PropTech Power List: People (March '23)

An update on who has the widest following in PropTech

Last year we debuted the first version of a PropTech Power List. It’s meant to track and lightly analyze the most “influential” PropTech people in the world.

I quote the term “influential” because that’s pretty challenging to measure.

There are plenty of heavy-hitters that are quietly working behind the scenes that you’ve never heard of. Still, just because quantification is difficult doesn’t mean we shouldn’t AT LEAST TRY to create some criteria for how influential these people are in the community. Otherwise, it’s just a completely subjective list of who I like and who I think is impressive (which no one cares about).

So, with that in mind, I used LinkedIn followers + Twitter followers and we published the first version back in December.

Why This Matters

If there is one thing PropTech does well it is lean into strategic investors. Most of the VC funds are filled with “strategic LPs” because the real estate industry is terrible at adopting new technologies.

The more allies and users you can have on your actual cap table the more likely you are to scale your business. Those investors have a financial reason to use and promote the greatness of your product.

And, like it or not, influencer marketing is a real thing.

More followers = more potential buyers.

Look at Jessica Alba and Honest Co, or the Kardashians and their brands, Ryan Reynolds’ Gin, or Reese Witherspoon and her company. Followers = dollars.

(Side Note - While this was probably overhyped in the last decade, I don’t think this is a low-interest-rate phenomenon. It’s advertising 101. More eyeballs means more buyers.)

So, with apologies to everyone on this list for comparisons to a Kardashian, these are the most quantifiably-influential people in PropTech. If you can impress them and get them to say something about your greatness it will almost certainly turn into revenue for you.

On to the names

Below is the updated list. After that jump, I’ll get into some analysis on the composition, what changed, and who we included/excluded.

For you free subscribers, here is the (mostly unchanged) top 10: