The 2022 State of Proptech Hiring — and of the Industry

Proxies are plentiful in high tech — stand-ins between network connection points. But there is the older meaning of one thing that substitutes and acts in the name of another.

The Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI), in its 2022 Protech Job Report, saw hiring of employees as “a proxy for the health and wellness of the real estate technology industry.” And there is something to be said for that. When companies grow and expand, they hire. When they come upon hard times, they often do the opposite, laying off personnel.

CRETI sees proptech’s position as strong, given numbers for last year. “Since January 2022, the US proptech labor market added 9,492 jobs,” they wrote.   “53.4% of jobs were conventional in-person, while 46.6% were hybrid/remote.  The most significant growth came in Q1 2022, with 3,650 new jobs brought to market by employers, representing 34.5% of new jobs in 2022.”

The report quoted Ashkán Zandieh, co-chair and founder of the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI), as saying, “Despite economic headwinds, the proptech industry’s job market remained strong in the U.S.”

But perhaps looking at that statistic from some different angles makes sense. Last year was unusual, even by high tech standards, as Fortune noted back in May. Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities, called it “an arms race right now across tech.”

“When it comes to some of these transformational trends around cloud, metaverse, e-commerce and other product-driven trends, we expect strong hiring trends for tech firms, at least into the middle of 2023,” he told Fortune. By the fall of 2022, big layoffs at major companies had already begun.

May was even further into 2022 than the first quarter, in which a third of the new proptech hires took place. June marked the true beginning of the Federal Reserve’s war on inflation, with one major interest rate hike after another happening, and the current prospect of the benchmark federal funds rate likely to easily clear 5%, up from the current 4.25% to 4.50%. That has large implications for financing and funding of startups, including those in proptech.

MetaProp, a VC firm that focuses on proptech, said in October that the confidence of investors and founders had hit lows since the firm first began tracking it in 2016. Technology stocks in general have been badly affected. Confidence on the part of VCs has generally been off. Some of the biggest have warned their investments to pare costs and hand tight because more equity money isn’t likely to be rolling in. That’s true for proptech as well, with some notable exceptions.

The real question is not how many people that proptech companies hired, but the number that are left and what the companies are doing now.