Is your proptech solving a once-a-year problem?

Tech is rewriting commercial real estate exponentially. Most coverage is news - who raised what, who bought what. This newsletter covers physics. Structural forces. Patterns before they’re obvious. Atoms and bits. Subscribe for updates →

the physics

Uri Levine, the founder of Waze, tells a story about his earlier startup. It solved a real problem - filing tax declarations in Israel. Painful, complex, everyone hated doing it. The product worked. People paid.

But the company died.

The problem happened once a year. After tax season, users disappeared. Feedback stopped. The product couldn’t evolve because there was no continuous signal from the market. Levine’s takeaway was simple: the granularity of the problem determines the viability of the product. A huge problem that occurs once a year is a worse business than a small problem that occurs every hour.

Now look at commercial real estate. Funds are structured for 10 years. Reports are annual or quarterly. Transactions take months. Onboarding a new client means 12-18 months of conversations, education, and demos before a signature. My partner recently said we’re prop-tech, not tech-prop - and behind that distinction is the fact that everything in this industry moves in slow cycles.

This is the core challenge for anyone building software for CRE. The industry thinks in decades, years, and quarters. But if you want to build a product that grows, you need to find problems that happen in minutes and hours. The gap between the industry’s clock and the product’s clock is the reason most PropTech startups can’t scale.

the signal

We learned this the hard way. When the office market crisis hit - COVID, then hybrid work, then economic downturn, then AI reshaping space demand - we saw 70% of our 2025 churn tied directly to market conditions. The market was on fire, and when people are fighting fires, anything that isn’t essential to their daily work gets cut.

That’s the Levine test in practice. Quarterly reporting tools, annual benchmarks, nice-to-have dashboards - they were the first to go. Not because they were bad products. Because the problem they solved didn’t happen often enough to become indispensable.

So we shifted focus. Instead of building for quarterly decisions, we doubled down on the things CRE professionals need every working hour: searching for office and warehouse space, finding leasing manager contacts, getting quick answers on availability, checking vacancy rates. Small problems. Constant friction.

Over the last six months at REDD, we’ve seen daily active users nearly double. Not because of a single feature launch or a marketing push. Because we started solving problems with high enough frequency that the product became part of how people work - not something they check once a quarter when a report is due.

Frequency is the moat. When your tool is open on someone’s screen every morning, cutting it means going back to phone calls and spreadsheets that same afternoon. That’s a very different conversation than renewing an annual dashboard subscription.

the translation

If I had to pick one metric for an early-stage PropTech startup, it would be daily active users. Not TAM. Not ARR projections. DAU tells you whether you’ve found a problem with high enough granularity to build a business on. If your users show up once a quarter, you have a feature. If they show up every day, you have a product.

When we built for brokers and agents, we found exactly this. Every time a broker needed to check available space for a potential tenant, they were calling landlords manually. Phone, wait, follow up. Days to assemble a single offer. This wasn’t a quarterly pain - it was an hourly pain, and every active deal required it. One click to see all available spaces in a given location. Daily friction became daily value.

final thought

CRE thinks in decades. PropTech must think in hours.

The gap between those two clocks isn’t a bug to fix. It’s the central design challenge. The startups that close it will scale. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why such a massive market produces so little growth.