“Tech already has and will continue to impact everything that we do in this business,” said John Panknin, associate director and adjunct professor at the Center for Urban Real Estate Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation at Columbia University, in the opening of his keynote speech at RealShare Apartments in Los Angeles. Panknin kicked off the two-day event with a speech on technology integration in real estate, and concluded that the industry is failing in its approach to technology, not in its willingness to adopt it. “This industry is huge,” he said. “It is the biggest in the world but is also the most archaic.” However, he promised that we could become more efficient and powerful if we leverage technology.

Technology is more than a website or software, it is about creating an environment that connects things and creates efficiency, he explained. But, there are challenges to applying this to real estate. The first is that technology is best and most easily adopted when it can be formatted into a template. We see this in the successful tech platforms at companies like Amazon and Bank of America. The data changes but the template remains; however, with unique properties and players, it is difficult for real estate to create a standard template. The other problem—and perhaps more significant problem—is what Panknin referred to as the V gap in skills. To capture the level of complexity in 10 years of more of experience in commercial real estate, you would need 10 years or more of experience in technology. This creates a skills gap, since there are few people that are simultaneously real estate and technology experts.

The problem here is not that the commercial real estate industry has failed to develop technologies, but rather in its approach. Panknin says that making sense of data and borrowing technology are crucial to the adoption of technology. Borrowing technologies from other industries may help to solve similar problems in commercial real estate. Sometimes, people outside of the business bring in new technologies that create more efficiencies for people inside the business,” he said.