Looking Back on 2022

Jan 13, 2023

[Editor’s Note: Unelevated is the full text of our 237th Weekly Transmission, originally delivered uncontrived to the inbox of increasingly than 600 GEM members on December 22th, 2022. Below, I squint when on a year that saw iBuying turmoil, carnage in the public markets, 3D printing milestones, and huge advances in generative AI. Plus, a variety of GEM members reflected on their 2022 predictions. Many links included are to members-only articles, so won’t be wieldy without an worth once setup.]

Image created with: Jasper Prompt: New Years triumph over a municipality skyline reflecting houses reflecting technology with text reading “2022”

Mortgage rates went up, and ownership houses became harder.

Yeah, that happened. And the trickle-down effects were many. iBuyers have their tails between their legs, valedictory faster than they arrived on the scene. With mortgage originations lanugo substantially (47% YoY in Q3), startups touching mortgages are reeling. Without the unanticipated booming housing market of 2020 and 2021, this year was a doozy for players on every side of the equation: sellers and buyers, brokerages, property managers, landlords and tenants. The 2022 macro left no one unaffected

Here’s a snapshot of the most notable newsy moments:

1. iBuying Turmoil: On the residential side, iBuyer carnage is the most prominent story from 2022. Zillow’s exit at the end of 2021 was a bombshell, but would have been far worse if they waited plane a few months later. It was a telltale sign of trouble ahead. Opendoor is reeling with a huge stock price ripen over the past six months, hoping shuffling the executive deck will help un-muddy the waters. Offerpad is teetering on stuff delisted. RedfinNow is no longer.

The silver lining is, as part of their recent leadership reorganization, Opendoor launched its third-party Exclusives marketplace–which will be one of the most compelling stories of 2023.

PS: Check our iBuying Ecosystem Intel.

2. Public Market Carnage: Almost every public proptech visitor took it in the teeth on valuation. With a unavailability of IPOs, late-stage got shaken—yet seed just rolled right along. While significant wanted is sitting on the sidelines and waiting, wanted deployment was not at a standstill: Veev raised a mound of mazuma to whop prefab, Italy-based Casavo raked in $400 million to try its hand at iBuying in Europe, and Roofstock took in $240 million to protract marching. Meanwhile, Flow managed to secure $350 million in a pre-seed round to re-build WeLive, trying to one-liner the nut of branded long-term rentals.

3. SFRs for the Win: The waif in home sales has been a boon for rentals. Based on sentiment at IMN’s Scottsdale event, single-family rental investors are thriving. All of which boded well for the variety of tech vendors servicing them.

A sign of things to come: Zumper’s first-mover expansion into short-term rentals means vacation, monthly, and long-term rentals in one interface. This morphing of traditionally separate inventory will unlock new efficiencies, and tousle the lines of what it ways to live and travel.

4. 3D Printing Advances: IMHO, the most heady story of 2018 was the partnership of NewStory and ICON on a 3D home printer. The sector continues to progress, and it’s likely we’ll squint when on 2022 as the year it crossed the chasm into mainstream. Mighty Buildings made strides by completing wordage of an early Zero Net Energy in Southern California. ICON had a imprint year, announcing plans to kick-off construction of the 100-home 3D-printed community in partnership with Lennar, and was awarded a $57.2 million contract from NASA to protract exploration of the Moon and Mars. With so many players contributing in the space, there is no doubt that 2023 will withstand witness to unfurled technological progress.

Image created with: Jasper Prompt: generative ai, chatgpt, AI images

5. Generative AI Breaks Out: Jeff Turner’s Creativity and the AI Revolution shook me. I’ve been thinking well-nigh the technology and use cases overly since. The power and speed of iteration are like lightning. No increasingly proof is needed than the unvarying peep overly since ChatGPT was unleashed on the internet less than a month ago. I haven’t been worldly-wise to stave it since.

