Future of Real Estate Tech:

The Built Environment

John brings 30 years of real estate experience to Hubbard Street Group. Over his career, he has developed over $3 billion of institutional-grade commercial, residential and hotel properties across the country. John focuses his attention on HSG’s new development and investment activity in Chicago and other major markets. John received a BBA and MBA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. John loves traveling the world with his wife, friends and growing family. He enjoys road biking, skiing, golfing, hiking out west and good wine and food.

Has 30 years of real estate redevelopment experience. Primarily on the north side of Chicago, converting industrial properties into office, retail,and recreational uses. All projects are owned, developed, and managed in house. John holds a graduate degree in Business from the University of Wisconsin in their Real Estate program.

Susan Tjarksen joined Cushman & Wakefield in October 2018 serving as Managing Director of the firm’s multifamily investment sales team in Chicago. Susan co-founded KIG CRE in 2015 which was acquired by Cushman & Wakefield in 2018. She brings more than 30 years of real estate experience working with both private and public investment institutions throughout the country. Prior to brokerage, Susan was a leader in apartment and mixed-use development, having planned, built, designed, financed and delivered projects totaling more than $3.5 billion in revenue. She has also successfully developed and sold 12,000 residential units, 2,500 hotel rooms and more than 2M square feet of retail and office space. Additionally, Susan is the co-founder and chair of Enodo, an AI-assisted multifamily underwriting and valuation platform. She is an active in the commercial real estate industry and her community. Susan is a member of the Forbes Real Estate Council, Roosevelt University’s MBIRE Advisory Board and the Lincoln Park Builders Club of Chicago.

Here are a few ventures recently backed by Thad: (1) Yapmo – Internal communications tool used by all 2000+ @properties brokers and employees. Facilitates real estate transactions (helps match buyer needs with seller inventory), houses agent knowledge base in searchable library. Benefits: Has drastically reduced companywide e-mail load and clutter taking up broker inboxes. Has directly facilitated hundreds of transactions. (2) PointDrive – Online presentation tool that allows users to send professional presentations through e-mail and to track user engagement. Used for listing presentations, showing reports, marketing reports, etc. Broker can view back-end reports to see what information clients are most interested in, how many times it’s being viewed, whether it’s been forwarded, etc. (3) TurboAppeal – Online Property Tax Appeal service that uses big data and machine learning to produce appeals that are more likely to be successful and reduce property taxes by a greater amount than traditional methods. Just received venture funding from a group of Chicago’s preeminent tech investors (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20160128/BLOGS11/160129813/kiphart-invests-in-online-property-tax-appeal-firm).

Phil Dumas is the president and founder of UniKey Technologies Inc. Mr. Dumas first started developing phone-controlled locks while working on his senior design project in college, which involved an access system for a car door. Fresh out of college, Dumas worked for biometric access control company Sequiam Corp. After working his way up to vice president of product development, Dumas left the company and spent a few years in the private equity field before founding UniKey Technologies Inc. Mr. Dumas took his idea on ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’ in 2011 before the smart lock category existed. He was the first entrepreneur ever to get offers from all five sharks, including Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary. Mr. Dumas is a graduate from the University of Central Florida with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.