To help us understand innovation in today’s real estate sector, we asked George Carras, Founder and CEO of R-LABS Canada, to share his innovator’s journey in real estate and discuss how technology can help improve our industry’s future.
Over the course of my 30-year career in real estate, I’ve had an amazing, first-hand experience in leading our industry in innovation using technology. I founded RealNet Canada during the early 1990s when the real estate sector was mired in distress and lacked the oxygen of timely, accurate market information. While today’s technology is exponentially more powerful than it was in my early RealNet start-up years, technology wasn’t the story then and isn’t the story now. The story is about people and the story is about you – my fellow innovator and we need your help here below.
When I look back on our RealNet journey, the one thing that stands out for me was our ability to mobilize our community around a problem: “The Better Decision”. Technology alone didn’t enable better decisions; it was the dedication of a small group of innovators that grew through word-of-mouth. We created a community of more than 40,000 people over 20 years, all coming together to share information in a trusted platform to achieve a common goal of better information through collaboration. Technology enabled the outcome, but it was the people who made it happen. In the same way, “PropTech” today is not defining the innovation in our industry – it is our industry innovators who are defining PropTech.
I’m very excited to be with you and our other fellow innovators in the R-LABS Innovation Community and I know our journey together will be more powerful and fun with more innovators. If you know another innovator who should be a part of our community, please invite them to join us on our journey. The future is ours to create.
