High Tech on the Low hosted by Jordan Kastrinsky, is on a mission to make high tech accessible to the world. In my podcast, I explore the many different facets of the world of high tech from development to marketing, to sales, to entrepreneurship and more! With society turning ever more towards technological solutions to make processes more efficient and secure, it is important, now more than ever, that we unite the high-tech sector's collective resources under one roof to reap the benefits of this knowledge-sharing. There is so much opportunity out there to grow within the industry that we must provide the tools through which to do so.
It is often the case that when growing a business, most entrepreneurs start with an area of expertise that they know. They are in content, so they start a marketing agency. They work in medicine, so they establish a medical device company that even fits their specialization. The list goes on. What happens, though, if you do not necessarily have the professional experience or expertise and still want to make a company in a given industry? Well, then you have to learn it.
Yariv Omer has a long career in tech, working in software development for many high-powered companies and ventures. So how did he get into real estate? After 10 years of talking with his childhood friend, Itay Goren, regarding the issues plaguing the real estate industry and namely the financing side of projects, he eventually took the plunge. As Yariv describes it, “I have a tech background, Itay lives in the states and has been in real estate for 20 years there, and Uri (Zror) has an extensive background in finances working with banks. So, I thought that the three of us were a good mixture of capabilities and backgrounds to build a data-driven company, for real estate, and also an investment house…it’s unique.”
Reigo Investments, the company that Yariv and his colleagues founded, is a real estate technology company reshaping the short-term real-estate debt market. The company developed a technology suite relying on data analytics and machine learning capabilities to improve project performance, reduce defaults, and cut underwriting time dramatically. “The goal was to create a data-driven, consistent way of improving the process and look at real-estate and how companies are underwriting it, to improve it,” Yariv adds. Currently, the industry does not rely on data-driven methods when it comes to real estate financing. Reigo comes into play in the real estate investment process when the investment committees come to decide on project viability.
“Today, the guys on the committees, they have experience. They understand the market. But changing the way they make their decisions to fit data is hard, but still, if they made a mistake once how will they know not to do it again? That is where we come in.” In Yariv’s view, the company is truly trying to change the way the real estate market functions. And while changing a traditional industry is not easy, the fact that he has learned the market from his colleagues has made him better suited to lead this change from the inside.
“I don’t come from real estate, but my team does, and I have learned from them and with them. And that’s how we know we are hitting a major pain point for the industry.”