And, now, AI created objects are a thing. Where does it all end? The only reason this is number five and not number one is that it’s not proptech specific. But it’s literally going to impact every industry in profound ways. In weeks and months, not years. Brace yourselves.

REFLECTIONS FOR 2022

How did we fare? Let’s take the time to reflect on several of the predictions and trends published a year ago.

Without remoter ado …

PROPTECH TRENDS

WEALTH MANAGEMENT TAKES CENTER STAGE
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

I stand firm in my weighing that agents and brokerages who don’t make the jump to wealth managers will be out of the merchantry in five or 10 years. You may moreover recall that Ryan Coon called for the unfurled convergence of real manor and personal finance in our 2020 predictions.
2022 will be the year that the deep intertwining of real estate, finance, and wealth management becomes utterly apparent. I’ll shoehorn that Truebill and its 2.5 million members were a foreign visitor to me prior to Rocket Cos’ $1.275 billion investment in the personal finance app. But the sheer size of investment in the trend is a staggering bet by a $30 billion dollar mortgage giant. They aren’t dummies, nor are they messing around. The next step is layering an Awning-esque investment brokerage on top of Truebill. That, and more, is coming. The waters are getting increasingly murky for real manor teachers who aspire to capitalize on consumers’ desire for investment advice: They will need to understand the unshortened landscape to thrive.

DM: Conceptually, increasingly of the industry has moved toward this vision over the past twelve months. But, I don’t see much in the way of very adoption/changes at the macro-tech level. One of my favorite Transmissions of 2022 re-imagined a future in which real manor websites don’t lead with a prompt to “search for homes.” So, there’s that to dig into for the believers out there.

Verdict: Draw

HOUSING AFFORDABILITY
Matt Hoffman // Partner, HousingTech Ventures

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” As The Who so aptly sang in Won’t Get Fooled Again. The year superiority is unlikely to squint too variegated from 2021 as we protract to stagger from the effects of Covid-19, coupled with the looming uncertainty of the 2022 elections in November and the ongoing chorus of complaints well-nigh housing unaffordability by those: doing nothing well-nigh it, standing to do the same things that are enabling it, or urgently opposing innovation and transpiration in order to protect their own little patch of dirt.
Having said that, here are some things that I expect to see in 2022:
Consolidation: A tuft of housingtech startups are going on their third or fourth years in need of mazuma and market share, and all of them are seeking the same customer. As gas tanks empty, expect to see a slew of mergers between startups with similar and complementary solutions. The surf of the yield will get picked up by the largest incumbents, such as RealPage, CoStar, and Zillow.
Agitation: We are going to start to see pushback on the single family rental market as jurisdictions enact “no-rent” covenants on uninfluenced single family homes (not unlike in some condo regimes).
Identification: Bad actors in the multifamily market are going to be exposed at a greater rate as municipalities prefer technologies that enable increasingly transparency with regard to violations and enforcement, and empower renters to document and pursue their rights.
Re-imagination: Work from home has given the suburbs new life and threatened some cities (e.g. DC lost 2.9% of its population in 2021). Planners, politicians, and merchantry groups are increasingly urgently engaged than overly in figuring out what a variegated future looks like, and that ways opportunity for people with innovative housing solutions.
Digitization: we will lay the groundwork in 2022 for a blockchain based real manor economy that will be the SOP in 2025, from title, to finance, to closings, to tax, to brokerage, to fractionalized ownership.
Regardless of how 2022 plays out, expect a growing group of people defended to making the housing market a increasingly transparent, equitable, profitable, and sustainable place to do business…and the GEM will play a role in bringing them to the table.

Bryan Copley: Numbers one and two whilom are both accurate. Ofo Ezeugwu‘s Brooklyn based WYL is part of Matt’s third trend, and the DOJ is investigating rent setting visitor RealPage over claims it recommended rent increases over market averages. Number four is moreover a win: Cities are creeping back, some faster than others–but the suburbs have been the well-spoken winners during the pandemic (2020-22).

