Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack review their journey on “Real Estate Is Your Business”, notable guests, what the hosts have learned, and how the industry is transforming, in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser.

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Law firm Goodwin Procter LLP launches PropTech practice to serve intersection of real estate and technology innovation…

Minta Kay (Chair of Goodwin’s Real Estate Industry group) and Salil Gandhi (partner in Goodwin’s Technology group) of Goodwin Procter LLP, join Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• What inspired the PropTech initiative at Goodwin Procter
• The firm’s huge global real estate bench, and huge technology bench
• How the firm has been getting a lot of calls, inquiries
• Woke up with convergence of practices, obvious place to go
• Tech – type of company, not an industry sector
• Also Fintech, Blockchain, do a lot in that space as well
• Real estate has been slow to adopt tech—that’s changing
• Need to pay attention, a cascade coming down around them
• Real estate becoming a service instead of just a hard asset
• The greatest potential for opportunity
• From first innovations on prop tech side on consumer listing sites, been seeing it on consumer side for awhile, bigger than a couple of entrepreneurs disrupting
• Investors are investing to remain abreast of latest innovations
• Keeping informed on opportunities to return investor returns, smarter buildings, manage portfolios
• How people are thinking about what a building is and how it is structured, and that it is driving business decisions and entrepreneurial innovation
• Why autonomous cars are important for real estate
• Why re-purposing of spaces and buildings is huge
• Going to raise a lot of new bureaucratic activity, permitting, zoning
• Collecting more data than ever before, so sourcing deals to pricing deals, design, maintenance
• From one transaction to an ongoing sharing of information
• Open-mindedness on real estate and regulatory that will allow innovation to occur
• Elasticity in the space is very important
• The need to house fleets of vehicles is coming, a shift is needed How smart contracts can shift advice business
• From ballet, chemical engineering and art history — to law
• PropTech is happening now in Asia too

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A nationwide realtor referral network…

Lisa Fettner, VP of Marketing for ReferralExchange (real estate agents can submit and receive clients from across the US), joins Thomas Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• How the role and job of agent has changed in last few years
• The need to be hyperlocal while being able to help people everywhere
• Why agents needs to be the subject matter expert to help them now and several years down the line, a client’s entire source for real estate
• Now it is all about the relationship
• How ReferralExchange is superior, algorythms, look at agents’ experiences
• Look at agents who want to participate and want to be engaged, while looking at their specific areas of expertise
• Handling personal info of referrals
• Handle tracking, follow up
• Most important factor when referring – protecting agent reputation
• The concentration of agents in the market, agents in pretty much every populated zip code
• Why ReferralExchange operations are in San Francisco and Sacremento
• One big challenge these days—agents don’t call leads or referrals back
• Minimizing bias, racial concerns based on photos
• Advice to be as personalized and customized for clients as possible, keeping clients in mind
• Fettner’s passion: Princess Project – give away prom dresses to teens who can’t afford them, promotes inner beauty, self confidence
• Don’t be afraid to have that conversation – it can lead to a relationship

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Health and wellness at the center of the real estate industry …

Ross Guttler, Vice President – Strategic Partnerships for Delos (transforming homes, offices, schools and other indoor environments by placing health and wellness at the center of design, construction, facilities and operations decisions), joins Thomas Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• How wellness is quite big now and where Delos comes in
• Approaching wellness and real estate from hard core science and medicine perspective
• What space is doing to our bodies
• Light quality and impact on standard of living
• How wearables will allow us to measure how space will impact our bodies, and react to what our bodies need
• Vetting materials
• Construction industries are waking up to “red list” materials
• Practices during construction to protect those building the pace as well
• At the crossroads being a real estate or a technology company
• Helping groups figure out things
• Help co-develop products and technologies
• “Darwin” – technology, the wellness brains for your home
• Physical and social environment is 70% of what affects health
• The best of North Carolina, and the origin of NASCAR
• Why space can make us better, smarter, healthier people

Guttler has spent 15 years in investment, development and advisory roles across multiple product sectors. At Delos, Ross manages strategic relationships among Fortune 100 clients as well as institutional investors, owners and landlords. Having joined Delos in the early stages, he has led the growth of several business lines. In addition, Ross serves in an advisory capacity to a NY-based startup focused on developing spectral sensors for the built environment.

Prior to joining Delos, Ross founded and managed the commercial division of ROI Properties, a brokerage and asset management firm that caters to distressed portfolios. He advised financial institutions, fiduciaries and receiverships on risk allocation and exit strategies for office, industrial and retail assets. Previously, he worked for the ViaWest Group, a commercial investment, development and services firm with a primary focus on value-add and opportunistic office, industrial and multi-family properties.

