Reflecting on Seven Years Building a ResTech Company

September 28, 2026 by Donald Davidoff

About three weeks ago, I handed over the reins of CEO for REBA, the company I co-founded with Chris Brust almost seven years ago. To be clear, I’m not going anywhere…just changing roles in order to focus more on my passion — helping customers and prospects solve real operational and asset management problems. As Executive Chairman, I’ll have more time for customers and prospects, more time for industry leadership and more time to assess and write about key industry issues. 

This change has afforded me the opportunity to sit back a bit and reflect on these last seven years. Chris and I started REBA at the end of 2019 with a mission to change how the industry uses data.  

I’m proud of the impact we’ve had as the only company focused solely on a suite of analytics.  We’ve grown to more than 100 clients with many of them taking advantage of the entire analytics platform. Along the way, we’ve seen a sea change in industry attitudes and, of course, technology (insert obligatory reference to AI here 😊). Here are three key observations/lessons I learned: 

The industry is finally embracing data. I actually had the idea for REBA BI back in 2012 when I left Holiday Retirement. The capabilities that my then-colleague and now-partner Chris Brust and I (and team) created at Archstone by 2007 provided a compelling analytics capability. However, candidly, the industry wasn’t ready yet. The vision and understanding of how data drove improved NOI through “better decisions, faster” was not yet strong enough to overcome the pain most C-suite executives felt writing checks for software. Startups are hard enough to run without trying to fly straight into a massive headwind. 

Fast forward to REBA’s founding in 2019, and the industry was finally ready. An influx of youth and other tech was changing the dynamic. We still had to often explain to COOs and CEOs who never had good BI how those who did and changed companies immediately made BI and data their number one or two priority; but those messages were received in a much more positive light than back in 2012. 

And while it still happens, the need for those conversations is much more rare. It’s definitely shifted from whether to invest in data/BI to how to best invest in it! 

The Gartner Hype Cycle is alive and well. The biggest shift since REBA started is the aforementioned wave of AI in the “AC” world (“after Claude”) that hit us in early February. And very quickly, the industry jumped to “the peak of inflated expectations” with comments like, “Why do we need a BI vendor. Claude will do it.” We even heard the odd comment about how maybe an operator could just build their own pricing system with Claude. 

There’s a couple challenges with this approach. Aside from the growing realization that “AI ain’t cheap” as companies see the cost of their token spend, there’s the reality that Claude (and AI in general) doesn’t change the “garbage in, garbage out” rule nor does AI have industry domain expertise. 

Thankfully, the metaphorical pendulum is already swinging back to where it belongs (in Gartner speak, folks are already starting to enter the trough of disillusionment). In a preview of a blog I’ll be writing next week, I fear that owners and operators risk trading out “Excel Hell” for “AI Hell.” The former happens when four different Excel-based reports/dashboards have five different occupancies. The latter happens when four different AI agents have five different occupancies. We’ve already heard executives complain about how turning Claude loose among their associates and transactional systems’ data has led to a variety of numbers none of which match their existing BI. 

That’s why all the Gartner, HBR, McKinsey and other articles on AI stress the importance of governed, cleansed data as the basis for good agents. It’s why McKinsey’s head of global real estate practice quickly answered the question, “Build, buy or partner?” with “you should do all three” on a recent Willy Walker webcast. And it’s why REBA’s mantra is “Buy the Foundation. Build your Advantage^SM.” 

Which leads to the other big reason that trying to build everything yourself is not the best strategy. 

Tech is important, but operators aren’t tech companies and shouldn’t try to become ones. I recently blogged about an executive who talked about how surprised they were to find that they were now running a tech company; and how that framing seemed insightful until I realized that they were thinking about it all wrong. They’re not running a tech company…they’re running a tech-enabled company, and the difference in those two paradigms leads to very different prescriptions for running their business. 

• The skills and processes (i.e. the operating platform) to run a great real estate company are practically orthogonal to those of running a great technology company. It’s virtually impossible to be great at both 

• Real estate companies don’t offer anything near the same career path to technology and/or data science associates. They can’t compete for the best talent nor, if they get good talent, hang on to those associates the way technology companies can 

• There’s little IRR in solving problems that have already been solved. Operators and asset managers have limited technology and data science resources, so why apply those to creating (and owning the technical debt for) foundational metrics and data model? Those resources have a “best and highest” use creating the custom agents, dashboards and reports and linking the foundational data model with unique, proprietary data that truly builds a company’s advantage. 

And to close my reflections, here are three more general personal/business lessons I’ve learned: 

• CEOs have one, and only one, key responsibility. It’s not people; it’s not technology; and it’s not financing. Well, really, it’s all the above because the best thing a CEO can do is to create and maintain optionality…in each and every area of the business. 

• Tech can change; culture lasts. On February 6, we all experienced how the release of Claude 4.6 rocked our world. Overnight, AI went from emerging tech to foundational building block. I’ll admit it…I was scared. Did everything we’d been doing for 6+ years at REBA now amount to nothing? Were we dangerously close to the “floaty chairs” from Wall-E? Rather than panic, I thought about REBA’s core values and culture. It wasn’t our tech or product that made us successful; it was our capabilities and approach. Those values, and the culture we built, will last well beyond any evolving technology change; and that is what has allowed us to chart the path where AI becomes an advantage for us, not just a threat. 

• Time is the precious resource, not money. I actually remember reading this many years ago in some book on business, and it couldn’t be more true in my REBA experience, we never were at a loss for finding money. Good ideas can always be funded. There’s always a Note, a loan or an equity offering if you’ve proven market fit. But we only have 24 hours in each day, 7 days in each week and 52 weeks (plus a day) in each year (ok, plus 2 days in a leap year 😊). Where each associate chose to put their time was much more dispositive in our success. The best thing each of us can do to be more valuable (in both our personal and professional lives) is to be purposeful in choosing where and how we spend our time. 

It’s been an amazing seven years for the industry, for REBA and for me. I’m so excited for what these next seven years will bring as well!