What Public Real Estate Companies Are Saying About Technology

We listened to their quarterly earnings calls so you don't have to

Thesis Driven dives deep into emerging themes and real estate operating models. This week’s letter is a quarterly overview of what publicly-traded real estate companies are saying about technology and innovation in their businesses.

The firms we are tracking; Thesis Driven subscribers can request we track additional firms going forward.

Real estate operators, investors, and technology companies alike are looking for insights on the future of real estate. Fortunately, the biggest real estate companies out there get on a public call every quarter and tell us about their businesses—including the role technology and innovation are playing, the investments they’re making, and how they see the future shaking out.

While the majority of earnings calls are spent on financial and operating performance, technology does come up at some point in most calls—some only briefly, but others in considerable detail. And companies’ responses to analysts’ questions about AI, centralization, hardware, and more can be illuminating for real estate investors, developers, VCs, and tech companies alike. So we at Thesis Driven listened to a bunch of earnings calls and are distilling the takeaways here for each company and in the aggregate.

To do this, we sampled a representative set of the largest publicly-traded real estate businesses, including REITs and services businesses from the major food groups. Specifically, we covered:

• Essex Property Trust (NYSE: ESS)

• Camden Property Trust (NYSE: CPT)

• AvalonBay Communities (NYSE: AVB)

• Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH)

• Mid-America Apartment Communities (NYSE: MAA)

• Equity Residential (NYSE: EQR)

• Lennar (NYSE: LEN)

• Simon Property Group (NYSE: SPG)

• SL Green Realty (NYSE: SLG)

• Prologis (NYSE: PLD)

• CBRE (NYSE: CBRE)

• Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK)

• JLL (NYSE: JLL)

• Vornado (NYSE: VNO)

• Boston Properties (NYSE: BXP)

For each, we’ll give a brief overview of how technology was mentioned (if it was) plus a review of key innovation-related themes from this quarter’s earning calls.

Thesis Driven subscribers are welcome to recommend other companies to us to add to the list for next quarter’s coverage.