What Real Estate Giants Are Saying About Technology | Q1 2025 Edition

We listened to their quarterly earnings calls so you don’t have to

Thesis Driven dives deep into emerging themes and real estate operating models. This week’s letter is a quarterly overview of what publicly-traded real estate companies are saying about technology and innovation in their businesses.

Each quarter, some of the largest real estate firms in the world tell us about how they’re using technology in their businesses. And we at Thesis Driven listen, translating their quarterly earnings calls into analysis of how the biggest REITs are approaching technology, data, and innovation writ large. (You can read Q4’s roundup here.)

To do this, we sampled a representative set of the largest publicly-traded real estate businesses, including REITs and services businesses from the major food groups. Specifically, we covered:

• Essex Property Trust (NYSE: ESS)

• AvalonBay Communities (NYSE: AVB)

• Mid-America Apartment Communities (NYSE: MAA)

• Equity Residential (NYSE: EQR)

• Lennar (NYSE: LEN)

• Simon Property Group (NYSE: SPG)

• SL Green Realty (NYSE: SLG)

• Prologis (NYSE: PLD)

• CBRE (NYSE: CBRE)

• Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK)

• JLL (NYSE: JLL)

• Boston Properties (NYSE: BXP)

• Blackstone (NYSE: BX)

• Brookfield (NYSE: BN)

• Welltower (NYSE: WELL)

For each, we’ll give a brief overview of how technology was mentioned (if it was) plus a review of key innovation-related themes from this quarter’s earning calls.

Major Mentions of Tech and Innovation

Equity Residential

EQR remains my favorite read among REIT earnings calls due to executives’ willingness to discuss the role of tech at a higher level of detail than most firms. For instance, contrast MAA’s statements later on to this discussion of the role of AI from COO Michael Manelis:

“We are in the process of expanding the deployment of our conversational AI capabilities across the entire leasing journey. This, along with the broader strategic automation initiative, is designed to reduce manual tasks, accelerate leasing cycles, minimize errors, and ultimately improve our overall efficiency and scalability, all while improving the overall prospect experience.”

“By this time next year, we expect the process from the initial inquiry, the lease signing, to be almost entirely automating, giving our customers more self-service and the ability to work with our teams as much or as little as they choose.”

Manelis continued later on, describing the faster reaction time enabled by centralization as well as its impact on the renewal process:

“Our centralized processes and system transparency provides us with a powerful and immediate feedback loop to any potential shifts in conditions on the ground in our markets.”

“We have a pretty robust process that's centralized right now. So the minute that that notice kind of is going out into our resident portal, we're having constant communication with those residents trying to see if we can get kind of those early notices done or get a little bit of that kind of confirmation of their intent to renew with us.”

I’ve written a lot about centralization, but I’ve probably undersold the positive impact it has on reaction time in large operators. It’s just so much easier to see—and quickly react to—what’s happening operationally when functions are centralized.

MAA

MAA continued their recent trend of focusing heavily on tech, kicking off with CEO Brad Hill discussing centralization: