Book Review: „Make Real Estate Great Again“

The book Make Real Estate Great Again by Robin Rivaton and Vincent Pavanello published in 2018, deals with one of the biggest economic sectors, the real estate sector and how it is going to develop and change.

Divided into four chapters, it describes the current state of the art and incoming changes through innovation by digitization or „hardware“ changes. It really visualizes a broad overview of what must be changed and how current players, so-called „Real Estech“ Entrepreneurs, are trying to execute those, which ways they chose to do so and how successful they were. The authors see a need for more innovation, business models based on customers and the usage of new construction techniques as well as new building materials such as wood. These are all examples which pushed the real estate industry from an old inefficient dinosaur into a new, modern and effficient part of the economy.

The chapters are structured like the real estate life cycle, from financing to construction, usage and maintenance. In every chapter you find an excellent selection of companies that work on eliminating inefficiencies in the real estate market. The conclusion is a wake-up call to everyone who tries to deny the fact that something must change but also shows that there are a lot of actors that invest and try to help entrepreneurs with their ventures.

One impressive example with the use of the English company BrickVest shows how the real estate investment market might be disrupted by a startup company.

Usually, if one wants to invest in real estate you either have to buy a property or invest in funds or in shares of a real estate company. The problems with these different types of investment are that they are highly risky when buying poperty or investing in a fund, where you cannot chose your property. BrickVests crowdfinancing platform offers a solution for this problem. The customer can actually choose his/her property by investing a minimum of $1,100. This gives even people with a tighter wallet the opportunity to invest into real estate.

This book offers a great overview of tech companies which can be helpful for real estate professionals who devote their companies to one of the most important assets – real estate. In my opinion it is not as important whether you call these organizations „PropTech“, „ConTech“ or „RealEstech“ (I am sorry the term „Real Estech“ is not my cup of tea) as their contribution to revolutionize affects this economic sector no matter how you call them. This book is the perfect addition to our PropTech Yearbook as many companies overlap and Rivaton and Pavanello give and ourlook on how they might transform the industry.

My rating would be a 4 out of 5, as it wraps up impressively the past, present and future of the development and change of the real estate industry. I would recommend it especially for real estate professionals who want to get an overview about what is currently going on as they also attached a small global glossary in the appendix.