORm9pZ3JDa0c4ejI4UFdZdHAxeU5ORFcyOTBZeTBaREc2QmJxOVR2T3l4cXJ5dW1MOEJvMkNfTSZobz1odHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRmxoNC5nb29nbGV1c2VyY29udGVudC5jb20mcz05NTkmaD04Yzg4NzAxZThiNDVlZmVjOGJiYTQxZmFkY2NjZGZmZmRhN2Y4MmIxMTc2ZTNkYTI4MmFkOTljODg5YzNjMjk2JnNpemU9OTgweCZjPTI4MjI3NzI2NDEiLCJleHBpcmVzX2F0IjoxNTk3MzE5OTUxfQ.s0DCaH-qmyZ3A7dfuM-nULqakx_8COLkpCEDjhlswXY/img.jpg" id="62cf3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7dbfceb4415180910add0cc6fae1f567" /><p>Treehouse Games, founded by former Riot Games product lead Michael Chu and indie games studio veteran Ryan Sullivan, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding. The studio will focus on making collaborative games "to serve a growing, global audience of millions of people who use games as their favorite way to hang out," the company said in a statement.</p><p>London Venture Partners (LVP) led the funding round. Bay Area-based Transcend Fund and Super Evil Megacorp CEO Kristian Segestrale also participated.</p><p>Chu and Sullivan told dot.LA that "it's too early to go into specifics about the game, but our team is hard at work building an innovative cooperative game to bring friends and family together."</p><p>"We want to create games that give you that feeling of camaraderie during a road trip, or the sense of generosity you get when buying your friend a cup of coffee," the founders said.</p>Fifth Wall Venture Firm Is Now a B Corporation
<img lazy-loadable="true" src="https://dot.la/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzQxNTAyNi9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTU5NDg4MDY5OX0.NOfRuXjcD7OZJun-sbNkeUpzJt9aLNizjAC3IVOhCc8/image.jpg?width=980" id="57d56" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="d048356cf99bbffa853c196187622614" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /> <p>Fifth Wall announced this week it is now a Certified B Corporation or "B Corp," which means it is legally required to consider the impact of its decisions on workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment.</p><p><a href="https://fifthwall.com/" target="_blank">Fifth Wall</a> is the largest venture capital firm focused on real estate tech, known as proptech. It announced the close of its second real estate technology fund last year, with $503 million in dry powder, making it the largest VC fund in Los Angeles. </p><p>"It is incumbent upon all of us to take actionable steps towards building a more equitable and sustainable society," said Brendan Wallace, co-founder and managing partner at Fifth Wall. "We're grateful to the resources and community offered by B Lab to help our firm as we continue to educate ourselves and make changes within our own organization."</p><p>Fifth Wall is now part of a cohort of 3,939 other B-Corps that include names like Ben & Jerry's, Allbirds, and Patagonia.</p><p>The real estate industry accounts for 40% of the world's consumption of energy and Fifth Wall says it is ready to help make construction more sustainable. Earlier this year, the firm announced a new carbon impact fund.</p>From Your Site Articles
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