Announcing the PropTech Power List - PEOPLE Edition

Just don't call them "influencers"

I thought about calling this the PropTech Influencers list but that term has gotten some bad connotations recently.

Still, this is a list of the most influential PEOPLE in Property Technology.

How should we define that?

Well, first, PropTech is technology you sell to owners and builders of buildings. So, while there are some really cool technologies that serve tenants and occupiers, I tend to focus on tech that is paid for by the building’s owner. That allows me to stay focused on building and portfolio technology and not open me up into the massive world of things like teleconferencing (“future of work” tech) and workforce management (“HR tech”). So, to qualify for this list, you must be selling/using/discussing technology for building owners.

Second, I want to use QUANTIFIABLE metrics for who is actually influential. I don’t want this to turn into people that I subjectively think are witty or interesting or wealthy. Nor is this a list of the founders who have raised the most money. This is the list of people who I can quantifiably say have tons of reach in our industry.

Which leads to the question . . .

How do you quantify something like influence?

I’m starting simple -

LinkedIn Followers + Twitter Followers.

A couple reasons for this approach:

• Those metrics are public and somewhat difficult to fudge. (Yes, I know of the click-farms in Asia you can pay to gain followers but I doubt we’ll run into that much in our little corner of the internet.)

• LinkedIn and Twitter are, for better or worse, where business is discussed. Yes, I know LinkedIn can be cringe and Twitter is the bastion of doom-scrolling (“Have you heard about the thing Elon did! Outrage! Slander! Capitalism!”). But this is still where you are most likely to discuss/promote/argue/champion a new technology. I’m sure your feet in the sand in Bali are beautiful on Instagram and that your couple’s challenge is mesmerizing on TikTok, but we are here for PropTech. So, those are the two platforms we’ll focus on . . . for now.

One more thing to note - With this metric we will both intentionally and unintentionally exclude a few people. For starters, I want to focus on people who ONLY focus on PropTech. So, while Marc Andreessen and his massive following would be an interesting addition, I don’t think anyone would consider him to be a pure PropTech person. We will also miss people like Adam Neumann who have intentionally (and probably wisely) shunned social media after some fallout. You can argue all you want about Adam’s tech prowess but I don’t think anyone would question his influence.

So, is this a perfect measurement? Probably not. But it’s the best we have for now and I’m always open to suggestions.

What we’ll do is publish this once a quarter or twice per year depending on how much movement there is in the list. There will probably be far fewer changes on this list than on the Company Power List so I don’t see any need to publish updates every month or maybe even every quarter. Regardless, we’ll highlight movements in the list and interesting news about its members.

As with the company list, I’ll give a free top ten to all you free subscribers and the full list and comments to the paid crew.

(Side note - If you are a student or young professional and want a paid membership, hit me up. I don’t care about your $9/month. I use it as a way to filter out people who aren’t serious about PropTech. After all, if it’s not worth $9/month, how important is it to you really?)

On to the initial list -