“Start building the basis for your long-term over-performance and operational efficiency today.” - Benjamin Günther - Founder Series #7

Benjamin Günther is the CEO and Founder of Alasco.

Alasco is the only integrated solution for financial and sustainability management tailored to real estate asset managers, owners, and developers—empowering over 300 leading firms like Hines, Invesco, and Patrizia to plan and execute high-impact sustainability strategies, optimize CapEx, and drive profitable, future-proof investments through its platform.

Before founding Alasco, he was the CEO and Founder of Stylight, Europe’s leading fashion aggregator, which was successfully sold to ProSiebenSat.1. He also served as a board member at Personio, the leading HR and recruiting software for small and medium-sized businesses in Europe. As a Founding Angel Investor at regulate and a member of Founders Pledge, Benjamin combines entrepreneurial success with a commitment to impactful, tech-driven innovation.

Tune in to this session to gain insights into:

• How to quantify the ROI of ESG investments;
• Why data-driven sustainability planning reduces unnecessary CapEx;
• How regulatory changes like the Omnibus Directive are shaping asset management strategies;
• How AI is being practically applied in real estate for tasks like document handling, budget tracking, and predictive risk management;

And so much more!

Interviews with inspiring Founders, Investors, and Real Estate Executives will be shared weekly on this podcast series - follow the PropTech Talks interview series and stay tuned!

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-maltzoff/

Transcript

00:00:00 Matthew Maltzoff
 Welcome everybody to another episode of PropTech Talks where we talk with successful proptech entrepreneurs, investors, real estate executives about the modern nuances of the real estate industry and what to do about them. We're here with the CEO and founder of Alasco, he goes by Benjamin. It's great to have you, Benjamin. Welcome to the podcast.
 
 00:00:24 Benjamin Guenther 
 Thank you, Matthew. Thanks for having me.
 
 00:00:27 Matthew Maltzoff
 Cool. I'd love to learn a little bit about you because you have quite an interesting story so far, I believe, and I don't know too much about it. I'm just staring at it thinking this is pretty cool. Tell me, how did you actually come to found Alasco? What were you doing before? Tell me about it.
 
 00:00:50 Benjamin Guenther 
 Basically I'm a tech founder for the last 20 years. Started off in a totally different industry, which was fashion e-commerce where we solved like a huge problem in fashion search that basically the shirt that I'm wearing is pretty hard to find online. So basically we used technology, machine learning to extract information out of pictures. So what's the exact colour of the shape and little details that we could make fashion comparable across multiple shops. And on the other hand we expanded into 15 countries with offices in Munich, London, New York and scaled around the world. So totally different industry but a very strong tech focus that we laid out. And basically the value or the USP of the company laid in real time controlling. So we were really efficient in finding out where to spend the next marketing dollar. Is it Gucci Tres in Italy or Adidas sinker in Australia? And this is where our kind of also passion of tech enabled real time controlling evolved. And we scaled the company for eight years and then decided to sell the company to a media company. And we had kind of the situation that we could think what do we really want to do in life? Because to be honest, like when I'm old, I don't want to tell my grandchildren that I've improved the search for fashion by five seconds in average. That was not like a legacy that I would be proud of. Basically I did two things after the exit. The first one was investing in startups as a business angel and I was lucky to get into Personio, an HR system that scaled to multi billion dollar company in the meantime. So I helped them out a little bit at the beginning, was on the board for the first three years and it's a B2B software so I really fell in love with B2B. So because here you can basically ask your customers what their problem is and solve it with tech and software. That was something that I was pretty passionate about. And the other thing is that I started a real estate company. So we became developer slash asset managers, buying office buildings, doing renovations, refurbishments and flipping them afterwards. And here like coming from a tech perspective and tech background, I was not really impressed by the amount of data that I could that I had access to to make a decision on in a transaction. I'm not really impressed by the software that was available to help us in operating the real estate company. And so these were all the different things that came together and dragged us into starting Alasco because it's kind of the ‘best of’ of these different adventures. It's real time controlling for the real estate industry as a B2B offering. And I'm always saying we -- so in the first company we were four founders and I started Alasco with two of them now seven years ago.
 
