Proptech providers spend a great deal of time talking about where the real estate industry is headed. Roadmaps fill conference agendas, product announcements promise transformation and new technologies arrive at a steady pace. Yet one question is rarely asked often enough: how closely do those narratives align with the priorities of the people actually responsible for making technology work inside real estate organizations?
To better understand that perspective, MRI Software recently interviewed senior technology and strategy leaders across commercial real estate. Participants included the CIOs of Urban Edge Properties and Hill Management Services, the chief strategy officer at Cherre, and the group vice president and global head of product at CBRE Property Management. Rather than surveying opinions at scale, the goal was to capture more candid, experience-driven insights from the leaders who sit at the center of day-to-day technology decisions.
Several interviewees framed today’s challenges less around systems and more around information.
“Previously, tech debt meant investing in infrastructure and enterprise application modernization,” said Tama Huang, chief strategy officer at Cherre. “Today, tech debt means data debt.”
While each organization operates in a different context, several consistent themes emerged that highlight a gap between how technology is positioned and howit is actually experienced by those who use it.
One of the most striking takeaways is that software itself is rarely the greatest obstacle. That honor belongs to data. Across conversations, leaders repeatedly returned to issues of data quality, integration, governance and accessibility. In many cases, technology investments stall not because tools lack functionality, but because the underlying data is fragmented or unreliable. Tech debt, in other words, is increasingly being reframed as data debt. Without a clear strategy for how data moves across systems and teams, new applications struggle to deliver meaningful value.
The focus on data also explains another common view: resilience comes from integration, not accumulation. Real estate tech leaders expressed frustration with environments built around loosely connected point solutions.
While individual tools may solve discrete problems, they often create additional complexity when stitched together. Leaders described greater confidence in platforms that reduce friction between systems and allow workflows, insights and controls to span departments.
From Huang’s point of view, “Systems must speak to each other — IT cannot be the middleman anymore.”
Several leaders pointed out that fragmentation has real downstream consequences, from slower decision-making to increased operational risk. When data is split across multiple systems, teams spend more time reconciling information than acting on it. Reporting becomes reactive instead of timely, and confidence in insights erodes.
In response, many organizations are prioritizing environments where systems are designed to work together by default rather than relying on custom integrations to bridge gaps after the fact. Platforms that enable shared data models, consistent governance and interoperable workflows allow technology teams to spend less time maintaining connections and more time supporting the business. For leaders under pressure to do more with leaner teams, reducing integration overhead has become as important as adding new functionality.
In an industry facing ongoing cost pressure and operational risk, simplification has become a strategic advantage.
The true drivers of innovation were another area where expectations diverged from common narratives. Several respondents emphasized that technology investment and adoption should not be viewed as primarily reactive to economic cycles or disruption. Instead, they described it as an ongoing discipline.
Cecilia Li, CIO of real estate investment trust Urban Edge Properties, said that innovation efforts take place regardless of market conditions.
“Our need for innovation and technology continues to advance not because of market shifts, but because we are continuously seeking ways to drive efficiency and reduce spend,” Li said.
Market volatility can accelerate certain decisions, but organizations that tie technology strategy solely to downturns risk falling behind. Continuous investment in efficiency, automation and insight was described as a prerequisite for staying competitive, not as a discretionary response when conditions worsen.
Several leaders noted that waiting for economic pressure before modernizing often creates more disruption than progress. Deferred investment tends to compound complexity, making eventual change more expensive and harder to manage. By contrast, incremental improvement allows organizations to adapt without overwhelming users or introducing unnecessary risk.
This approach also shifts how success is defined. Rather than asking whether a technology is innovative in isolation, leaders increasinglyfocus on whether it improves consistency, scalability and decision-making across the organization over time.
As organizations grapple with fragmented data environments, expectations for software are changing alongside them. “Data will continue to play a big role,” Li said. “Software solutions will be expected to provide built-in AI capabilities in order to stay competitive.”
Artificial intelligence, unsurprisingly, featured prominently in the discussions, but not in the way many headlines suggest. While none of the leaders dismissed AI outright, there was clear skepticism toward inflated promises. When asked if they were tired of hearing tech providers talk about AI, a few respondents exclaimed, “Absolutely — make it stop!”
The reaction was less about skepticism toward the technology itself and more about fatigue with exaggerated claims. Leaders emphasized that AI has a role to play, but only when it is applied thoughtfully and transparently. In their view, trust is built when AI capabilities are clearly bounded, well-governed and aligned to everyday workflows, instead of being positioned as a cure-all.
AI, in their view, should be judged by outcomes rather than novelty. If it reduces manual work, improves decision quality or removes friction from daily tasks, it earns its place. If not, its sophistication is largely irrelevant. The message to providers was simple: explain what problem AI solves, how reliably it does so and how it fits into existing workflows. Joe Stokes, group vice president and global head of product at CBRE Property Management, said AI has shown promise when it delivers practical value.
“AI has accelerated our decision-making and enabled a level of self-service not previously available,” Stokes said.
That same pragmatism extended to how success is measured more broadly. Rather than focusing on the technical complexity of a solution, leaders consistently pointed to adoption as the real benchmark. Technologies that employees struggle to use, avoid or work around ultimately fail regardless of their capabilities.
Ease of adoption, intuitive design and alignment with real-world processes matter more than feature depth alone. In practice, this places a greater burden on providers to understand the day-to-day realities of their users, not just their strategic ambitions.
Several leaders emphasized that reliability and usability matter more than sheer breadth of functionality. John Hall, CIO of Hill Management Services, said the proliferation of features often comes at the expense of consistency.
“It’s more important that available features work properly than to have many features that sort of work,” Hall said.
Taken together, these insights offer a useful course correction for both proptech companies and their clients. For providers, the findings reinforce the need to spend less time projecting visions of the future and more time validating assumptions with users. For owners and operators, they highlight the importance of approaching technology decisions through the lenses of data readiness, integration and organizational change, rather than chasing isolated innovations.
Across interviews, one theme remained constant: effective technology strategy starts with listening. When providers understand how systems are used (or avoided) inside real estate organizations, expectations become clearer and outcomes improve. The distance between vision and execution narrows.
Ultimately, the gap between provider narratives and user expectations is not a failure of ideas, but of alignment. When technology leaders listen more closely to those responsible for executing strategy on the ground, the result is not just better software, but more resilient real estate organizations.