Regarding number five, FTX and “crypto winter” have had an (unfortunate) negative effect on blockchain based technology adoption. Matt may have been 5/5 if it weren’t for bad actors in this emerging space. ChatGPT / conversational AI has taken the buzzword wand and will run with it well into 2023, leaving blockchain based technology solutions towers in flipside category’s shadows for the first time since the whence of the pandemic.

Verdict: Win

RACING TOWARD BUYSIDE EXTINCTION
Jim Klinge // Broker, Compass

Eliminating buyer-agents is the easy solution to reach buyside extinction, and it’s well underway. Redfin has dumbed-down proprietrix representation by paying their newest teachers $50 to unshut the door for buyers. These new teachers literally have no wits or anything to offer the buyers as far as advice, and are directed to the professional wage-earner when at the office for help—oh, great, to someone who has never seen the home. The resulting trend is to expect nothing from buyer-agents, and now the big listing teams treat outside teachers like the enemy. Buyer-side commissions are dwindling, there is no transparency well-nigh making offers, and buyer-agents are treated with disdain. By now, home buyers don’t think they need help—heck, they can find all the homes for sale online—what else is there? When they find one they like, they can reach out directly to the listing team. Soon, there will be no need for the MLS, and the search portals will be optional. But the listing wage-earner can, and will, tuition 4% to 5% to transact. It will be tabbed compression, but it is a result of the industry ignoring the value of buyer-agents for decades that they will wilt extinct.

Jim: The last sentence has surely come true, and will probably never change—no one in the industry will overly fathom and publicize what buyer-agents do for work. As a result, they are dying a natural death. And I midpoint that literally, as the old-guard realtors that brought decades of wits to profitable buyers fade into the sunset. Now, new teachers are prescribed the proprietrix prospects and told to get them into a house. With the public never having benefited from working with a buyer-agent, they won’t miss them when they’re gone: As far as buyers are concerned, working with the listing-agent’s team got them the house.

Realtors who make up the old guard—those with 20 years experience—still have a box of merchantry cards. Those who pay dues every year will still be ‘in business,’ technically. But with buyer-agent bounty stuff crushed by greedy listing agents, there is less incentive than overly for senior realtors to do the tough work with buyers when they can instead trip to Baja.

Some day—and it could happen in 2023—a major visitor will sally who spends hundreds of millions on razzmatazz to vamp consumers to their home-selling machine. What that machine looks like doesn’t matter—it’s considering they spent the razzmatazz dollars to get the customers that causes them to take over the industry.

Verdict: Draw. The number of teachers in California grew by 3,769 this year, which is 1.8% higher than it was at the end of 2021. But we moreover widow at least 36,000 new agents—we’ll see how many pay their dues then next month. It financing well-nigh $3,000 every January to stay employed by Compass and similar firms. I’d guess that at least 100,000 won’t renew, but how will we know?

RISE OF THE LIVE ANYWHERE MOVEMENT
Jimmy Woodard // Co-founder, Cloud Castles

Look, we all know the WFH miracle isn’t going away. It’s untellable to put the cat when in the bag regarding our joint and newfound lifestyle flexibility. Nomadism is here to stay (a history lesson for those keen to swoop in).
To capitalize, Airbnb will launch two initiatives:
“Live from anywhere,” targeting the medium-term rental market
“Work from anywhere,” offering office spaces, houses, and ADUs as workspaces, which will come with a merger with WeWork (or a smaller competitor such as DeskPass, FlexDesk, or Codi)

DM: Airbnb’s Friendly Apartments program means a “Live from Anywhere” reality is working and well. The second part of this was nowhere to be had in 2022, though with WeWork’s stock price having dropped 90%, perhaps 2023 will be the year.

