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Is Proptech Adoption Held Back by.. Jargon?

Warning: gloves are coming off in this post.

The newest additions to this site are short story glossaries of proptech and real estate terms, and as I’ve been writing out all the definitions, I realized that these were two distinct languages. When tech and real estate get in the same room, they just don’t get each other.

Why We Come Up With Jargon

It’s totally normal for industries to come up with new terms to express concepts that commonly used English words and phrases cannot. Proptech and Real Estate are no exception, and there’s plenty jargon that easily conveys meaning.. once you know what it means.

For example, tech came up with “cap table” and real estate came up with “cap stack“. To industry outsiders or a cheeky AI image generator, these phrases may conjure up the images below:

But for both industries, cap is short for capital, and the phrases are just a more efficient way to refer to “the list of equity and debt in the deal.” So these are justifiable technical terms that deserve their places in the lexicon. But not all of the terms are worthy of a spot..

Jargon isn’t just Cringeworthy..

Some proptech jargon adds unnecessary complexity to terms in order to signal that the speaker is part of a tribe- like machine learning specialists, or UX designers, or the broader tech industry. Here are some examples:

Learnings: WTF is this? A confused gerund? Is it borrowings from lolcat speakings? The common English would be “lessons,” but the tech tribe is obsessed with turning failings into learnings.

Sunsetting: Speaking of failings, tech doesn’t even call it that. Sunsetting evokes a eulogistic sense of pride, honoring the glorious life and downfall of what was probably a stupid idea that destroyed value and caused lots of collateral damage. But at least they probably haz sum learnings.

Dogfooding: When founders have to test out the product themselves, they have to “eat their own dogfood”. Unfortunately proptech founders with no real estate background can’t partake in dogfooding because it’s too expensive and risky to do while they’re also running a proptech startup. So guinea pigs have to eat the dog food instead.

Real Estate jargon, on the other hand has a distinctive old-money, white collar culture about it, which, don’t get me wrong, is just as bad as tech-speak. Given real estate’s deep ties with the finance industry, it’s not surprising that a large chunk of the terms are acronyms. This sentence could conceivably appear in an email between a lender and a CRE developer:

Your APR and proceeds were based on the DSCR, which we derived from your DCF model’s NOI. We need to wrap up DD, so once we review the PCA and ESA our ETA on your LOI should be EOD. OK? TTYL.

..Jargon Creates Barriers

Those examples were relatively harmless, but at its most dangerous, jargon is downright elitist and exclusionary. Many proptech founders and VC’s look down on the real estate industry because they perceive it as being slow to adopt new technology. How many times have you heard proptech founders declare “real estate is an antiquated industry” and “real estate is slow to adopt“, or the perennial favorite, “real estate is ripe for disruption“?

To me, these phrases reek of hubris and ignorance. The tech industry’s fatal flaw in its approach to real estate is that they associate their willingness to embrace technological change as being more open minded, adaptable, and intelligent. And so, they see real estate professionals as kids on the short bus that need their help.

This attitude leads to tribalism so strong that entire companies can be started and funded by founders and VC’s with no real estate experience whatsoever (cough *Katerra* cough). A VC’s typical high standards for ‘Founder Market Fit‘ gets replaced by ‘These Founders Can Teach The Market How It Should Fit.’ Can you really blame the real estate industry for being hesitant to work with an industry that doesn’t seem to respect them?

Ultimately, the differences in real estate and proptech jargon have contributed to the huge cultural gap (see video below) between these two industries that’s preventing them from effectively communicating and collaborating with each other.

How to Bridge The Divide

And this leads me back to the beginning of the article. Linguistic differences between tech and real estate do slow down proptech adoption. I’ve put together two readable glossaries (Proptech Jargon Lessons and Real Estate For Noobs) on this site where instead of feeling like you’re reading through a dictionary, it’s an immersive language lesson and choose your own adventure!

By taking the time to learn proptech and real estate terms, we can start to narrow the gap and work together to build a more proptech-friendly real estate industry. And in the end, that’s probably what both proptech founders and real estate professionals truly want. After all, it’s not about saving the world–it’s about making it a better place. Or as real estate insiders call it, placemaking.