 00:04:21 Matthew Maltzoff
 Fantastic. One of the, a common trait that I've spotted a few times is what, what I'm now thinking is like the truest form of entrepreneurship, which is where you're doing something yourself and then you see a problem and you think this is quite annoying, I'm going to fix this for myself and then also just build a business out of this, which is really exciting. So going from a very different model and you even mentioned the tech enabled component, the system you actually built internally is what enabled you to set to solve that problem. In the fashion industry. What is, what would you say is the main difference between let's say these sort of Internet, sort of these Internet scaling companies, I guess B2C if I'm understanding it correctly. And now these are more B2B SaaS type company. How do the two differ for you?
 
 00:05:20 Benjamin Guenther 
 I think the approach is really fundamentally different because in B2C it's all about website optimization because it makes a difference if the ‘go to shop’ button has a dark green or a light green colour whatsoever, if it has soft edges or not. These are all the things that we could test on scale for basically behaviour that nobody can express. Because I can't say that I like this colour more in an online shop than that. In B2B, it's totally different. You can really dig deep into the mind, the experience, the problems, the challenges of a customer and then seeing what can I solve with tech, like putting different things together, developing something and how can I solve these problems with software? I think a common theme that both have in common is basically usability. If you look at our software, we really focus a lot on usability because I mean real estate is so fragmented and many people work together in Alasco without having an onboarding. Which means that we try to make it as easy as possible to increase the adoption of multi stakeholder platform like ours within the projects or the assets and so on. It has to be easy that people use it. And this is true for B2C as well as for B2B.
 
 00:06:55 Matthew Maltzoff
 Interesting. How has being an investor changed you as an entrepreneur, if at all?
 
 00:07:04 Benjamin Guenther 
 Basically it dragged me back to becoming an entrepreneur. So in these two years where I had the gap and very sitting on boards, I was came to the point where I felt like basically I want to present, I want to be in the arena and build something and build something up and not only give advice from the sideline, but also from an investor perspective. Also in real estate. I think it's a very valuable information to be in the shoes of your customers to really say, okay, I have this data here, I have benchmarks here, now I need to make a call with my own money. And that was super exciting for us because at the end there's still not 100% certainty in any kind of investment and managing this uncertainty and make a decision based on that, that's I think is the exciting part.
 
 00:07:57 Matthew Maltzoff
 Fantastic. What would you, I guess moving more towards the real estate industry, what would you say is the main problem to solve today?
 
 00:08:09 Benjamin Guenther 
 I mean it's, we're now in a situation of kind of a perfect storm. We’re just coming a  bit out of the recession. Everybody's praying that we've reached the bottom. Which means that usually it should be a focus on the build up again and there are now more macro effects that people have to handle. There's of course back and forth with the ESG and sustainability. So it's so many moving tiles are parts at the moment that makes it really difficult. And I think on top something that we see a lot is that over the last two years many teams got smaller, the teams are reduced and now when they start to basically restart going on the market, they run into capacity gaps. So efficiency is a big topic. How to basically build up your real estate team for the next era. That's I think the common theme that we see.
 
 00:09:10 Matthew Maltzoff
 Moving a little bit to sustainability. We noticed at Investment Expo you talked about unifying sustainability with financial management to drive exit liquidity. What does this concept actually mean in practise by asset managers? How do they tie that exit liquidity, the ability, the ability to exit at higher valuations. How do they tie that into sustainability?
 
 00:09:38 Benjamin Guenther 
 Yeah, I think most of the market already understands in theory how a green building can boost exit liquidity, but we really focus on making that measurable and actionable. So there are green premiums or avoiding brown discounts that have a direct impact on asset pricing. The demand for green or demands of tenants improve the leases and reduce vacancy risks. And of course targeted CapEx investments that are tied to ESG outcomes. They lead to better maintained assets, fewer backlogs, stronger exit story. But I think that the challenge is that not every ESG investment pays off equally. So from an ROI perspective, there's a clear limit on how much ESG investment makes sense in every single building and it's different for every asset in your portfolio and also changes over time. This is exactly where we can come in with Alasco. So we try to fill the strategic gap, helping asset managers define the right sustainability strategy for each building based on its financial context and decarbonization potential. And this is yeah, where where we've built the first fully integrated ESG and financial management platform, which means that we cover the whole journey, not only single parts of it. Because right now we see many have did analyses of your portfolio or assets and now have deducted one decarbonization plan. But then you need to weave that into your CapEx plan that you already have. And so this is why you really think about this process end to end and thus connect ESG with the financials and the business plan of an asset.
 
