ShareCommissionTrac CEO Turner Levison made a lasting point about the acceleration of commercial real estate technology and the pressure the industry is under to choose effectively from a wide and bewildering array of offerings.
Putting up a slide of the classic 1985 film Back to the Future, Levison highlighted the uphill battle against time: “It’s not going to take another hundred years for technology to be drastically different from today than today’s technology is from the earliest commercial real estate technology.”
The core tech ingredients, matched with local choices about configuration and workflow, make up what Levison referred to as the “technology stack.” Individual tools in the stack provide help in enduring areas of commercial real estate: marketing, CRM, deal pipeline and inventory management, document management, and, in keeping with his own company CommissionTrac’s offering, management of commissions on transactions.
With such a long and rapidly evolving list of recipes to make a brokerage tech stack, what is the best way to tell what choices are the right ones? “Ask questions,” said Levison. No matter the pace of change, research remains the one constant in a shifting technology landscape.