“I was telling them, ‘This is going to put us on the map, and people are going to start noticing us,’” recalls Sebastian Tobon, one of the visionary entrepreneurs behind Ícaro (on Airbnb here), Colombia’s most unique luxury accommodation. “A week later, like magic, you came knocking on our door.” Just 90 minutes outside of ...
“For every 50 contractors that retire, only seven enter the workforce,” explains Shanna Greathouse, Founder and CEO of Pigybak, a startup at the intersection of social impact and home services. “In 2025, we were already facing a 50,000 employee labor shortage across the US for contractors – and that was before recent policy changes that ...
Sean Landsberg’s journey from property management executive to PropTech founder illustrates the power of solving real operational challenges. As the CEO of AppWork, Landsberg has evolved what began as an internal solution for a mid-sized property management company into a rapidly growing maintenance operations platform serving some of the largest property management companies in the ...
“The most doxxed piece of information is somebody’s personal residence,” explains David Lanciotti, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at The Land Trust Company. In an era of rampant identity theft and digital exposure, this 125-year-old company is transforming a traditional legal instrument into a modern shield against 21st-century privacy threats. The former Chicago Title ...
After developing nearly 700 communities across 40 states, Patten Properties welcomes new CEO John Patten, marking both a generational transition and strategic shift for one of America’s most experienced land development firms. Growing up in a three-generation family business taught John Patten lessons that couldn’t be learned in any business school. As he steps into ...
“Everyone thinks affordable housing means government subsidies and $800,000 per unit costs. That’s insane. Totally unsustainable.” Aaron Mensch is challenging the status quo for affordable housing development in Los Angeles. “In the private sector, we can build these units for a third of the cost.” From Crisis to Opportunity: Building a Real Estate Foundation That’s ...
When Kasper Rune Sogaard looks at the property management software landscape, he sees an industry stuck in the past. As a former Amazon engineering manager who helped build the ingestion pipeline for Prime Video and later Disney+, Sogaard has spent his career developing sophisticated systems to automate complex workflows. Now, as the founder of MagicDoor, ...
“Most urban grids are pretty dirty. You might have a lot of clean energy development outside of the urban area, but how do you use it in an urban area?” poses Karen Alter, Chief Marketing Officer at NineDot Energy, highlighting one of the most pressing challenges facing America’s cities. The answer, it seems, lies in ...
“Tech is new for the sake of new. Real Estate is old for the sake of old,” observes Marc Zuluaga, co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Cadence OneFive. This tension between innovation and tradition lies at the heart of the challenge his company is working to solve in the building energy retrofit space. Founded three ...
“I like to say I’m two degrees of separation from every broker and buyer in Manhattan,” says Mike Fabbri, who was recently named The Agency‘s top-producing agent in New York City for 2024 by sales volume. This extensive network, built through years of working behind the scenes at some of New York’s most prestigious brokerages, ...
With U.S. homeowners sitting on over $35 trillion in home equity and reluctant to refinance their low-rate mortgages, innovative financing solutions are finding their moment. Leading this shift is Unison, which has developed products that let homeowners access their equity without taking on traditional debt. “Most homeowners can’t easily access their equity without taking on ...
With over 50% of outstanding mortgages below 3.5%, the traditional resale market has stalled. In this challenging environment, Jome CEO Dan Hnatkovskyy has identified and capitalized on a crucial market opportunity in new construction sales, building a platform that’s reshaping how builders connect with qualified buyers across 17 markets. “Builders have land investments, construction loans, ...
Former U.S. Congressman Kwanza Hall has built a career in public service focused on delivering concrete results. Now, as the new chairman of Develop Fulton, one of the Southeast’s preeminent development authorities, Hall is bringing fifteen years of public service experience to shape the region’s economic future. “It’s a really unique opportunity to make a ...
“Why are we doing this the same way we have for the last 100 years?” This question haunted Andrés Leal during his early days as a civil engineer, watching crews lay bricks and raise buildings using methods that hadn’t changed in a century. Today, as one of Commercial Observer’s top 30 PropTech leaders worldwide and ...
In the competitive world of real estate investment, Mitra Investment Partners has emerged as a distinctive player by blending innovative deal-making with a tech-forward approach to asset management. For Diana Shaw, the firm’s Chief of Staff, what began as a chance encounter with one of the founders during an evening walk has evolved into helping ...
