Los Angeles

The CRETech Los Angeles event held last week Downtown dove into the nuances of tech integration in the commercial real estate industry. The event opened with a discussion of technology with some of the leaders in real estate, and concluded with a discussion of Fifth Wall executives. Fifth Wall is a venture capital firm focused on funding real estate tech start-ups. The discussion at CRETech included Brad Greiwe, co-founder and managing partner; Brendan Wallace, co-founder and managing partner; Natalie Bruss, partner; K.C. Cleary; partner; and Vik Chawla, principal.

“What is really critical in a venture capital model like ours is to delicately orchestrate this tension between being corporate and yet independent,” said Wallace says about the firm's model. “On the one hand, we must listen to our corporate LPs and internalize their acute understanding of their own technology pain points and absorb their deep domain expertise. Yet, Fifth Wall must simultaneously recognize that corporate venture capital almost always underperforms financially because they have been challenged in their ability to think outside the box and lack the venture capital investment acumen to structure great deals and find great entrepreneurs.”

The firm recently surpassed $100 million in revenue—a first for a real estate-focused venture firm. Wallace says that the firm's “expansive” view of Built World technology and investing in disruptive technologies related to energy, mobility, logistics and fintech. “It is in these nonobvious Built World technologies that corporate venture capitalists have been so limited and where they've struggled to 'see around the corner' and to capitalize on how their business or industry will transform over the next decade: like Airbnb and hotels, co-working and office owners, Opendoor and homebuilders and clutter and self-storage or industrial,” Wallace explains. “Conversely it is in these nonobvious Built World technologies where Fifth Wall has excelled in investing and capitalizing early in disruptive technologies that are highly strategic to our corporate LPs but that, on their own, real estate corporate venture capitalists have failed to recognize early enough.”