Field Notes from the Best "Tech" Conference in the West (*Cough* It Was a Real Estate Conference)

I sat down with Adam Preski after he got back from IMN's Real Estate CFO & COO Forum West in Newport Beach, and the first thing he said (before I'd even hit record) was that the whole thing felt more like a tech conference than a real estate conference. 

He wasn't wrong. Of the dozen-ish panels Adam sat in on at the Pendry, every single one circled back to AI and data, regardless of the stated topic. The property tax session? It was about how AI parses tax documents. The COO panel on internal operations? Automating PTO policies and corporate handbooks. The asset management panel? Same conversation, different chairs. 

"I never heard cap rates mentioned once." 

For a 15-year commercial real estate veteran, that is a notable thing to walk away from a real estate conference saying. 

A quick word on Adam 

Adam spent the bulk of his career on the other side of the table from the people he now sells to. He started as a project analyst at a DC developer in the mid-2000s — underwriting new development deals, riding around in cabs with rolled-up blueprints — until Lehman Brothers had its little hiccup and…. 

He has a moment from that era he tells like a Michael Lewis paragraph. He was in a cab on the way to a job site, where his firm was selling one-bedroom condos for about a million dollars apiece. As they drove through the luxury section of DC, the cab driver started pointing at buildings: I bought a condo there. And there. And there. Adam remembers thinking, hm, something seems a little off here. 

Two years later, the music stopped. 

After that he did asset management at a multifamily owner-operator, then spent years in capital markets, raising equity for new development and refinancing apartment portfolios on the agency side. He was a multifamily banker covering Freddie and Fannie deals when COVID hit in 2020, and his entire book dried up overnight. 

Like so many others, he switched to tech, because — as he put it — he'd "seen enough volatility on the ownership side" and wanted to go do something more stable, like startup technology. 

He is in on the joke.  

The conference 

Adam's read of the room: every CFO and COO in real estate now has an AI policy, or knows they're supposed to. Every company is exploring AI in some functional pocket of the business. Claude and OpenAI are generally the platforms people are using. And the questions that came up in panel after panel to the point of polite exhaustion by day two was some variation of the same loop: Buy or build? Who owns it? Where do we start? 

The most popular answer, very helpfully, was “just start somewhere”. 

"There does seem to be a bit of fatigue in terms of where to even begin. We're real estate people. We're not technologists." 

The room, Adam said, gets that the technology is here, and that competitive pressure means doing something. What the room doesn't have is a playbook. So companies are doing what companies do: taking an asset manager or a senior associate and asking them to "figure out the AI thing," on top of their actual job. 

By his account, one panelist mentioned that every single candidate they'd interviewed for an open asset manager role had asked what the company's AI policy was. Which means it's not just a market edge anymore. It's a hiring edge. A culture edge. An everything edge. 

The part that's a little sad (IMO) 

Here is the line from Adam that stuck with me. He said it almost in passing: 

"Real estate is hard right now. NOI is down. Rents are flat. Deals don't pencil. So there's this weird excitement that this new technology is going to give us this secret sauce we somehow didn't have access to before." 

You can see the shape of it from a mile away. A beaten-up industry meets a hyped-up technology, and the technology starts to feel like a lottery ticket. 

This is the same energy I keep clocking everywhere right now in my Apple News feed. Things don’t seem great anywhere you look so we want GLP-1s. Whichever wellness shortcut your group chat is currently obsessed with (spirulina???) New jobs. Mini-facelifts. In other words: People are tired. People want a silver bullet. Real estate is just having its turn at the front of the line. 

The whole thing has a faint COVID-toilet-paper-hoarding quality to it (remember that?). I'm not sure I need this thing. But everyone else is grabbing it. So I'd better grab it too. 

On the conference industrial complex 

One more thing worth saying about IMN specifically. Adam went to IMN events ten years ago. Back then, he says, the room was roughly 65% buyer and 35% vendor. This year, the math has flipped, hard. The Pendry's main floor was two rooms of booths with a comparatively small conference room tucked in behind them. The actual content, in plate-portion terms, was the side dish. 

The owners, Adam thinks, have caught on. They're not showing up in the same numbers, which leaves a lot of vendors networking with each other — a sentence that should not need to exist, and yet. 

The take-home 

If there's a lesson buried in all of this, Adam said it best at the end of our call, and I'm going to give him the last word: 

"People want to be advised right now. They want to be consulted. They want to be heard. They don't want to be sold to. Offering something that doesn't look like everything else out there is valuable but — be a little more advisory, be a little more helpful." 

That's the assignment. 

Less power-hosing buyers with another vendor deck. More writing them something closer to a love letter, or at least an honest acknowledgment of what it actually feels like to be the person in the seat right now. The person that’s just trying to make the right call with a hundred conflicting voices and a tightening market and a board breathing down your neck about an AI policy you haven't written yet. 

The conference may have been a tech conference in disguise. But what it surfaced is a deeply human problem.

We're going to keep working on that part. 

Adam Preski leads sales in the West at symmetRE. If you were at IMN CFO & COO West and want to keep the conversation going, you can grab time with him here.