Ross is a former board member of the Urban Land Institute and has held leadership roles in numerous other industry and non-profit organizations. He received a B.S. in Economics from Duke University and an M.B.A. from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

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Restaurants as freelance work spaces…

Preston Pesek, Co-founder/CEO of Spacious (transforming unused space into a city-wide network of stylish, productive workspaces where you can meet, work, and get stuff done) joins Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• How the way people think about office space has changed
• Spacious as a heavyweight of co-working world
• The goal for the user experience of product to be as frictionless as possible
• The ability to walk in and check in without a reservation
• Seamless instant connection to the community, space, WiFi, etc.
• Is Spacious more co-working or coffee shop? (Somewhere in between)
• How Spacious was conceived
• Doing business with restaurant tenants, that was perfect place to enter the market as a start
• Value prop for a restaurant space – monthly check, marketing exposure, fill space with room full of people who will be hungry when service begins
• Frat culture of co-working vs. higher end vibe at Spacious spaces, attracting more sophisticated/stylish members
• Individual workers vs. enterprise play
• Fantastic upgrade from a coffee shop
• Establishing consumer brand as B-to-C first, then B-to-B, end user is who focused on from experience perspective
• Creating a nighttime network for after-5pm spaces
• Balancing supply and demand
• How Spacious can spin spaces up and down quickly, ability to be responsive to changes in marketplace without big spends
• Being able to manage how grow footprint in a balanced way
• Is Spacious a tech company or a real estate company?
• Internal company is a tech company
• Being a geek around cities of architecture

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PropTech, education reform in New York City, and motivating innovation…

Ryan Baxter, making NYC’s built environment more educational, Founder/Chairman of PASSNYC, Real Estate Liaison for MetaProp NYC, and Co-founder of PropTech Challenge, and former Vice President of REBNY, joins Tom Kutzman in the MouthMedia Network studio powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• Real estate tech/prop tech
• Baxter‘s unique path to prop tech, how he started in a trade association, Real Estate Board of NY
• His undying love for NYC, looking for way to work around that, loved lobbying as a concept
• The opportunity to make lots of impact
• How the Association is older than NYC, serves more than 17,000 members across real estate professions
• How Baxter started a regulatory effort on changing how ConEd treats power plants within buildings, taught him a lot about how NYC interacts with and treats tech
• Aaron Block, a founder of PropNYC,  knocked on door asking for help, saw them as distribution platform
• How his work allows outcome beyond pursuit of wealth
• Bing Co-Founder of Protech challenge, started last year grew to over 100 people from 47 companies,
• Moving from personally-participated to virtually to impact many more people, to spur innovation, increase diversity, and create opportunities around the world
• An augmented reality tool to overlay real time building information, helpful for engineers to know what a particular system’s flow of info in real time
• A lack of agility and responsiveness in real estate is going changing
• The need to understand that there are only five value propositions
• A limitless opportunity for the human imagination
• A $230 Trillion and growing opportunity worldwide
• Developers should lean into PropTech
• Why PropTech is years behind FinTech, yet broader than any other tech vertical we’ve seen
• Is PropTech only one part of it, and a low hanging fruit, and limiting lens?
• MetaProp
• Starting with community building approach as a new fund
• Why learning the language across the industry is crucial
• Promoting better educational access and equity using community organizing and coalition tactics
• Why the tip of PropTech spear should be public schools, and how they can design the future
• Enabling schools to be specialized, motivating participation and resource provision, and working toward continual desegregation
• The debate on why specialized schools have value
• The Empire State Building, Jay-Z, and a great restaurant

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Growing a team by utilizing a marketplace with highly vetted freelancers in a gig economy…

Nathan Hirsch, Founder and CEO of FreeeUp (FreeeUp is a marketplace offering pre-vetted freelance talent) joins Thomas Kutzman for a conversation about growing a business with the right talent. MouthMedia Network studios are powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• The gig economy, and accepting the fact that entrepreneurs are not equally good at every part of their business
• How FreeeUp provides access to great talent all over the world to help build business
• FreeeUp’s original start in ecommerce, then marketing, then real estate agencies (10-15% of their current client are in Real Estate)
• An example of a virtual assistant
• What’s driving the trend of freelancing
• The way FreeeUp provides a lot of vetting, only takes the top 1%, and when they let them in
• How FreeeUp started with $2k and grew to millions – only using freelancers from their own marketplace, and running a virtual company
• How they didn’t look at FreeeUp company as a software business initially – looked at it as people who matched people — but when they looked at it as software and kept improving it, the company turned a corner
• Why freelancing is part of the next wave of the business economy
• How FreeeUp has a good foothold — pain points tough to fix, and hard to copy when fixed – looking at any competition in the business—and the vetting process is challenging to get right
• Freelancers have multiple clients each with their own styles, agendas
• Spending extra time at beginning setting best expectations will help save countless hours of clarification
• Solid communication, feedback to freelancers is critical when employing them
• The biggest error: assuming everyone’s expectations are the same
• Diversifying is important different people for different functions
• What would you do with extra hours?
• An important business lesson, and how Hirsch’s entrepreneurial career began with — selling baby products out his dorm

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Blockchain explanation, applications, and possibilities…

