In this article Julien Pache, Venture Partner at Verve Ventures, spells out why there is an urgent need to invest in startups connected to real estate. This is also the goal of the partnership-based Constructive Venture Fund that enters its second phase soon.

Julien Pache- Verve Ventures
Julien Pache
Venture Partner

About the author:

Julien joined Verve Ventures in 2012. He has been building up the firm as part of the management and led the investment team for almost 5 years. He also managed Verve’s CVC mandates to invest in fin-tech and SaaS companies. In 2019, Julien joined Verve’s portfolio company Bring! as CCO. At Bring!, he led revenue growth, business development and strategy. In 2021, Julien came back to Verve Ventures as a Venture Partner. Julien holds a MA in Law from the University of Fribourg and spends his spare time on philosophy, gardening and doing sports in the mountains.

The largest asset class

As venture capitalists we debate market sizes a lot. Hence, we love situations where we don’t have to argue much and this is the case for real estate. In fact, it is the biggest asset class there is. Obviously the addressable market for a specific solution in the real estate market will inherently have limits: how many new houses can you build, how many real estate management companies can use this solution, etc. However, given the size of the built world, the addressable market for individual companies are most of the time large enough for venture scale outcomes. As investors, we like that. We like that a lot. Last but not least, the built world has experienced a very modest encounter with digitization and technology in the course of the last decades. To us this sounds like a large open boulevard for venture capital.

A dent in the course of our planet

Real estate drives approximately 39% of total emissions. Yes, you read that right: 39%! Given the urgency we face to fix the negative externalities of our economy, it goes without saying that reducing these emissions will make a crucial difference on whether we manage to keep our planet’s climate under control. Much more than money, we are talking about fixing one of the most important problems that this and the next generations are facing. If that is not a purpose worth pursuing, we don’t know what is.

Impact everyone’s life

Housing represents on average 20% of the income spent in EU countries. Sometimes much more. Moving the needle on these spendings by offering cheaper ways to own or rent property and build at the fraction of today’s costs will change life opportunities for a very significant part of the world’s population. Freeing disposable income from housing will allow people to expand their set of opportunities. We can’t be more excited to facilitate that by backing founders to bring solutions to largely democratize cheaper housing.

In short, we do it because transforming the built world will allow everyone to live better lives on our home planet. Quite simple.

Written by

Julien Pache

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