There is an industry in which you can end a board meeting without anyone asking: “What does the data say?”
For decades, the real estate world ran on intuition, connections and an “ear to the ground.” A manager who managed a tower in Tel Aviv knew what it was worth because he had managed towers for twenty years. The developer who acquired a complex in Berlin relied on a “gut feeling” he had built over decades. The asset was physical, the decision was human, and what was called “experience” was usually a duplication of yourself in an older version.
Then came PropTech. And with it, quietly and quickly, came the women.
Amalia Paz is a founding partner and manager of BRICKS Proptech Innovation, an Israeli innovation hub that connects large real estate companies with young technology startups. Before founding BRICKS, Paz served as CFO of public companies in Israel and abroad, including the role of CFO at Polar Investments and divisional controller at Vishay, which is traded on Nasdaq. She brought to the real estate world a language it hardly spoke: a language of data, risk management and M&A transactions.
When Paz presented the Israeli ecosystem to Chinese investors, she explained that “the conservative real estate industry is one of the last to implement innovative technologies, but this is a process that accelerated in the past year.” And Israel has a decisive role in this: according to BRICKS, the network includes about 150 Israeli startups in the field, connected to real estate players from many countries around the world.
What is interesting in Paz's story is not only what she built, but why she managed to see the need before others did.
PropTech, unlike traditional real estate, seeks to ask different questions: not “what is the property worth according to comparable transactions?” but “what does the data say about the tenants, about population mobility, about patterns of space usage?” This is a language that requires a willingness to dismantle assumptions. And someone who grew up on the language of finance and on running public companies arrives there with tools that traditional real estate never bothered to adopt.
Outside Israel, the pattern repeats itself.
Nikki Greenberg, an Australian who managed technology strategy at the global real estate company QIC, realized the industry would not change if the voices inside remained the same voices. In 2018 she founded Women in PropTech, a global organization connecting women entrepreneurs and investors in the field, with hubs in New York, Toronto and London. Greenberg, whose background is architecture and real estate development, argues that real innovation in the field requires sharing information across professions and across geographies, not only among people who grew up on the same palette.
Laura Hines-Pierce is a senior vice president at Hines, one of the largest real estate companies in the world. Under her leadership, she led capital raising of 6.6 billion dollars and a transaction volume of over 17 billion dollars. Hines-Pierce, a graduate in economics and art history from Duke and an MBA from Harvard, led innovation and sustainability initiatives as pillars of the company's business strategy. In a world where “big real estate” is almost automatically associated with the tough male figure in a dark suit, she is redefining the symbol.
Vanessa Butz founded District Technologies in London in 2017, a mobile platform for managing flexible workspace. The company provides services both to companies looking for office space and to property owners, out of a belief that technology should serve communities, not only transactions. Butz came from a background in design and community development, and such a seemingly “non-real-estate” background became an advantage her male competitors didn't know how to replicate.
Back to Israel.
In a conversation I recently had with a PropTech consultant who works with some of the largest developers in the Israeli market, she said something that stuck with me: “The men in the field ask ‘what is this property worth?’ The women ask ‘who will live here, and why, and what do they need that doesn't exist yet?’ It's not a nicer question. It's a question that leads to a better deal.”
She was right. PropTech is in essence a shift from the question of “what” to the questions of “why” and “who.” The data run by platforms like BRICKS don't only calculate value, they try to understand human behavior. Someone who was trained to listen to unspoken needs, to manage multiple expectations at once and to connect worlds that don't talk to each other, comes to this field with a built-in advantage.
PropTech sits at the intersection of real estate and technology: two fields with low representation of women to begin with. It is not surprising, then, that women make up only between 5% and 20% of PropTech founders worldwide. But precisely because of that, those who are there are there because they chose to break barriers, not because the entry path was open.
There is a nice irony in this: precisely the field considered “cold,” data, algorithms, analysis of masses of information, allows women to enter through the front door. Because someone who built a career in finance, management, design or analysis discovers that real estate is no longer a “closed club” that only those who grew up inside it can enter.
When I sit with developers who are building teams for international projects, I ask one question: who in this room asks questions you never thought to ask?
If the answer is “no one,” that is not risk management. It is a bubble waiting to burst.
PropTech did not set out to correct a social wrong. It simply opened a market that required different thinking. And the women who arrived there brought it.
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית