Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 28 /Jul 3, 2026
Why real estate stays fragmented on purpose
Matthew Schneider, Building Inc
Jul 3, 2026 /Real Estate, Cities & Housing
Why real estate stays fragmented on purpose
Matthew Schneider is the founder and CEO of Building, a platform that organizes, verifies and delivers property data for real estate transactions. He came to it after starting a syndication company and discovering that everyone wanted financing and few were ready for it. His thesis is that real estate is slow because trust is expensive, and that data can carry trust if it is built right.
Matthew Schneider, Founder, CEO, Building Inc
In this conversation
What Building does in plain English, and who is hurt most by bad property information.
Who moves the needle inside an owner's organization, and how to budget for something that touches every department.
Matthew's definition of verification: click a cell and land on a pre-verified document with who, what, when and how attached.
The invisible costs of disorganization: rework in the field, weeks of redlines, and capital sitting idle instead of earning its preferred return.
Real estate is all about trust and authenticity.
Matthew Schneider
Chapters
The new economy of real estate
What a new economy of real estate could look like if data were trusted.
By the numbers
Commercial and multifamily mortgages maturing in 2025
Matthew says capital sits idle because trust is expensive. A wall of maturing loans is what forces the data to move.
Source: Mortgage Bankers Association, commercial mortgage maturity volumes (2025) ↗Everyone around the table
Every role that touches a transaction, and what each needs.
Budgeting for data
How to think about paying for data infrastructure.
What it means to verify
What verifying a document actually means.
Why he's building
Why Matthew built the company, and where it goes next.
While you saved a couple hours putting everything together, you did not save any time on the trust factor.
Matthew Schneider
Takeaways
Real estate stays fragmented on purpose, because every counterparty has to verify what the other one says. Organize the data, verify it, and settlement, diligence and capital can move like any other asset class.
Dragging files into a chatbot saves a few hours of assembly and saves nothing on the trust factor. The other party still has to see the source documents.
Intelligence about a property is not episodic. It accumulates, locked to the asset, and then it has to be believable to the person across the table.
Everyone wanted to be financed, but not everyone was finance ready.
Matthew Schneider