Buildout’s Jason Tillery on the Pace of Change in Tech – Robert Khodadadian

Technology usage in commercial real estate has reached a point where those who don’t adopt it will find themselves left behind. But what is technology for its own sake and what offers solutions that make a tangible difference for commercial brokers? It’s a question that Buildout CEO Jason Tillery and his team seek to find answers for. Connect CRE spoke with Tillery recently for his take on the pace of change brought on by tech and how to find tools that work.

Q: Are we seeing more technological advances each year? Everything from vaccine development to electric vehicles and artificial intelligence feels like it’s coming at us so much faster than ever before. Do you have any perspectives to offer on what makes this moment in technology unique?

A: In a way, I don’t think this is really a unique time. Technology has always been progressing and it’s always been accelerating. What makes it different is how it’s perceived within a single human’s lifetime.

Two hundred years ago, you could expect to live a life that was basically the same as your parents. And that had been true for the thousand previous years as well. But starting about 100 years ago, that was no longer true. Because of things like cars and planes and telephones, you could expect to live a life that didn’t look like your parents’ lives. Later on, in the last century, progress started moving fast enough that you would see change within your own life and live a different life in middle age than you would in your childhood. That became excit ing, And the theme of the whole century was progress. Everybody was hopeful about what the future may bring. It’s been true up until recently that we could expect to see this kind of accelerating, excit ing change.

As waves of technology came, you could see them changing the world around you. We started hearing about the Internet in the early ‘90s. And it didn’t really change the world for about 15 years. So you had a lot of time to adapt to that change. If you didn’t change your business in 1997 to adapt to the Internet, that was fine. But if you hadn’t changed by 2007, you were probably in trouble. Then we saw a wave of technological change come with mobile and social, and you still had time—you didn’t have to adopt all this in 2006. But if you waited 10 years, it was too long. What’s different now is the pace as it relates to us as humans. What’s happened in the last year with AI is so jarring, because it’s already had such a huge impact on society and we’re just not equipped as people to adapt to change that quickly. So I don’t think this is a unique moment from the perspective that technology is coming and it’s coming faster and faster. What’s unique is that we’ve broken a barrier beyond which people are just not equipped to adapt, and the hard fact is it’s only going to go faster from here. This is sort of the new way of life for us.

Q: Is replacement something that commercial real estate brokers need to be afraid of?

A: Everybody should always be vigilant about the fact that as a society changes, they have to change or get left behind. That’s always been true. You just don’t have as much time to adapt now, so you can’t afford to wait five or 10 years before adopting these tools, because the world around you will be filled with people who do and become a lot more efficient. One bit of good news is that commercial real estate brokers are not playing a zero-sum game the way that so many businesses are. If you’re a restaurant, people only eat so much, or if you’re a dentist and you find a way to use AI and robotics to fill five times as many cavities, we’re only going to need one-fifth as many dentists in the world, because people don’t just go in and have that stuff done for fun. But that’s not true for brokers. If a broker calls a building owner and convinces them to sell their building, that is a deal that materializes out of thin air. And so they’re making this economy happen. If they went away, a lot fewer deals would be done. So it’s not a zero-sum game. And the efficiency gains that brokers see will result in many more transactions. But the people who don’t do it are probably going to disappear. For the brokers who miss this train, there’s probably not going to be a great future.

Q: How does Buildout recommend its clients evaluate, adopt, and leverage changing technology?

A: The challenge here is that there’s so much stuff appearing on the market. You can’t afford to waste your time evaluating a bunch of things that aren’t going to work. I can tell you that at Buildout over the past decade, I have bought dozens of software products where a very talented salesperson has tried to talk us into why it’s worthwhile to buy their product. It just never works out. The benefits never materialize. On the other hand, when someone comes to you with a solution to a problem that you know you have, that’s when sometimes it really works out. You can’t always believe that what they’re selling actually works. But if it does, it’s going to be worthwhile. We’re trying to help our customers identify as many things in that latter category and as few things in that first category as possible. Now more than ever, you need a vendor you know, with whom you have a relationship that goes beyond a typical vendor relationship, someone who you can consider a partner, someone to whom you can just offload this process of tech evaluation. And that’s what we’re trying to be for our customers.

Q: Where do you think tech can be best implemented to augment/complement the human, relational aspect of work?

A: The job of technology is to clear the runway of all of the incidental work that’s done by a broker. In software, we talk about breaking a task down into its incidental and inherent complexity. You want to eliminate all the incidental complexity that you can because that’s not really what you’re trying to solve for as a broker.

The inherent job of a broker, I believe, is selling a dream. They’re really just a small group of people convincing people to follow their dreams and lease that space or buy that building. When somebody leases a 1,500-square-foot street retail space, they’re not just trying to take possession of the premises and successfully execute a three-year lease. They’re trying to open a coffee shop, and a broker is a partner in pursuing that dream. Same with a factory. If you buy a 50,000-square-foot factory, it’s not because you want to be the owner of a particular property. You’re trying to expand a third-generation business and a broker is part of that story. That is the inherent complexity of their job. It’s going to people and convincing them to make a really important decision about their business and their life. They can do that and they’re good at it.

But what their actual workloads look like isn’t really that. It’s a lot of paperwork and making brochures and driving around and making phone calls and trying just to find the person they’re trying to get ahold of and get them on the phone. That is all incidental. If we can get rid of all that work, everything other than engaging with another human to convince them to make this kind of decision, then that’s the ultimate success for software. I don’t think there’s any clear path to having software replace that last step, which is really what a broker is.

Photo of Jason Tillery by Noah Gelfman.

The post Buildout’s Jason Tillery on the Pace of Change in Tech appeared first on Connect CRE.

Robert Khodadadian has long had a simple philosophy about selling real estate. There are approximately a million buildings in the city, and the broker that gets to sell any one among the multitude that will hit the auctioning block at a given moment is, sometimes, simply the person who happens to pitch their services to the right seller.