ICSC 2026: The Questions to Ask a Proptech Vendor Before You Sign

What the show was about this year

ICSC Las Vegas ran May 18 through 20 with more than 25,000 attendees. The new ICSC+PROPTECH track put software founders in curated meetings with owners and operators, and the panels leaned hard on AI-driven site selection, predictive leasing models, mobility data and building management platforms. The mood was confident. Retail vacancy is at 4.4% and the "death of retail" story has been wrong for five years, so the industry showed up ready to spend.

Spending on software is where a lot of that confidence went. That is where owners get burned. A tool that demos well in a booth and fails in a portfolio costs a year of staff time and a contract you cannot exit. We build software for this industry, so take the following with that in mind. It is also the list we would want a buyer to use on us.

Seven questions

Where does the number come from? Ask the vendor to click on any figure in the demo and show you the source. A rent estimate, a risk score, a predicted lease-up. If the answer is "the model," walk away. Every number that reaches a decision should trace back to a document, a data row or a formula you can read.

What happens when the data is missing? Real portfolios have leases with no amendment history, rent rolls that do not reconcile, and CAM budgets in three different spreadsheet formats. Ask the vendor to show the tool failing gracefully. A tool that guesses when it should ask is worse than a spreadsheet.

Who owns the output? Read the terms of service for the clause about training on your data. Your leases are your tenants' confidential business terms. A vendor that trains on them has made you a party to a disclosure you did not authorize.

Can it export? Excel, CSV, PDF, and a format your property management system reads. If the only way to get your data out is a screenshot, the vendor has built a trap, and the pricing will tell you so at renewal.

What does it cost at scale? Per-property pricing looks cheap at 10 properties and absurd at 200. Per-user pricing punishes you for training staff. Ask for the price at three times your current size.

Who else uses it, and can I call them? Not the reference the vendor hands you. Ask for a customer who left. A vendor that will not name one either has none, which is a very young company, or has many, which is a problem.

What does the tool refuse to do? The honest vendors have a list. Ours includes anything where the math is not deterministic, because a valuation that changes when you re-run it is not a valuation. A vendor who says the tool can do everything has not tested it on anything hard.

The site selection pitch specifically

AI site selection was the loudest category on the floor. Most of it is mobility data with a model on top. The data is useful. The model is only as good as the outcomes it was trained on, and almost none of these vendors can show you predicted versus actual sales for the sites they recommended two years ago. Ask for that table. If it does not exist, you are buying a map, not a prediction. Price it as a map.

What the tool should give you back

The reason to buy any of this is time and accuracy, so ask the vendor to show both in your own documents. Bring three leases, a rent roll and a CAM ledger from one property to the demo. Ask the tool to abstract the leases and reconcile the rent roll to them while you watch. A good tool finishes in minutes and shows you the two places the rent roll disagrees with the lease. A demo built on the vendor's clean sample data tells you nothing.

The savings that matter are specific. A lease abstract that took a paralegal four hours now takes a review of a finished draft. A certificate of insurance check that took 15 minutes now takes a glance at the flagged fields. A CAM reconciliation that consumed the first quarter now starts from a complete calculation with every figure traced to a ledger line. Those are the hours that go back to leasing, to tenant relationships and to the deals. And the errors the software catches, the misspelled additional insured, the amendment that never reached the rent roll, are the ones that used to surface as claims and disputes.