In the last two months Michael Marks has turned down a dozen offers to make keynote speeches at conferences. His company, construction startup Katerra, is three years old, but the attention surge is very recent. “Construction technology has gotten kinda buzzy,” he says.

That may be. But more likely, interest in Katerra has spiked because in January, the company landed an astounding $867 million in venture funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. A deal of that size, led by the venture industry’s most talked-about fund, will put a company on the map overnight. Marks had been planning to raise around $500 million, but in a pattern that’s become familiar, once SoftBank got involved, everything got bigger.

The SoftBank Vision Fund---a source of fascination and fear among rival venture investors---is known for its investments in cutting-edge technology. But now it’s making a big bet on one of the stodgiest industries around---real estate. The $93 billion fund’s sheer firepower has the potential to shape winners and losers in any market it decides to enter, and it is quickly doing so in real estate. The fund has met with at least 50 potential investments in the category, according to managing director Jeffrey Housenbold. That’s resulted in four big bets, with more to come.

A month before the Katerra deal, SoftBank led a $450 million investment in startup real-estate brokerage Compass, and a $120 million investment in home-insurance startup Lemonade. In August 2017, the fund invested $4.4 billion in coworking giant WeWork.

SoftBank is holding deal talks with OpenDoor, a startup which buys homes directly from owners and sells them, according to sources familiar with the situation. Founded in 2013, OpenDoor is now buying more than $1 billion worth of homes per year. SoftBank would not comment on potential investments. OpenDoor declined to comment.

At first blush, real estate technology doesn’t seem to fit Son’s stated thesis of a future dominated by artificial intelligence, robots, and big data. But the fund’s reach extends beyond the singularity. That’s by necessity---$93 billion is a lot of money to put to work in AI or robotics companies.

Housenbold tells WIRED the Vision Fund’s mandate also includes aspects of human needs or desires that won’t be replaced or destroyed by technology. Even when robots and AI are a prominent part of our lives, he says, “we will still need to eat and have a roof over our heads; we will still have a desire to learn, travel and connect on a deeper, more personal level.” The Vision Fund believes categories like real estate will be enhanced---not replaced---by technology.

The real estate sector’s central appeal is its size. A mega-fund like SoftBank’s demands mega-opportunities. (The fund’s minimum investment is $100 million.) Real estate provides the kind of unfathomably large numbers SoftBank’s team needs to get excited: $228 trillion in global real estate asset value.

Further, the real estate industry is fragmented. For example, the largest residential brokerage and real estate services company in the US, Realogy, owns around a dozen different brands and controls a single digit percentage of the market. And real estate’s leading players have been slow to adopt technology. “Traditional real estate players are fundamental value investors looking for current yield. They just think about the world so differently,” says Ryan Scott Abbe, head of real estate investment banking at ‎JMP Securities. “They’re scratching their heads at all of these technology solutions.”

The availability of data is making the market more efficient, making it harder for real estate investors to earn a return by simply buying low and selling high. Investors, brokers, financiers, and related players must increasingly rely on technology to move faster and make more strategic decisions, or face new, tech-enabled competition. “It’s probably the last great bastion of the global economy that has not seen that type of disruption,” says Richard Sarkis, CEO of Reonomy, a commercial-real-estate data platform in which SoftBank invested in before the Vision Fund was created.