Investing In Real Estate Tech With Alon Gorbonos Of RE Angels

Real estate is now rapidly adopting new technologies to keep up with the fast-paced economic pressures and make their processes more cost-efficient. Alon Gorbonos joins Scott Kelly to discuss how RE Angels is focusing exclusively on early-stage real estate tech startups. He shares their experiences and insights as an angel fund at the intersection of real estate and technology, particularly as they navigate the rise of cutting-edge innovations such as automation and AI. Alon also talks about their team composed of seasoned real estate professionals who bring deep industry expertise and knowledge about one of the most exciting spaces to invest in right now.

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Investing In Real Estate Tech With Alon Gorbonos Of RE Angels

A few weeks ago, I got an opportunity to go to Blueprint in Las Vegas. It’s the conference basically talking about the technological advances in the construction and the property industry commonly known as ConTech and PropTech. I was fascinated by not only the technology that’s changing the industry, but the investors involved.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be doing a series of interviews with folks in a PropTech and Construction Tech space. In this episode, I have Alon Gorbonos of REVC. It’s a fund that’s focused on the intersection of real estate and technology. Alon explains that REVC invest in early stage startups, pre-seed, seed, up series A within the real estate ecosystem, specifically in PropTech, construction technology, and real estate fintech.

During the interview, he highlighted tech enabled services and that trend where technology is integrated into traditional real estate business to increase proficiency and profitability. He mentioned several successful companies which we’ll learn about during the show. He emphasized that real estate that is considered antiquated is now rapidly adopting new technologies to the economic pressures and the need to reduce expenses. Alon believes that the current market presents a generational opportunity for investment in real estate tech, which he knows is the second fastest going vertical in venture capital after AI. Give this great interview a read. We’ll be back with some key takeaways.

I’m excited to interview Alon Gorbonos of RE Angels. Alon, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Thanks for having me. It’s a big pleasure.

Alon Gorbonos’ Career Background And Journey

We got a chance to meet at Blueprint, which is a great PropTech conference that we both went to a couple weeks ago. I’m glad to get you on the show. Before we jump into what you’re doing at RE Angels, maybe share a little bit about your personal background. What were you doing before you launched the angel group?

To make a small correction, we are a fund rather than an angel group. While it’s small, it’s still very important both to investors and entrepreneurs. To your question, interestingly enough, I was an honor operator, an investor of real estate. I spent about a decade buying, renovating, and selling hundreds of millions of dollars of properties in the United States throughout the East Corridor, focusing on the Sunbelt area.

In 2022, I decided to distill all these experiences into where I believe is the next most interesting thing that’s going to happen, which is an intersection of real estate and technology. In my opinion, we are about to be tremendously disrupted in a positive way. A lot of value will be created. In some ways, it’s exactly where the financial market was for many years ago with the entire fintech boom that happened. I’m excited. You are not probably the best years.

All About RE Angels

Talk about the fund and the thesis. Where are you investing? How do you invest? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

By the way, we are raising our second fund which would be named REVC. It’s focused on, as I mentioned, the intersection of the real estate world and the technology world. Interestingly enough, where we are in 2025, both of those areas, tech and real estate coming from major dislocations. Anything that we see in the economy is cyclical. Both of those huge sectors on their own are coming into now, what probably will be a tremendous growth going forward.

Now, we are focusing on the early stage. Basically, founders and startups that are either pre-seed, seed or round eight. They’re trying to go after innovation and technology within the real estate ecosystem. We think about it a bit differently and the most common use term is PropTech. PropTech is doing a bit of injustice. PropTech is just part of the story but we’re investing in PropTech, which is technologies that are here to help you manage existing properties. Also, we invest in construction technology, tech and we also invest in the fintech of real estate. The embedded financial layer is probably the biggest asset class worldwide.

That’s awesome. Talk about where you see the trend. I’m going to talk about some of your investments in just a minute and some of the things you are. In terms of where you saw, you were at Blueprint. I was there, too. There were literally thousands of people there and hundreds of innovative companies. It seemed like there were just people doing a lot of different things in the space. Where do you see the leading trends in both PropTech, construction tech and fintech as it applies to real estate and construction?

Interestingly enough, within real estate, there is a notion of what I like to think about a stick and neighborhood services. You take a legacy trade or a legacy business. You manage to either scale it very fast or basically increase the profitability by integrating new cutting-edge technology into the back office of it. Let me give you an example. One of our probably most interesting companies in our portfolio is BestShare. You should check them out. They just finished raising a tremendous big A round. What they are doing is they are taking the traditional best control business.

With technology, they are integrating the supply to the demand of the real estate operators and taking something that part of my French is not sexy. Who wants to deal with this? They’re doing it in a very unique and interesting way. Taking margins literally quadrupling them from the traditional mom-and-pop way. That’s one of the transits we see. We also invested in similar concepts in house cleaning and in property management.

We are looking more to those types of ideas. The second one, which you can avoid. It’s AI, but within AI is how you take and you are basically integrating agents and artificial intelligence into the fundamental processes. Whether into a sales organization like a company of ours that we called Unity AI, or Spatial iOS. It’s integrating co-pilots into the design and the architecture like work processes or parsing, which is like integrating AI into the inspection of units when tenants move in and move up.

How RE Angels Chooses Its Founders

Thank you for sharing some of those. I may jump back to that in just a minute. You mentioned tech enablement as it applies to real estate and construction tech. What about the other side? You came in from a real estate background and now, you’re an investor in tech as it applies to real estate and PropTech. What are the attributes of the founders that you’re investing in? Are they real estate people that decided to build tech? Are they tech people that decided real estate was a good market? Who are these entrepreneurs?

That’s a great question. Honestly, there is no one answer to be a truthful or secret formula. For me, establishing REVC, I was a frustrated user. Financially, you’re doing well in real estate, but interestingly enough, from an operational point of view, it was a headache. It’s probably one of the most antiquated, backwards, lack of tech industries that are still out there.

What I’ve noticed and what I’m seeing in a few years, to your point, it’s not just real estate professionals that are trying to change the status quo. You see a lot of technology people. People that come from cyberspace and the cloud space and like the cutting edge AI. Realizing that the last low hanging fruit are in the real estate businesses. They are coming and that excites me as an investor but also excites the real estate user of trying to use this type of innovation.

How Customers Respond To Real Estate Tech Adoption

Let’s talk about the customers of these companies. You already mentioned construction, PropTech, and the real estate industry has been very antiquated for a long period of time. Now, they’re enabling the tech. How did they inspire the ultimate users to change their tried and true methods? Contractors aren’t into AI, at least not yet. Real estate agents are slow to adapt outside of what they do now. How do you see the customer adoption of these technologies?

A few years ago, it was a big obstacle because to your point, it’s hard to go to a contractor that has been working the way they are working for many years and saying, “From now on, I’ll start to do things differently.” If I may ask, how many times did you use ChatGPT in the last 24 hours? I think because the answer is multiple times. Every person in this value chain is being affected and expecting technology to come and help you.

Now, on one hand, you have that. On the other hand, you also have real estate as a whole that grew very much until it plateaued a few years ago and fundamentally. In order to create value in real estate, you can either increase a revenue site or decrease the expense. We can squeeze the lemon as much as we could on the revenue. The only way to create value is by reducing expenses. Technology is probably the best candidate to help you to reduce expenses while staying the same efficiency or even greater efficiency, so to speak.

To your point, you see a lot of end users asking for it or almost realizing it’s either adopted or becoming irrelevant. It’s almost like the analogy of the Kodak. If you remember the film like photography, the digital cameras. Real estate is getting it. Interestingly enough, I’m going to make a statement that might be a bit controversial. Real estate in 2024 became one of the fastest adopting of new technologies and solutions because they were so lagging. They now have much more appetite and also much more financial means to do so.

How RE Angels Is Investing Moving Forward

Let’s talk about how the economy impacts. Interest rates and other factors in the economy affect construction, rentals, and buying real estate, both residential and commercial. Where do you see that factoring into where you’re investing now and how you’re going to invest going forward?

I have a crystal ball to where the interest rate will be. I wish the situation was different. If anything, we saw the Fed reducing probably for the first time in a while. That’s my personal prediction. I think there would be more rate cuts to come considering the entire macro or economic and political conversation. To your point, we create a lot of interesting opportunities because the economy is getting better. There is more funds that’s going to flow into the real estate businesses.

It’s almost like the moment you reduce interest rate, the engines start to ignite. The moment they have more capital, they are feeling better about deploying tourism technologies. I think that goes hand in hand in my opinion with IPO markets slowly coming back. It’s also like backwards effects. The moment you have more technology IPOs, more proceeds and more capital is going back to the investors, the funds and can deploy into the private markets.

We talked about it even in Blueprint. The first half a year of 25 was very interesting in terms of M&As. We haven’t seen such a big amount of M&A activity in real estate technology for a while for a decade. Interestingly enough, while it’s not the classic exit that you take a company and publicly IPO it. You have the legacy players. The private equity is charging to buy the startups, the private companies into the hundreds of millions of dollars and like I get an investor excited because the duration from investment to an exit is shortening tremendously. That’s a very exciting time to invest.

Real Estate’s Rapid Tech Adoption

You touched on this other venture forums and private equity making acquisitions. What about the investment landscape? The other reality is, when I went to Blueprint, I was very new to PropTech. I’ve been investing and involved in all kinds of technology from SaaS and cybersecurity and everything else. Do you see the investors in PropTech and construction Tech being still a niche? Do you find other firms taking a look at it as something that they haven’t visited before but want to add another option to their portfolio?

That’s what I’ve been trying to say for years and now, it’s happening. I’m happy. I think it’s going to happen further extend. We did the proprietary research in REVC. We found out, believe it or not, that real estate tech is the second fastest growing vertical in venture capital after AI. It’s growing faster than cyber and faster than fintech. Now, I want to put a disclaimer. In absolute numbers, it’s still not the same but it’s going literally by 60% year over year.

It’s good you went to blueprint because up until a few years ago, if I would have told you as a general venture investor, “Do you want to go to this interesting conference about technology?” You’re probably looking at me and being like, “No. I have better use of my time.” Now, you are intrigued. You are going because you start hearing more and more about it. You see the generalist funds are poking into it more and more.

As time goes by, it’s slowly establishing itself into a mainstream vertical within the adventure capital ecosystem, even Blueprint. A few years ago, it was probably around 1,000 people and now we are close to 5,000 people, which is pretty much tremendous growth just from that conference but you see everywhere else as well.

Exploring RE Angels’ Two Funds And LPs

Let’s talk about the funds. Let’s talk about fund one first. Tell me who is the makeup of the LPs? Who’s investing alongside you?

Fund one by name can derive pretty much the answer to the question. It was named RE Angels or Real Estate Angels. The idea was to put together, including myself, a group of real estate professionals who are extremely passionate about this opportunity and also about being able to strategically help our founders. All our investors are coming with dozens of years of experience in the different verticals or value chain of real estate.

We have chairmans like multibillion dollar or multifamily operators, founders and partners of multibillion dollar credit funds in the brokerage business, the design engineering, the construction, and so on. The idea is to get experts in each field. If Scott is the best entrepreneur out there and he invested.

We are providing Scott not just capital, but also one click access to this breadth of knowledge of real entrepreneurs, meaning they know tech entrepreneurs, but each LP in our first fund builds from scratch their own real estate platform. Now, when the tech entrepreneur is talking with the real estate inputs, it’s like a very fruitful discussion because they can talk about what matters so to speak. That special sauce is proven to be very successful.

Let’s talk about funds too. How much are you racing in the fund? Again, what’s the makeup of the investors that you’re looking for in this fund? Also, what’s the makeup of the investments you’re going to make in this fund versus fund one?

In fund two, we are targeting $35 million that we want to close. The idea was to basically take the same concept that we’ve proven that it’s working in fund one. By the way, performance is over the charts in fund one. Taking that and now writing bigger checks but still keep the essence of being an early stage investor and helping our founders. Also, we are followers. We’re not leaders. To all founders that are reading this, when you are raising a round, we won’t lead a round. We’ll wait until you have a lead investor.

