Proptech Espresso

Can the current housing crisis be solved with technology? How have different government policies and social forces contributed to economic and racial inequality in housing? How is the Terner Center advancing innovative policies to influence the way government at all levels is directing money towards creative ways to address housing needs? What successes have the first cohort class from the Housing Lab achieved after the program?
Michelle Boyd - Program Director for the Housing Lab, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and address the need for an equitable recovery from COVID-19.
Michelle Boyd is the Program Director for the Housing Lab, the Terner Center’s program to support early-stage entrepreneurs tackling the high cost of housing. She brings nearly a decade of experience in community and startup finance, organizational design, and urban policy research. Prior to joining the Terner team, Michelle worked as a strategy consultant for the Bridgespan Group, collaborating with nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and foundation leaders across issues of community development, housing, and education. Michelle holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business, an Interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Real Estate from UC Berkeley, and a BA in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. Michelle also serves as a Chamberlin Fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

Does construction tech end once occupancy of a building happens? Why is it important to be able to professionally reinvent yourself? What was the draw to the clean tech space after spending time in the aerospace industry? Why has construction insurance costs ballooned? What can GCs do to mitigate risk and thereby help keep insurance costs in check? Why has water become such a larger driver of construction related insurance costs? What have been the drivers of IoT device adoption on the construction site? How is technology adoption on construction sites different from the rates that you see in other industries? Why is technology adoption becoming a competitive advantage for many early adopters of technology within construction? Why is the data from the interconnected job site so valuable for construction companies? Why is the outlook for construction so bright?

Alex Fuentes - EVP Strategic Growth at Brickeye, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and share the unique coop program of the University of Waterloo engineering department that exposed him to a wide variety of industries including power generation, consumer electronics, manufacturing and aerospace to name a few.

Why is the reasoning from first principles approach so successful in unlocking creative solutions to complex problems? What can you do to differentiate true customer needs from the noise of what customers are asking for outloud? How long does it take the average homeowner to save up their down payment on their first home? Why does the real estate industry thrive on information asymmetry? What is the benefit to the individual investor of cutting out the middlemen currently involved with most residential real estate transactions? How can you achieve transparency with blockchain based transactions without completely forgoing privacy? What is the reason special purpose vehicles in the form of an LLC are commonly used for real estate tokenization? Why is Homebase co-purchasing a small percentage of the homes they are fractionalizing? What are the tradeoffs that Homebase made by prioritizing its legal and regulatory adherence framework? Has the US created significant disadvantages for web3 innovation with its current incomplete regulatory framework?
Domingo Valadez - co-founder of Homebase, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how his experience growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants who achieved the American dream of purchasing real estate unknowingly planted the seeds for his passion around real estate and rethinking home ownership.

What was it like to work at WeWork during its hypergrowth phase? Which businesses outside of the WeWork mothership were Aleks involved with? What did Aleks learn about the right cost of capital for different business models while at WeWork? Why are boutique hotels generally not profitable? What serendipitous introduction led to the Cuby Technologies co-founders meeting? How do the start-up costs for an industrialized construction company differ from that of most other proptech companies? Why has construction efficiency been decreasing over the last couple of decades? How are construction companies planning to overcome a continued reduction in skilled labor in order to meet the chronic housing shortage? What are some of the scaling challenges for volumetric construction and how does this differ from the scaling challenges of 3D printing? Why is the manufacturing world moving towards a distributed network of localized manufacturing vs giga-factories? What was Ryan Homes doing in the 1950's that is similar in nature to what Cuby Technologies has innovated on? How are Tesla and Cuby Technologies similar? What are some of the benefits of using steel in the residential homebuilding process? Why does Cuby Technologies fall under the deep tech umbrella?

Aleks Gampel - co-founder & CEO of Cuby Technologies, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss how a childhood fascination with big city building architecture led to a career in real estate development and proptech.

What is GIS and why is this technology so important for real estate? Why is city planning at the core of almost every aspect of real estate? Why is lead follow up for sales people, inside and outside of real estate, such a struggle? What is conversational AI and why does it make sense to use this tech for sales lead follow up? How is the predictive analytics branch of AI being used in proptech today? Nate Joens- co-founder of Structurely, joins Proptech Espresso to answer these questions and discuss the opportunity for generative AI to transform the mundane everyday tasks that workers in almost every industry are performing.