Omid Malekan, author of “The Story of the Blockchain: A Beginner’s Guide to the Technology Nobody Understands“, blogger, and Explainer-in-Chief at Triple Smoke Stack (a publishing, consulting and educational firm that specializes in bringing the latest advancements in blockchain technology to traditional companies) joins Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• Malekan on Blockchain – technology that gives digital items physical properties
• Physical things can only exist in one place at one moment in time
• Because of crypto tokens big public blockchains epxploded in value
• More and more industries are looking at blockchain, including real estate
• There are many applications beyond crypto currency
• Before the Internet, restrictions of physical existence worked but blockchain reduces friction or restrictions
• Digital items are replicable
• Music is a great example of an application of blockchain that can be of value
• Blockchain exists on a spectrum, with varying degrees of how to apply it, and is by nature often decentralized
• A process to keep you honest
• A consensus mechanism
• Bitcoin is slow (only a few transaction per second)
• Losing a key/passowrd to access, the value is lost
• Real Estate doesn’t change hands without people knowing about it, likely a blockchain run by government for property in the future
• Using blcokchain to potentially democratize ownership and mortgages
• How REITs were like an early tokenization, good step in that direction
• While REITS are cumbersome and expensive, can take the REIT model and issue tokensi instead, a tradeable avatar
• A lot of creativity possible
• Like a co-op model, real estate distilled down to shares
• A home is an indivisible asset, tokenization can enable that, financing aspect – you go to one bank, one loan, future can offer breaking debt into pieces each with other people
• Fractional ownership, fractional debt
• Nomadic lifestyles enabled by fractional ownership shares in properties to live in places not regular residence, like a timeshare
• Creatively applied can improve on good parts, lose bad parts
• Airbnb a perfect example of Web 2.0 kind of business, someone builds platform, people use it, and most of value goes to owner of platform.
• Whether a value of Blockchain can be to mediate disputes
• How you can determine cryptocoin has value despite being digital
• Becoming The Explainer in Chief
• Model United Nations, learning to debate, valuable life lessons that it was a popularity contest, not all about substance, from moment you walk into the room relationships
• Artifical Intelligence replacing jobs

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Marketplace for short form retail and pop-ups…

Joy Fan, Chief Creative Officer of Storefront (@storefront – the world’s leading online marketplace for renting short term retail space) joins Thomas Kutzman, Scott Pollack, and guest host Pavan Bahl in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• How Storefront “cracked the code” on short-term rentals
• Real estate brokers have open arms for pop ups, changed from 5 years ago
• How pop-ups and short-term rentals transformed from trend to strategy
• Perfect timing, how Storefront rode a wave for the last 6 years
• Demands of retail has changed
• Bringing digital into physical
• Providing pricing up front so anyone can see it and share it
• Servicing both landlords and tenants
• Why Storefront doesn’t own spaces, technology makes it easy for brands to search for space
• Now in Canada and US, just opened Dallas and Austin, plus already in LA, NYC, SF, Chicago, Miami
• Looking at events and experiential, but focus on storefronts
• A lot of long-term leases are coming up and vacancy rates have risen a lot in major metropolitan areas
• Low cost at a conference
• Retail on the rise in US, story-sharing
• Making the physical experience feeling sensory like the online presence, creating addiction
• The international opportunity – where there is retail and where there is storefront
• Fan’s opinion on a brand that’s getting it done
• The story of twins
• Incredible donuts

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Two startups sharing their company visions on providing a better rental experience…

Benjamin Pleat, CEO/Founder of Doorbell Communities (supercharging apartment living through curated event experiences) and Ashrit Kamireddi, CEO/Co-Founder, and Scott Bierbryer, COO/Co-Founder, of VeryApt (a trusted apartment review community for people who want to make sure their next apartment really feels like home) joins Thomas Kutzman on location at The Future of Real Estate Summit in Miami,FL. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• Conferences as a great opportunity to discover new ideas/innovators

Doorbell Communities

• Looking at the experience side of things, not changing real estate, don’t redesign spaces, how the use of space is a platform for community creation
• Leverage existing spaces from lobbies to community spaces
• Creating meaningful experiences to cerate sticky communities
• Work in best in class providers including local businesses, good to support local businesses and get them in building
• Skepticism that neighbors don’t want to interact in a place like NYC, content gets them out
• The business model, and expense structure
• The value of software and analytics
• Offering experiences from psychic mediums, pastrami tastings, coding classes, and more.
• Currently in Boston and downtown Wooster
• Challenges are in the real estate finance world, recurring fee treated as different kind of expense, and Class A vs. Class B
• Avoiding technical debt, and how software augments experience without inhibiting, and enables community building and personal interaction
• Affordable housing, offering the same experience or hurdle distribution and acceptance by community

VeryApt

• A data-driven concierge rental platform that makes finding the perfect apartment effortless
• Having very accurate data and content, making the ecosystem transparent
• Not just scraping listings, accurate [ricing/inventory, data from tenants talking about experiences in apartment
• Unique IP on recommendation engine, able to highlight buildings
• Concierge replaces much of the value of traditional agent
• Owning listings, not just scraping and taking data feed
• Trying to instill same culture and processing several markets
• Building out the brand, opportunities tangential to what they’re doing now ,rental insurance, figuring out moving
• Taking infrastructure and help solving problems beyond the immediate rental part

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