Verdict: Win

GO FOR BROKE ON SECOND HOMES
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

At prices upwards of $500,000 and plane north of $1 million, the regulars for shares of Pacaso homes is limited. But, once share prices waif tropical to $100,000, or plane less, shares in second homes will fly off the shelves. The largest opportunity is not to target those willing to pay a million dollars for a slice of a $5 million mansion, but rather offering unperformed ownership on a $200-300K ski cabin.
Pacaso once had a crazy 2021, leaping from a $75 million Series B straight into a $125 million Series C in a matter of months. Expect increasingly funding, and the driving lanugo of share prices. And, don’t worry, if you can’t sire U.S. prices: A few international players have exported the model to Inside America and vastitude (Ancana/Kocomo in Mexico).
Remember, if the idea of a Pacaso-style proptech house shared among founders, execs, and VCs interests you, I’d love to hear from you.

DM: There have been new entrants in the category, but not much on the upkeep side. While Delara is targeting $25k per share, I wouldn’t say they or anyone else have proved a sustainable businesses can be built selling lower price points.

PS: I’m still interested in the proptech house idea. Most likely in Latin America. Reach out if you’re so inclined.

Verdict: Lose

COSTAR LAUNCHES A MLS IN THE METAVERSE
Robert Hahn // Founder, 7DS Associates

CoStar has never operated an MLS. It operates the closest thing to an MLS in the commercial real manor world, but in residential real estate, with all of the complications and variegated cultural norms from commercial, CoStar is a total novice. Surpassing it can step in as a white knight, CoStar probably should know a thing or two well-nigh operating an MLS.
The Metaverse offers them the perfect opportunity to do so.
If digital land and digital buildings start trading, buyers and sellers and landlords and tenants will need a single place that has all of the inventory with some kind of verification of the property. I expect that CoStar will be a player in digital CRE in the Metaverse; they have the expertise, the credibility, and the opportunity to wilt that. It is a trivial matter, then, to proffer that system to digital “residential” real manor as well. I’d guess that personal homes won’t be a huge thing in the Metaverse because, well, people don’t unquestionably live in the Metaverse. But having been a longtime MMORPG fan, who owned a virtual house, furnished it with my trophies, had parties and Guild meetings there and so on… I’m fairly unrepealable that at least some people of the Metaverse will want to own their own virtual “homes.”
It’s not a perfect match for the MLS in the real physical world, just like the Metaverse is not the real physical world. But it’s a tropical unbearable representation, just like the Metaverse is, and it will provide much needed practice for the team at CoStar to be ready for when the rules of the physical world changes. (Read longer version here).

Rob: Obviously, I got this wrong, wrong, wrong. Big part of it, of course, is that I wanted a way to work the metaverse into the real manor conversation, but the other big part of it is that the metaverse as it exists today is merely a marvel for gamers and geeks.

Now with the swoon of the crypto market (long overdue, and really a positive minutiae overall), I suspect that it’ll be a while surpassing we see CoStar or everyone else offer an MLS in the metaverse.

The Metaverse is, for all intents and purposes, kind of dead. The whoopee will and should move to Mirror Worlds, which have real world utility and are pretty amazing.

Verdict: Lose

BLOCKCHAIN ACTUALLY BECOMES USEFUL
Teresa Grobecker // CEO, Real Manor Consortia

Appraisals have wilt increasingly expensive and time-consuming as fewer people wilt appraisers. Appraisals are unduly increasingly expensive in inner cities and rural areas, which unduly impacts lower-income buyers and minorities. In October 2021, the FHFA announced that desktop appraisals will wilt the norm, not just a bandaid during the pandemic. Going forward, realtors will still play an instrumental role by collecting the valuation information through a Facetime-like app with a licensed appraiser. The sanitized report will remove racial bias from appraisals and the process will offer affordability and a quicker turn. Valuation inspections—along with AVMs, inspection data, and land reports—will all be packaged and uploaded to the blockchain ledger as data NFTs pre-listing.
And finally, seller title policies will be logged on the blockchain and used as title-starters (the seed of a title report). Blockchain can moreover potentially reduce search fees, which are nonflexible financing incurred by title companies. Reducing these nonflexible financing could potentially pass savings on to the customer. Title insurance (finally) becomes increasingly affordable.
As blockchain finally grows up and provides trackable monetary utility in the real manor transaction, real manor transactions will happen faster—DOM will waif by half—and transaction fees will undergo a pricing transformation.

