In the first half of 2021 alone, venture capital invested $10.6 billion into Property Technology companies or “PropTech.” Every legacy real estate player is scrambling to enter this market by acquiring, partnering, or investing in the latest real estate technology.
Challenge
In 2018, Tract Co-Founder Laura Kelso was the sole marketing leader tasked with building the brand of a $100 million PropTech Venture Fund attached to one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms. With existing firms like Metaprop and Fifth Wall already dominating the conversation, time-to-market with a unique value proposition was vital.
Key constraints included a lean team of less than a dozen people, including the investment team, managing partners, and the portfolio services team. Additionally, the parent company’s existing digital channels were too broad for the technology story to cut through the noise.
At the time, the media were really struggling to grasp the PropTech category, being either experts in real estate or technology, but rarely both. We really had to prioritize market education and media backgrounders so that we could lay the foundation for headline features to come.
Laura KelsoEx-Venture Fund Head of Marketing
The PropTech Venture Fund's goals were to:- Create a unique thought leadership platform to lead the conversation around PropTech in a way that’s distinct but still reinforces the parent company
- Grow awareness of the venture fund through events, media, and editorials
- Fuel joint revenue opportunities with the parent company and its customers
Solution
With only a handful of spokespeople at our disposal, we created a multi-channel marketing strategy to amplify our unique value proposition to the market everywhere proptech leaders were reading and gathering.
We differentiated the PropTech Venture Fund by highlighting our:- Access to top real estate clients to quickly iterate and test Go-To-Market strategies
- Ability to generate pipeline through commercial agreements and business development
- Expertise from proven technology entrepreneurs to drive hypergrowth and rapid PropTech adoption
- Events
We leveraged marquee sponsorships across the top PropTech conferences, creating portfolio showcases, executive keynotes, and exclusive dinners, driving business opportunities for the startups and parent company.
- Media
We built a targeted media database on Airtable to programmatically build relationships with key reporters at every major real estate and technology outlet. We focused first on market education, helping reporters connect the dots across the two industries. We then layered on industry viewpoints, resulting in venture fund profiles and editorials. We also advised portfolio companies on their media campaigns, helping to announce more than a dozen transactions.
- Social
We created LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for the venture fund, independent of the parent company’s, in order to attract a targeted audience of tech-curious and tech-enthusiast real estate professionals.
Results
The PropTech Venture Fund became a household name in the real estate community in less than a year. Our investment pipeline was full, attracting the best new startups and technology entering the market. The fund’s technology messaging was cascaded across the entire parent company business, coloring even the global CEO’s presence at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
The PropTech Venture Fund’s marketing engine fueled success for the parent company, its clients and portfolio of startups, which included:- Driving 250+ new sales opportunities and hundreds more leads for the venture portfolio of startups
- Securing keynotes at every major real estate conference (20+), including Urban Land Institute, MIPIM, CREtech
- Establishing and growing social channels from 0 to more than 10,000 targeted and engaged followers
- Earning nearly 400 earned media placements, across more than 120 outlets, fueled by deep relationship-building with journalists from Reuters, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, The Information, and more