 00:11:44 Matthew Maltzoff
 It's interesting because in what might be effective in one market might be very different in another. In the UK, I mean, in a lot of places HVAC systems seem to have quite a profound effect and pay themselves off quite quickly. In the UK now we're seeing efficiencies with water being able to pay itself off quite quickly. So you know, now you're working with a number of clients also being I suppose a client to Alasco. You know, we're hearing many investors struggle with measuring the financial return on ESG investments. Can you share an example of where sustainability measures directly increase property value?
 
 00:12:33 Benjamin Guenther 
 Sure. I think it's still a common challenge also because I mean there are not so many transactions that prove the final impact on sustainability and it's hard to assess what is a micro effect on the price, what is a sustainability effect. That's why we try to make it as tangible as possible for customers. And one story that pops up to my mind is a case study that we've just released with a customer KAURI CAB plus 1 billion assets under management based in, based in Berlin. So they were planning, they did all the analysis for the portfolio and were planning for one building and 1.2 million ESG investment but after they've realised the data in Alasco and they actually discovered that the building was already CO2 neutral. So as a result they reduced the planned investment to just 200k saving a million in CapEx while still hitting their sustainability goals. And we think this is just one use case or example throughout the whole customer base. We always see two kinds of effects. One are short term so operational improvements like energy optimization of course cut CapEx this can boost NOI and creates the leverage to renegotiate leases or increase rent. And then of course it's about the mid to long term view to help avoid brown discounts which is crucial in today's market.
 
 00:14:05 Matthew Maltzoff
 And it almost felt overnight everybody was talking about green premiums and I don't know if some magic went around the air and then it was all brown discounts. What is your take on the way that the market views sustainable investments, future proofed assets, future proofed portfolios and where do you think that, that that sentiment is actually going?
 
 00:14:34 Benjamin Guenther 
 I think the, the market becomes more and more educated about it. So a couple of years ago we were always joking that the ones that understand ESG are now selling to those who don't and I think this has really changed. So if you look at transactions where customers use our product we see that everybody is well informed already. So because the seller is informed, because you want to know what's, what kind of demands will come from the buyer in terms of ESG optimizations and then the CapEx plan. The banks are better prepared assessing that the ESG score of a building when they, when they check the loan for it and also the buyer will definitely make their own ESG dd. So this is where it's so deeply integrated in market that now I think just the level of professionalism around sustainability has increased. That's why sometimes it was a green, a green plus on the price and now it's people start talking about a brown discount.
 
 00:15:45 Matthew Maltzoff
 And from a regulatory perspective we previously had a number of to in fact still do have a number of regulatory bodies to pay attention to. And now with Omnibus in theory this means that taking action toward, taking let's say productive action towards some sustainability goals should be simpler in practise. Do you believe, do you believe that Omnibus will, will allow asset managers to I guess move more productively towards it will have a little bit more guidance and a bit more direction. How do you feel the compliance landscape is evolving?
 
 00:16:33 Benjamin Guenther 
 Yeah, I think when, when we look at regulation around ESG and reportings and so on, we see that there's always uncertainty over the last two or three years. Which benchmark is the one that everybody, that the market agrees on, what gets pushed in by regulators and so on and so on. You basically need a weekly pulse check to stay on top. What's, what's required. I think now with the discussion around Omnibus, I think the dust settles quite quickly. There will be less bureaucracy and also think an adjustment that makes sense focusing on things that you can really measure and thereby it's more comparable. But as mentioned, so energy carbon data, it's already deeply embedded across the whole value chain from banks to tenants to transactions. This momentum isn't going away. So I hope it will increase adoption, actually by implementing less bureaucracy and focusing on the right things.
 
 00:17:40 Matthew Maltzoff
 Yeah, it's interesting. I was speaking to an asset manager at MIPIM actually and they said for us, Omnibus is actually allowing us to move forward a lot more than before because previously they were, they felt they're in a situation. It's like asking your sales guy, hey, I would like you to do 100 sales in this market. I want you to expand in Japan. I also need you to hire 30 people. What do they look like? Don't really know. Also, you know, and, and you sort of have analysis paralysis and you don't really know how, how to move without, without you're walking in a China shop without breaking something else and sort of actually making it more streamlined and simple, even though it might overall look like the total request. Hey, I thought he was supposed to be expanding In Japan, hire 30 people and do 100 sales in that market. But actually this is what seems to be enabling some asset managers to move forward effectively.
 