Teresa: The market put all loan origination and appraisals into a blender this year. Without many Fannie and Freddie meetings, both have indicated that they will rely plane increasingly heavily on data and floor plans and less on appraisals. Banks and lenders are eager to prefer streamlined processes to reduce loan origination, which now financing over $11,000 (and still loses $800 per file!)

Verdict: Draw

METEORITE HITS THE SPAC MOVEMENT
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

Vacasa, Sonder, and Inspirato are all embracing SPAC partnerships. Southport Vanquishment Corp and its Ellie Mae veterans are seeking $234.6 million and a mortgage and real manor partner. And, amidst the recent lay-offs mess and Vishal Garg’s resulting “break,” the Largest merger with Aurora Vanquishment Corp is likely to proceed. All that said, the proptech SPAC craze will officially evaporate/crater in the year ahead.
The public markets simply don’t support the current valuations of companies stuff taken public. View is down since hitting the market, as are Hippo, WeWork, and Latch. Let’s be honest: How much proptech can public markets absorb? There are only so many transformative companies worldly-wise to scale in the wake of skyrocketing consumer vanquishment financing in this age of uncounted noise.

DM: I was emphatically right on this, majorly right. In fact, the probity evaporation is plane worse than I overly imagined.

Verdict: Win, though it’s really a loss for innovation.

CONSOLIDATION M&A
Matt Knight // Founder, Proptech Angel Group

As unconfined as the SPAC-a-palooza was in 2021, don’t expect that to protract in ‘22 (agreeing with Drew). It wouldn’t surprise me to see the same quantity of PropTech exits in 2022 as ‘21 but via a variegated avenue. One of our most important IPOs will be among them, and there are multiple interesting late-stage PropTech companies that will be highly-compelling vanquishment targets.
Much like VTS did with Rise and Lane, expect to see increasingly consolidation in the crowded niches. With all of these newly-public startups topfull in cheaper capital, expect them to start ownership increasingly than they build relative to their full-length sets.
And I wouldn’t confine that simply to the younger startups. With RealPage (Thoma Bravo) and Entrata (Silver Lake) now PE-owned, squint for the PE playbook – sell/close non-core or low-margin merchantry units and buy high-margin or new-market businesses.

Matt: We did have a nice SPAC exit with Appreciate. With wanted markets stuff wonky, IPOs have dropped to substantially zero. So, my “most important IPO” didn’t happen, but it did have a big, private financing round.

There was plenty of consolidation in the space but less than I expected. It’s nice to see mature companies like HappyCo ownership Yuhu, and there are a lot of these in the works overdue the scenes. Maybe this bleeds into next year, but I expected to see the most popular categories trim lanugo to two or three major players,and it hasn’t happened yet.

Same with the PE guys. They’ve been pretty quiet so far this year with all the market tumult, and it makes sense in retrospect that they would be relatively circumspect this year. I still believe in the trend, but it didn’t happen at the pace I expected. Maybe next year . . .

Verdict: Draw

CONTINUED EFFICIENCY GAINS PRICING RESIDENTIAL ASSETS
David Bluhm // Co-founder, Plunk

The world’s largest windfall matriculation both demands and deserves largest than Home Price Alphabetize Reports based on a data-limited approach, published quarterly and reflecting information that is increasingly than 60 days old.
As Wall Street moves increasingly intentionally into residential real estate—now investing in housing at a massive scale—there will be an increasing push to develop the same tampering and forecasting tools that enable confident and frictionless investing in most all other windfall classes. This will require both wangle to real-time, ground-truth pricing for an individual home as well as real-time tracking and monitoring of overall market and segment performance.

