Theo K. Browne: Meet the Real Estate Tech Exec: Prem Khatri at Chetu

In our latest real estate tech executive interview, we’re speaking with Prem Khatri at Chetu.

Without further ado…

What do you do?

Chetu is a custom software development company, servicing a myriad of industries across the IT spectrum for the past 18 years. These industries range from real estate to gaming, with things like payments, healthcare, and retail falling in between. The solutions we provide are as diverse as the industries we tend to.

The operations team is very much the engine of the company, propelling this company in new directions, challenging our current boundaries, while maintaining the reliability our customers have come to expect.

As Vice President of Operations, I ensure this engine is running harmoniously, taking all the steps necessary to keep the machine well-oiled and healthy. At the moment, this undertaking includes a staff of 1,400, each of whom is an indispensable part of the whole.

As for me, my role requires me to zoom in on day-to-day, moment-to-moment exchanges, while zooming out to understand how the micro plays to the macro. This is how we formulate strategies and instrument benchmarks to judge our progress by; when there is disconnect between the micro and the macro settings, I know it’s time to pivot and evolve our processes.

We believe process propagates success, and where you find success you replicate the process. At Chetu, we have developed processes for nearly every department within our ecosystem, establishing a heightened standard for the entire team to meet.

And for us, it has been widely successful, instigating exponential company growth year over year.

What problem does your product/service solve?

I could in fewer words articulate the problems Chetu has not solved. Our clients come to us with their technical hurdles and we solve them, and therefore it’s difficult to boil it down to just one or two problem areas we tackle (impossible actually). Generally, we accommodate staffing needs, allowing clients to segment a project between us and their internal team. Anything from custom software development, integrations, implementations, and taking a partner software and rounding the edges a bit to make it fit perfectly within the client’s ecosystem.

In terms of the real estate and lending fields, we have historically focused on facilities management, HOA management, IDX, MLS, property management, RETS, real estate valuation engines, and on top of the real estate niche services, we have had many clients come to us for web portal development, a platform to display their listings from and a repository for active and inactive properties.

Chetu’s selling point is our industry expertise. Although we have software engineers who preform application maintenance, backup and disaster recoveries, custom app development, infrastructure support, quality assurance, system integrations, we have engineers who carry out these services for a particular vertical. Each vertical contains its own set of software engineers fluent in the latest coding trends and industry compliance standards.

If we were to backtrack, and address this question head-on, I would say Chetu is the bridge between where clients are and where they would like to be, the bridge consisting of a scalable, intuitive solution that stretches if the gap were ever to widen. Chetu’s solutions evolve alongside our clients.

What are you most excited about right now?

Blockchain. To think that less than a year ago we were limiting blockchain to digital coinage, and now it has bled into industries across the board—I am eager to watch blockchain dismantle the silos it was initially bound within to leave its mark in unconventional ways. This decentralized ledger has the capacity to revolutionize exchanges of all kinds, even within the real estate industry.

Smart contracts will truly change how players within the real estate community negotiate by eliminating the need for immediataries. Blockchain provides a common, transparent platform for offers to take place, an environment highly sought after in a time of growing interconnectivity. I think moving forward, any technology that gives way to a heightened level of data integrity will be progressively disruptive to the operational structures we are beginning to outgrow.

Under the same umbrella of next generation technologies, I am extremely excited to see where automation takes us, RPA in particular. These past ten years have been all about big data, and we are certainly excavating data at an alarming rate, as system dialogues forged through the internet of things open new data streams. Our next major roadblock will be finding the means to apply data funneling in at such high volumes. This is where RPA comes in, formulating outputs through a predefined narrative of input/output relationships.

We have many blockchain and RPA projects in the works already, and we are receiving new inquiries about these technologies everyday. I’m sure we will see a far greater adoption rate in the next few years as next generation technologies transition into a marketplace imperative.

What’s next for you?

Chetu has had international clients for over a decade, but this year we are working to penetrate our Latin America market, catering to native-Spanish speakers by distributing all of our sales and marketing collateral in Spanish as well.

Communication is our number-one priority, employing a transparent, open lines of communication between developers, directors, sales team members, and clients at all times. Hence, our website will be accessible in various languages to accommodate a broader market as well as bringing on multi-lingual operations and sales personnel.

Offering our services in languages apart from English will certainly take our communication model to the next level.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

Chetu is remarkable in that most of the individuals in the highest positions, has incredibly humble beginnings—we’ve all begun as developers and built ourselves from the ground up, so I’m passionate about guiding others through a similar journey and encouraging young minds to think outside their current circumstances, toward a bigger picture.

I believe we need to cultivate this entrepreneurial spirit from the very beginning, instilling a go-getter attitude, and this begins in the classroom. Along with several other members at Chetu, we have begun STEM outreach, partnering with our local school system in Florida to inspire children to reach beyond themselves toward something greater.

So I guess you can say I’m passionate about two things: education and the progression of technology. Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to marry the two into an awesome program for our community that gives schoolchildren who have already expressed an interest in technological entrepreneurialism a glimpse into the future.

Thanks to Prem for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

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