Welcome back to the Digible Dudes. In today’s episode, we’re joined with Samantha Skrobot, Managing Partner – Real Estate Technology at GW Advisement. GW Advisement is a management consulting firm based in Chicago that focuses on offering services that solve for both employee happiness and company revenue. At GW Advisement, Samantha works directly with business owners and leaders to improve strategy and processes, related to growth strategy, product planning, and business development. Throughout the episode, Sam shares her wisdom on new developments in the real estate landscape, disruptive technologies, marketing & consumer experience strategies, and more.
Sam’s career in real estate spans over a decade. Her experience is based on different roles that cover numerous aspects of the real estate business. We talk about her career journey and her current role. Getting into today’s topic, Sam shares some observations from the property technology space. We also dive into some of the gaps that exist in the PropTech market and the possibility of new players that offer solutions to fill these gaps.
Like all other industries, automation has been showing steady growth in the real estate space as well. Sam shares her thoughts on what type of new technologies we might see in real estate in terms of automation. She also talks about the limitations of automation and how to make the best of automation technologies and trends she sees in the single-family rentals space and ILS platforms.
Tech giants such as Google and Amazon have a history of getting into new industries, offering new and disruptive technology solutions, raising concerns about anti-trust practices. We dive into the possibility of one of these tech giants getting into the real estate industry and some of the factors that may prove to be challenging for tech giants. Wrapping up the episode, Sam shares her hot takes on the limitations of automation and advice for data-driven approaches to real estate marketing.
[13:30] Sam’s Background – We start the conversation with a brief look at Sam’s real estate career of 12 years, learnings from different roles she was involved in, and her current area of focus.
[18:15] PropTech Trends – Sam shares with us some new developments in the industry that she’s excited about.
[25:40] New Players – Sam shares her take on the work some of the PropTech companies are doing and the possibility of seeing new players in the property management space.
[30:00] Automation for On-site Management – We asked Sam about what new innovations we can expect in the industry in terms of heavy automation technologies for property management.
[36:00] Developments in ILS Space – Sam’s take on what the recent RentPath acquisition means for the industry and consumers, and some other interesting developments related to ILS platforms.
[44:33] Single Family Rentals – The single-family rentals market has been growing over the last few years. We asked Sam about her predictions related to innovations in the SFR space.
[51:19] Real Estate Supply – Sam shares her take on whether the industry will be able to keep up with the demand for housing units in the near future.
[56:30] Waves of Disruption – We asked Sam whether she sees any massively disruptive technologies coming into the industry in the next five years.
[1:00:23] Tech Giants – We talk about the possibility of tech giants such as Google and Amazon getting into the real estate space and how they might enter the industry.
[1:05:13] Hot Takes – Sam shares her opinions about the usage of automation, how it affects consumer experience and its limitations in the real estate markets.
[1:16:07] Data-Driven Marketing – Sam shares several pieces of advice related to taking advantage of data for real estate marketing.
