When Kyle Waldrep was in his final semester at SMU, he began interviewing for leasing positions in commercial real estate. With each meeting, he noticed that the industry and specifically, the leasing process, was ripe for optimization. After turning down a job at a large brokerage firm, he pursued this idea. He read, met, toured, and researched, quickly picking up on the pain points that leasing agents and asset managers dealt with every day. Simultaneously, Kyle became fascinated with workflow technology and took deep dives into tools used in other industries. By the Summer of 2018, Dottid was born with the vision to be the first workflow tool for commercial leasing and beyond in driving activity, communication, and efficiency into the process. Large, multi-party lease transactions deserved transparency and tools to enable people to do more with less.
From the start, Kyle developed a team of commercial real estate outsiders surrounded by a network of advisor/investor “insiders” to approach the problem with a different mindset. According to Kyle, “we are not trying to solve the problem with just another brokerage tool. We are building technology that adapts to the users’ best business practices to ensure alignment.” Dottid’s CTO, Senecca Miller, uses the Uber analogy to reference how this team is solving the problem: “Ride sharing always existed; just look at taxis. Uber created automation and a user experience second to none to enable ride-sharing to become one car away and one click away.” This is exactly how Dottid views lease transaction inefficiency: Simple, intuitive technology solving the problem by engaging teams, unifying disparate data and automating processes.
The LPC Team has been tracking Dottid since early 2020 when it began going to market with the first iteration of the platform. After seeing significant strides and market validation through customer pilots, portfolio rollouts and peer feedback, we began socializing it with our internal stakeholders involved in the leasing process. Initial feedback was very positive. The UI/UX of the platform was what initially stuck out to us. Dottid had done the legwork to get into the heads of the various the various contributors involved in the lifecycle of the leasing process; this was critical to us. Most other platforms who have seen success in the real estate technology sector were built by users for the users. Although Dottid was originally conceived by a soon-to-be college graduate, it was heavily influenced by would-be users, and it still is today. This has not gone unnoticed by just the LPC team: it has been continually reinforced through validation by their growth of customers and market traction and by other technology leaders in the real estate field taking notice. In particular the Altus Group (owners of ARGUS Software) struck a partnership agreement with Dottid in the summer of 2021.
By bringing Dottid into the LPC Ventures portfolio, we believe a very important tool has been added to the toolkit for our teams. Dottid proved to us that they could be a user-friendly workflow tool for the leasing process. That is who they are today. But, even more so, they sold us on the future of where Dottid was heading as reflected by the Altus Group’s involvement. While the journey continues to become the de facto asset management and leasing workflow & collaboration tool, we believe Dottid is on the right track. As they continue to build their product focused around user feedback and input, we intend to be at the forefront giving them the insight and direction needed to execute.