 00:18:37 Benjamin Guenther 
 Absolutely. I mean, it's always in situations like this, I would always say don't focus on what's out of your control, focus on what's certain and what you can control. And in our case, that what we see, what's important is to own your data on the financial infrastructure so that you can come up with your own benchmarks with your own analyzers, connected ESG with CapEx to understand the full effect. And I think the most important thing is to stay flexible. So if you have all the data, all the documents, everything under your own control, you're also flexible to react on different reporting standards which come from regulators, but also from banks or investors. And also this way you can adjust your plans on the go. So as mentioned with example before, if you have a fixed decarbonization plan and you get new insights or prices are changing, it makes maybe more, more sense to put PV in the roof than improving the HVAC. So these are all the things where, yeah, how to navigate through this uncertainty by building this infrastructure and financial infrastructure and the data infrastructure on your own and then having like, yeah, the ability to, to react on what's coming next. But, but because there will be something coming next every, every time.
 
 00:20:03 Matthew Maltzoff
 And you've mentioned in the past that crises have their advantages. How has the current economic climate actually influenced sustainable adoption within the built environment?
 
 00:20:24 Benjamin Guenther 
 Yeah, I think as we just talked about it, we see a decrease in uncertainty, like the regulation becoming more specific and with every that happens on the market we get more confirmation on the value of ESG. So this is a good thing. And I think this way also in the midterm we see an increasing adoption because the new rules become more graspable and you can basically rely business models on like the new standards or the new world that also includes sustainability into your business plans. But these are all the benchmark, the financial benchmarks that you need to basically act at the end.
 
 00:21:16 Matthew Maltzoff
 And let's talk a little bit about those two beautiful letters that people love.
 
 00:21:21 Benjamin Guenther 
 I know what's coming.
 
 00:21:24 Matthew Maltzoff
 Well, it seems that people are integrating AI a little bit more into their businesses. It's not just this is it going to take everybody's jobs question. It seems that there's quite a bit of utility here. Alasco recently launched the AI powered data copilot. What role do you actually see AI playing within the future of real estate?
 
 00:21:47 Benjamin Guenther 
 I think most of us still underestimate how deeply AI will shape real estate and how quickly. And I think the underlying factors of real estate make it clear. It's fragmented, it's full of stakeholders, it's not yet fully digitalized. So people are talking more about AI than digitalization. And real estate is driven by a lot of dispersed, qualitative, fast changing information. And this is exactly where AI thrives in my opinion. So I think that the impact will play out in three different phases. What we all see or probably have implemented in our daily life, which makes it also so powerful in terms of adoption that people are playing with AI in their personal life, which increases adoption in their business life. So the first thing is to make today's processes more efficient. In our case, although with the data copilot, it's for example in data collection, document handling or budget tracking. So everything that you already do becomes more efficient through AI support. The next step, second phase, is that it will enable better decisions because AI can of course identify patterns, information and correlations that humans would simply miss. And I think the combination of both is that it will enable you to make better decisions earlier. So predicting issues before they surface, whether it sifts cost overruns, regulatory risk or underperforming assets, we will get way more visibility on what's really going on in the portfolios. And again, I think it's basically important to have two things like having the data and the processes in your own company and connecting existing data. So in the case of Alasco, we, for example, we link static data like contracts or budgets with dynamic processes data like invoice approvals. And thus we have a totally new way to look at a project. And the second step is then enriching it with additional data. I think for, for asset owners, it will be super interesting how the whole district develops like microlocation trends, how many residential units are in development in my neighbourhood, how many retail openings, closures, the whole dynamics that add up to a risk in your project. I think all of this data will add valuable context to all of your decisions.
 
 00:24:37 Matthew Maltzoff
 It almost seems like a fundamental shift to real estate, because real estate traditionally is not transparent, then that actually was a method of capitalising on a deal. If you take a really simple example, if somebody has to move out of their house because they've lost their job or they've had another child, there is an inefficiency there in that sale. If you compare that to a stock where the information is all known and both players are only acting based on their own opportunities. But there's so many transactions. Here, it's only one person might even know that it is for sale. So that making the market more efficient, having more data accessible and simultaneously internally within organisations, being able to do more with data, it seems that the two forces are both at play. What effect does that actually have?
 