We will join as a strategic real estate partner to that round, whether it’s a generalist fund or maybe a real estate tech fund that you’re doing. Now in terms of the makeup of their investors, we’re still going to preserve our unique focus on real estate professionals. I believe also, we’ll have a big like broader audience or a broader scope of LP that are all financial allocators and professional investors that sees opportunity and want to monetize.

Why Choose RE Angels Right Now

Thanks for that. I like to ask this question to everybody on the show because I’ve spoken to potential investors in the fund like LPs, funds-the-funds, high net worth people. Why your fund and why now?

I can talk for hours.

We’ll give you fifteen more. How about that?

I was joking. In my opinion, first of all, why our fund’s performance in my opinion matters the most. If you look at our fund one performance, we are tracking top decile. Getting out of the 2022 vintage, that’s a very important factor. The distinction among other similar GPs or other venture capital firms. Also to that point, not only are models but real estate tech, as we spoke a bit before in this episode, in my opinion is the most interesting under the radar vertical by the general funds.

You have a generational opportunity to invest, in my opinion, what’s going to become very major and very mainstream and not too long. I’m talking about 2 or 3 years ahead of us. It’s specializing in those, in my opinion. It helps you to pick the needle in the haystack. We all are operators. We all understand real estate. We invest with very simple rules, Scott. When we look at the technology, we ask our LPs, do you think it’s a good one? Are you going to be a user? Are you going to pay for it?

Believe it or not, that basic fundamental is proven to be very right and very true. The moment that we know that our end users want to buy it, we want to invest in it. That helps us become very successful. Why us? There are very good venture capitalists in our field out there. We have an interesting edge but in general, you can’t go wrong investing in our vertical in my opinion.

Now Is The Time To Jump Into Venture Capital

I’m so glad you mentioned wanting to buy the product. Sometimes, you have to eat your own dog food to be engaged. I appreciate that feedback. What else do you want to share with our readers? Any final thoughts or ideas?

In general, we are now in probably one of the most interesting times in many years. Not only that, we are coming from a proudly tougher few years. The pace of innovation and how technology is now going to disrupt anything and everything has been before. It’s going to become faster, better and bigger. To any one of your readers, if you haven’t invested in venture in general. Probably now is a time. It’s going to be very interesting.

Also, because of that pace, we are changing the models or the playbooks. It’s no longer just a big billion-dollar VCs. Scott, to your points, investors like yourself, you lean and fast and smaller. Our problem is the one to win this new wave of innovation that is coming. I’m super excited. It’s going to be very fruitful to all of us.

Get In Touch With Alon And RE Angels

Where can people learn more about RE Angels or REVC and get in contact with you?

First and foremost, our website. It’s REAngels.vc. You can look it up in your portfolio and get in touch. We have a LinkedIn page also. We’re pretty active. Feel free to email us at Hello@REAngels.vc or Alon@REVC.fund. Any of those works.

Alon, thanks for being on the show. For those reading, make sure you like, comment, and follow this great interview. We’ve got more coming in the PropTech space. I’ve been inspired to interview more great PropTech investors like Alon. We’ll talk soon.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

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Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

The interview that I had with Alon had some interesting takeaways from the real estate industry and what’s happening. As he mentioned, it’s rapidly growing within the venture capital space. Honestly, before I went to the Blueprint conference, I knew very little about the space. It’s undergoing positive disruption, which is an area where there hasn’t been any change in decades. That technology advancement is creating substantial value for investors.

As we mentioned, he’s involved in PropTech, construction technology and real estate fintech companies. The industry’s secret appetite for this technology is driven by this need to reduce cost and increase profitability. Alon and others are in a key spot for destroying industry, but his fund, REVC, focuses on a strategic investment model bringing real estate professionals as limited partners to provide families with new experience in addition to capital.

That’s extremely valuable because you have an industry that’s been not technologically advanced for many decades and now is rapidly using technology to improve the opportunities to make money in the real estate space. We got some more great interviews coming up in this PropTech and construction tech space. Make sure you follow us, like, comment and share this show.

Important Links

• Alon Gorbonos on LinkedIn
• RE Angels
• RE Angels on LinkedIn
• Blueprint
• Hello@REAngels.vc
• Alon@REVC.fund