top of page

Property's Money Lives in New York. Its Biggest Names Live in LA.

6 hours ago
5 min read

If you want to raise money for a property technology company, you get on a plane to New York. If you want to become a famous name in property, you are probably already in Los Angeles. Two businesses, one asset class, and almost no traffic between them.


Twelve of the 25 founders on our Top 25 PropTech Founders list for 2026 live in New York City. On our Top 25 Real Estate Leaders list, drawn from the same cohort in the same year, three do. Los Angeles, which barely registers on the PropTech list, holds seven.


Here is why that should bother anyone who works in property. These are not two industries. They are two ends of the same one. PropTech sells the software, real estate does the deals, and both make their living from the same buildings. You would expect the people who matter in one to be in the room with the people who matter in the other. Instead they are not even in the same city.


Both groups earn their living from the same buildings. One lives where the money is. The other lives where the cameras are.

Two ends of one industry, 2,450 miles apart


The clustering is not subtle. New York holds almost half the PropTech list. Greater Los Angeles holds more than a quarter of the real estate list. Outside those two cities both lists thin out quickly: the San Francisco Bay Area is the only other place either one gathers in any number, and after that the names scatter one or two to a city.


One more detail worth holding on to. Every single founder on the PropTech list is based in the United States. On the real estate side there is exactly one honouree outside it, Tatiana Londono in Quebec.


One group needs capital. The other needs an audience.


PropTech founders sell software to institutions. Their customers are REITs, national brokerages, large landlords and lenders, and the venture capital that funds them sits in the same few postcodes as those customers. When your sales cycle and your funding round both run through people in Midtown, there is a powerful argument for being in Midtown yourself. The list reads almost like a seating plan.


The real estate leaders are doing a different job. Most of them have built public audiences: Josh Altman, Tracy Tutor, Jason Oppenheim, Josh Flagg, Mauricio Umansky, and Harris and Parnes are agents or brokerage principals with television careers behind their profiles. That work does not need proximity to capital. It needs cameras and the kind of listing worth filming, and Los Angeles has supplied both for twenty years.


There is a third explanation, and it is about us. Our selection leans on published commentary, media presence, speaking and peer recognition, and each sector produces those signals in its own way. A New York PropTech founder who closes a funding round is written up in the trade press within days. A Los Angeles agent who closes a landmark sale is filmed. Read that way, these lists map where each industry becomes visible, which is a narrower claim than mapping the industry itself and probably a more useful one, because visibility is what moves careers.


Even so, the oddity survives. An industry built on the same buildings has produced two separate rosters with almost no geographic overlap. The most defensible reading is that property is two career markets wearing one name: a capital market and a consumer market that happen to share an asset. People who rise in one rarely cross into the other.


This year is pushing them further apart


On the PropTech side, money is concentrating. CRETI counted $4.53bn across 231 disclosed rounds in the first half of 2026, down 0.6% on the same period last year, with a median round of $6.75m. The third quarter told the sharper story: $2.21bn was invested, of which the seven largest deals took roughly $1.28bn, or 58% of the total. When more than half a sector's capital passes through seven cheques, sitting near the people who write them stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a business plan.


Seed economics make the same point more quietly. MetaProp, a Manhattan firm and one of the category's defining early investors, puts the average priced proptech seed at $6.3m this year against $3.6m in 2022, with more than half of 2026's seed rounds at $5m or above compared with roughly a third four years ago. Larger seeds mean fewer and more institutional ones, and institutions cluster.


New York is also handing its founders a problem worth selling into. Cushman & Wakefield expect 9.5m sq ft of office-to-residential conversion to break ground in the city during 2026, more than double this year's volume and nearly twice the 2008 peak, helped along by the 467-m tax incentive and the City of Yes rule changes. A conversion is a construction problem, a leasing problem and an operations problem at the same time, which is exactly the sort of mess software gets bought to manage, happening on their doorstep.


Los Angeles is loosening its grip for the opposite reason. At Inman Connect in July the recurring argument was that AI has made content cheap to produce and so made the agent's own personality the scarce asset. One Compass agent on the panel described taking his LinkedIn following from around 200 to more than 7,000 inside a year. When the asset is a face and a point of view rather than a production crew, the case for paying Los Angeles rents weakens. Audiences can be built from anywhere.


So expect the two to drift further apart: PropTech's New York concentration tightening as capital consolidates, real estate's Los Angeles concentration loosening as distribution stops needing a studio. That is a forecast, and next year's cohort will test it.


What it adds up to


The distance between these two lists tells you something practical about building a career in property. Influence on one side follows capital, and capital still has an address. Influence on the other side follows an audience, and audiences no longer do.


So the advice splits. If you are building software for property, the network that matters is geographic and it is in New York. If you are building a name in property, where you live matters less every year, which is a newer state of affairs than it sounds and the thing we will be watching in next year's cohort.


Read next




Each year The Industry Leaders names the 25 most influential people in each of 25 industries. Selection rests on published commentary, media presence, speaking and peer recognition, and it cannot be bought. Figures in this piece were computed on 13 October 2026 from the Top 25 PropTech Founders 2026 and Top 25 Real Estate Leaders 2026 lists: 50 entries in total, 25 in each list, with a location recorded for all 50. They describe those two lists and no others.

bottom of page