Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

There’s a question worth asking about most property data companies: does the data come first, or the business problem? On a recent episode of The Innovation Blueprint Podcast — ORIL’s series on emerging PropTech, hosted by ORIL’s CEO Roman Havrylyuk — that question sat at the center of a conversation with Ivo Draginov, co-founder and president of BatchService.

Ask a PropTech team how many systems their platform connects to and you’ll usually get a number they’re a little proud of. A typical platform ties into an MLS feed, a couple of CRMs, a payments provider, an e-signature vendor, and a scatter of data sources, yet it still converts and retains about the way it did a year ago. So the question worth asking about real estate platform integrations isn’t how many you can support.

For as long as there’s been a rental market, there’s been a version of this question: is the number on the listing actually the number? Ask anyone who’s built a pricing model, a forecasting tool, or a CPI estimate on top of rental data, and you’ll get the same answer — probably not, and there was never a good way to check.

PropTech teams sometimes plan an AI initiative by starting with the wrong question. They ask which model to use before they can answer a more basic one: is our property data ready for any of it? AI pilots may stall not because the models underperform, but because the property data feeding them is fragmented across MLS feeds, PMS records, and CRM exports, duplicated across sources, and missing the ownership, tax, and location context a model needs to reason.

Real estate teams have no shortage of software options. The real decision is which tools are worth the operational change they require. Digital transformation in real estate means using connected digital tools and shared data to automate manual workflows, improve the customer experience, and make decisions from real numbers instead of instinct.

When a PropTech product struggles, the issue usually isn’t the code. A skilled team can build the wrong thing well: a listing platform on a data model that buckles when the second MLS feed arrives, a CRM that ships to spec while agents quietly stop using it, an MVP that investors, agents, and end users each expected to do something different. That gap between what the business assumes, what users need, and what the architecture can support is what we mean by PropTech product misalignment.

Open a brokerage’s CRM instance a few years in, and it rarely looks like a sales tool anymore. Somewhere along the way, it picked up MLS feeds, transaction history, integration logic, reporting dashboards, and lately, the raw data behind a first AI pilot. None of that was the plan. Each piece got bolted on because the CRM was the system already sitting there. A CRM was built for a narrower job than that: logging a call, tracking a pipeline, managing the relationship an agent owns.

Most real estate and PropTech teams don’t struggle to see the value of analytics. They struggle to decide how far to go to get it. Do you build a real estate analytics platform from the ground up, or layer dashboards on top of the systems you already run? This is an expensive decision to get wrong. Built well, a custom platform becomes the backbone of how your company prices assets, prioritizes a portfolio, and reports to investors.

Your frontend can look flawless — fast search, clean filters, a map view that renders in under a second — and none of it will matter the day you connect your fifth MLS. Somewhere between the second and third regional feed, most PropTech teams hit the same wall: the code that worked beautifully for one market starts breaking in ways nobody predicted. A field that was always a number is suddenly a string. A boolean flag for “has pool” shows up as free text in the new feed.

At some point, every real estate or PropTech company hits the same wall: the tools that got you here aren’t the ones that will scale with you. The question isn’t whether to rebuild the stack — it’s knowing what you actually need before you spend money finding out.