 00:25:44 Benjamin Guenther 
 I think we will again see two, two phases. So the first one is those who are really good at AI and already integrated into the decision making, they will have an advantage over those who don't. Which means in the same setup where you have a risk return profile, in the first step you can really de-risk in a transaction, but also in operation, so when you're developing something before the market catches up and gets and everybody can de-risk. So it will be fun to and exciting to see, given the speed of AI development, how fast people can integrate it into their processes, into core business to make better decisions earlier and when the market then levels again that everybody's on the same level. But I think this will be something over the next five, ten years where we will find a new, where you have many opportunities at the beginning and then the market catches up at one point again.
 
 00:26:50 Matthew Maltzoff
 Amazing. And if you could give one piece of advice to real estate firms now taking their first steps towards sustainable transformation, towards retrofit, towards a portfolio that they might want to increase the value of or gain liquidity with, what would that one piece of advice be?
 
 00:27:16 Benjamin Guenther 
 Basically I think it's always the same to act now even if the full roadmap isn't clear or all information and benchmarks are not defined. In real estate this means start building the internal infrastructure today, capturing your data, document decisions, track your actions. Because like diverse strategies waiting here. And if you look at the value or the impact you can have by starting now, it affects your operational efficiency. Like as mentioned, the team sizes are reduced now when it picks up again, you come out of the recession with a more efficient setup. But then either if it's ESG or AI, you need the data and the history of it to be a front runner in your specific segment. And I think that's why I would always encourage to just start trying to gather as many data as possible, bring in as many processes internally and track everything because this will be the basis for over-performance in the next years.
 
 00:28:26 Matthew Maltzoff
 It feels, just listening to you, it feels like these videos, I don't know if you've seen them, but it's sort of a, you look at a 20 year time horizon and 30 businesses and you'll see, you know, three or four dominant players and then there will have been an event and then players 9, 12 and 14 are new dominant players. And it feels we'll see. Well, I guess only time will tell, but it feels that we're in a similar position. So would you agree with that analysis? What do you think?
 
 00:28:59 Benjamin Guenther 
 I'm leaning into it because there are so many events coming together, like it's the end of a cycle to start of a new one, which is usually an entry point. Then there's like major shifts like ESG, a completely new dimension to every business model in real estate where you don't have experience of 20 years or benchmarks yet and AI. So this is kind of the cocktail that I think when we look back in five years we will all say yeah, it was so clear that a major shift has happened and like moving fast paid off.
 
 00:29:37 Matthew Maltzoff

Fantastic, and I suppose, I mean the natural next question is where does the industry actually go in the next five years and how do you see Alasco within that new industry?
 
 00:29:54 Benjamin Guenther 
 Yeah, so I think we will have a rapid acceleration of digitalization in general because it's not only for the sake of it, it has the positive outcome that processes are way more efficient than before and you can do more with the same capacity of people. And then it's weaving ESG into your business plan and creating this benchmark so that you can make educated decisions and include it into your financial plan. And not only managing it standalone kind of. And on top of that AI where we really don't have a clue. And I would only say stupid things now, if I look back in three years that it's moving so fast that every opinion is outdated in the next month. So I think this is an exciting phase because it's basically this huge acceleration of digitization for the industry, lots of backgrounds that will have an impact on everybody, not only the real estate companies, but also the tenants and everybody who is involved and will reduce a lot of the risks that are involved with real estate as we know it today. And yeah, this is basically also the journey where we want to support our customers, like bringing operational excellence into the organisations. In our case it's the development phase with cost controlling, it's ESG controlling and CapEx controlling, building up the layer for AI for every customer, but also including it into our products. And this is, yeah, this keeps us busy at night and the roadmaps are packed for the next quarters, so it's not getting boring. But I mean, that's the beauty of this journey.
 
 00:31:43 Matthew Maltzoff
 Amazing. And I, and I just to even touch on one point you, you've subtly mentioned is almost that that proactive thinking set, you know, set setting Alasco up, even, you know, real estate asset manager setting their businesses up proactively with that data foundation, no matter the potential directions it can go, you're in a strong position. I think that's a really insightful point. Fantastic. Benjamin, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on this podcast with so many gems, so many gems from what you've been saying, it's been a true pleasure and I suppose the next time I might be seeing you will probably be in September if I'm not mistaken.
 
 00:32:31 Benjamin Guenther 
 Yes, at the PropTech Connect.
 
 00:32:34 Matthew Maltzoff
 Great stuff.
 
 00:32:35 Benjamin Guenther 
 Really looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Matthew. 
 
 00:32:39 Matthew Maltzoff
 Thank you very much. Take care.