Read our latest news round up on tech trends in cities, real estate technology, construction technology, built world fundraising news, and more.

Read our latest UrbanTech newsletter for industry news, funding announcements, real estate and construction trends, events, and more.

Dreamit UrbanTech Managing Director Andrew Ackerman gives his advice to founders in Propmodo about how to create a market size slide that will impress potential investors. Too often, founders present a top-down market size estimate that includes irrelevant pieces of the market and does not include any numbers related to product pricing. Investors have such low expectations from this slide that they often gloss over it during meetings and figure out the estimate themselves.

Real estate giants like JLL, CBRE, Newmark, and others are adapting to a new environment in which they are no longer the primary arbiters of market data in the commercial real estate sector. Tech companies with large transaction volume and innovative data collection methods are offering an alternative. In response, large CRE brokerages have diversified their businesses, rolling out advisory services for their clients and moving into areas like property management that are less cyclical than the data-dependent brokerage side of the business.  

According to a new report published by commercial real estate giant JLL, VCs invested $1.05 billion in global construction technology startups in the first half of 2018, a record high. The investment volume in 2018 is already up nearly 30 percent over the 2017 total. These construction tech startups are helping to deliver projects more quickly, to reduce wasted resources and materials, to make worksites safer, to increase coordination among stakeholders on project sites, and to provide new data sources for project leaders.