David: This past October, CNBC’s Senior Real Manor Correspondent, Diana Olick, commented during a morning financial markets round-up on the most wontedly cited Specimen Schiller, S&P CoreLogic Home Price Index. She quipped, “I unchangingly mutter that this particular alphabetize is wildly outdated, considering it’s not only backdated by two months, but it’s a three month moving average, so really it goes when five months.” Her scuttlebutt unmistakably outlined the market’s need for something increasingly reflective of a highly zippy and dynamic real manor market—real-time valuations like what Plunk is subtracting to the marketplace. As home prices wide during COVID, there was little doubt as to direction. Since then, the overall US home market has slowed, cooled, softened or steadied—market performance has varied wildly by geography, and continues to do so.

Meanwhile, new forms of real manor ownership are coming as promised. In fact, Pete Flint recently shared that, “The real manor industry is evolving towards rapid, transparent, and digital transactions and waffly models of ownership.” He goes on to explain that we are just starting the third generation of real manor innovation. Pete defines the first generation as the “Information Generation,” where players like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin directly empowered home buyers with wangle to listing and market information. The second was the “Transaction Generation,” where inefficiencies, time, and forfeit squeezed out of real manor transactions (this is where we are currently). Now, we are just inward what he calls Real Manor 3.0—or the “Ownership Generation,” where new forms of ownership unshut up RRE to many new types of investors. We are indeed still early, but the need to transact RRE faster and with increasingly fully informed conviction seems clear.

Verdict: Draw. Right, but still just the primeval of adopters.

THE BIG GO BIG IN M&A
Greg Robertson // General Manager of MLS, Lone Wolf Technologies

The past few years have been all well-nigh PE firms gobbling up smaller self-sustaining software companies, W R Studios stuff one of them. In 2022, the consolidation will protract but it will be the worthier companies merging with other larger companies to wilt plane worthier entities.

Greg: Inflation and the rapid rise of interest rates put a potation on the real manor market any new acquisitions and any in progress.

Verdict: Lose

Overall 2022 Proptech Trend Score: 3-3-5

RESI PREDICTIONS

ZILLOW-AIRBNB DO THE UNTHINKABLE
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

Rich Barton is no stranger to big bets, having already acquired Zillow’s largest competitor and the number two residential portal when in 2014. This time, he’ll see that joining forces with Airbnb offers the endangerment to unzip well-constructed domination over demand for short-term, midrange, and long-term accommodations, as well as unhook near unlimited real manor porn for voyeurs. There is an immense opportunity to largest serve home sellers with a marketplace that offers what they genuinely want:
Any and all options to monetize their most valuable asset. That ways everything from a Zestimate to a CMA to multiple mazuma offers from competing investors. Vastitude that, an estimate for both long-term and short-term rental income, as well as a tightness “bid” by a verified property management firm to take over management of the home in mart for a percentage of the revenue.
The two companies working jointly on a home ROI dashboard with a built in marketplace would be a home run. Can egos and incentives line up?

DM: Nope, not this year. Plane though Airbnb became a legitimate player in the long term rental market, I’ll have to protract dreaming well-nigh the day the two proptech darlings join forces.

Verdict: Lose

COSTAR NABS ZAVVIE
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

It’s no secret CoStar has set its sights on Zillow. On the heels of Zillow’s exit from iBuying, I made the specimen for Zillow acquiring Zavvie and integrating its product as the de facto “marketplace” into Zillow’s Premier Wage-earner offering. CoStar snapping up Zavvie from under Zillow’s nose would be a nice move to stir the pot … and requite them plane deeper inroads with Zavvie’s very strategic network of mid-size brokerages.

DM: CoStar failed to take the strategic player off the chess board. I am still a parishioner that there is an offer Lane Hornung and Stefan Peterson won’t be worldly-wise to refuse coming. Thus, I’ll push this prediction to 2023 or 2024.

