PropTech — short for property technology — is the application of information technology and software to the real estate industry, spanning home search, transactions, brokerage tools, and data and analytics.
The field matters because of what it sits on top of: real estate is one of the largest sectors of the economy, and for most of its history its core workflows ran on phone calls, paper, and local knowledge. PropTech is the layer of software that digitizes those workflows — listing portals, transaction management, mortgage and title technology, valuation models, and the data infrastructure that ties them together.
The first wave was consumer-facing. Portals like Zillow and Trulia put listings in front of buyers and built large audiences around home search. The more recent shift has moved toward the professionals: agent- and brokerage-facing tools like 📝RealScout, lead-nurture and collaboration platforms, and shared data infrastructure that surfaces real-time market demand rather than just static listings. In that framing, technology amplifies the agent's judgment and the brokerage's reach rather than disintermediating them.
This is my field. I spend my time making sense of the collision between technology and real estate — work that's been recognized through Forbes 30 Under 30 and the Swanepoel Power 200 — and I keep coming back to the same throughline: the agent stays the protagonist, and the software exists to make them better.