PropTech: Essential, Innovative…and Ultimately Useless?
Every industry gets its "revolution." Education had one. Healthcare had one. Now real estate is still in the thick of it — PropTech.
Billions have been poured into "reinventing" the industry. Startups, VC rounds, big conferences with neon stages and slogans about disruption.
And yet… most of it amounts to cosplay theater.
The Theater of Innovation
The VR headset nobody uses after six months.
The blockchain deed nobody can actually enforce.
The CRM agents abandon before Christmas.
Real estate innovation looks less like transformation and more like a political leadership spill in slow motion — endless rebrands, no real structural change.
The Boring Bulls That Win
The bulls that survive in this arena aren't the sexy startups with TED Talks and glossy decks. They're the dull ones:
DocuSign
Boring digital signatures that actually replaced paper.
Digital Lockboxes
Simple tech that solved a real bottleneck.
Listing Aggregators
Unsexy databases that became essential infrastructure.
Tools that quietly fixed bottlenecks while everyone else chased the "future of."
The PropTech Paradox
It's essential because you can't play without it.
It's useless because it doesn't change the system itself.
And maybe that's the real lesson:
Forget revolutions. Build boring things that work.
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Simon Dodson writes about digital systems, market failures, and the strange beauty of infrastructure. Building at cpp41419.com.au