Verdict: Lose (for now)

REDFIN AND FLYHOMES GET HITCHED
Drew Meyers // Founder, Geek Estate

I can’t image the year ending without at least one of the major power buyers (Ribbon, Homeward, Flyhomes, Knock, Orchard) stuff uninventive by a publicly traded market leader. The union of two Seattle-based tech-enabled brokerages fits the snout for Redfin, a visitor that historically has not been super zippy in the M&A department (however, they did acquire RentPath in 2021).

DM: Before the real tsunami that wiped out proptech market caps far and wide, we did see Accept.inc uninventive by HomeLight. However, I think it’s unscratched to say a Flyhomes-Redfin union is off the table for the foreseeable future, as they both have gone through lay-offs (Flyhomes, Redfin) and Redfin no longer has a market cap to sire it a endangerment to struggle such a merger. That said, I’m with Bryan Copley on Redfin: they’re down, but not out.

Verdict: Draw

Overall 2022 Resi Prediction Score: 0-2-1

CONTECH CENTRAL

Stephen Del Percio // VP & Assistant General Counsel, AECOM

Civil infrastructure will remain inside to the zeitgeist of the US built environment:
Another natural disaster—hurricane, heat wave, tornado, flood—will wreak havoc on hair-trigger components of US infrastructure (I wrote this prior to hundreds of motorists stuff stuck for 19 hours on I-95 in northern Virginia during a major snowstorm less than three days into the new year) while at least one high-profile infrastructure project funded through the IIJA (i.e. the Biden infrastructure bill) breaks ground prior to the 2022 midterm elections in January (the Gateway Tunnel in the NY Metro area, maybe?). Either, or both, will renew criticisms that the IIJA was too small and support a push for spare infrastructure spending in a new version of the Build When Largest Act, which stalled in the Senate prior to the 2021 winter recess.
As new federal (and state match) spending shakes loose from the IIJA, savvy entrepreneurs will wield existing proptech solutions to create new infrastructure-related data sets and run analytics versus them, helping public- and private-sector actors capitalize on new project and investment opportunities created by this new funding environment.
I’m not entirely sure what this one will squint like. But with $500B in new federal spending on its way (although perhaps not until the second half of timetable 2022), there is a lot of opportunity here to redirect venture and human wanted out of the trenches of construction job site hardware, where so much of the contech worriedness has resided over the last few years.
The AEC industry leans nonflexible into blockchain tech; a major legacy player launches a cryptocurrency, a token, or an NFT that crosses $1B in market cap.
According to sites like cryptoslate.com, most of the tokens launched to stage that have some connection to transportation- and/or energy-related solutions are trading well unelevated $50M in market cap (with a handful of exceptions). The engineering brainpower and push for digital innovation within legacy AEC companies will icon out a way to capitalize on NFTs and/or the fledgling metaverse land grab.

Stephen: First, and as I’ll detail in my 2023 predictions without the holidays, funding from the federal infrastructure snout has been slow to roll out (for a variety of reasons). 2022 wasn’t the year for starchy infrastructure – but 2023 might be! So I’ll score this one a yank as plenty of funding opportunities for important projects opened up – it’s just taking some for the spigots to turn on. TIE.

Second, although there were some interesting new contech products that launched in 2022 (check out digital AECOM’s “PipeInsights” and “planEngage”) the kind of solution I envisioned last January when I made this prediction remained elusive. If Drew allows it, I’ll double lanugo here in 2023; I still believe that there is a big consumer-facing opportunity at the intersection of infrastructure, data analytics, and real estate. TIE.

Finally, I probably deserve increasingly than one loss for my contech crypto prediction disaster. While I’m still a parishioner in blockchain applications for our industry, I haven’t put a penny into my Coinbase worth in months, and this prediction feels like it came from a variegated world. UGLY LOSS.

Verdict: Like the Hartford Whalers opening a 1980s season in the NHL’s old Adams Division, I went a mediocre 0-1-2 with these predictions.

Overall 2022 Contech Prediction Score: 0-1-2

And with that, let’s turn the installment on 2022. Our “2023 Predictions” and “The State of the GEM” will come out without the New Year. Have a happy holiday season.

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