When it’s time to buy a new home or rent an apartment, the first thing we do is hop online. We browse listings, scroll through photos, compare square footage and the number of bedrooms — all perfectly normal 21st century behavior.
So it may surprise you that until very recently, there was no equivalent for the commercial real estate (CRE) market — where owners and brokers could see office listings, digitally tour a space and complete a leasing transaction online.
Last month, however, New York City-based property tech company VTS released VTS Market, a new platform designed to finally fill that gap in the CRE industry.
“Would you go see a potential apartment if you’d never seen a photo or didn’t know how many bedrooms it had?” asked Holly Hilario, the company’s Director of Demand Acquisition Marketing, in an interview with Built In NYC. “Believe it or not, that’s what our industry was dealing with.”
Founded in 2011, VTS traditionally worked on centralizing data and workflows for commercial landlords to help them find tenants. Now, VTS Market provides a space to market and lease their spaces online, with the ability to publish photographs, digital tours and 3D renderings. The shift to digital content has been a long time coming, accelerated by COVID-19 and its accompanying shelter-in-place orders.
“The market landscape has changed profoundly over the last few months,” said CEO and Co-Founder Nick Romito in a statement last month.
“To stay competitive in this new remote world, landlords and brokers need a digital platform featuring best-in-class digital content that is integrated into existing workflows with powerful analytics and that excites tenant rep brokers — and they need it now.”
With most of the world’s largest CRE owners already on board when the platform launched on June 23, the company claims VTS Market is the most rapidly adopted product in property tech history. Two weeks on from the product launch, Hilario told us more about the need VTS Market serves, and how COVID-19 will alter the CRE landscape in years to come.
What long term changes do you think COVID-19 will create in the CRE industry?
COVID-19 has definitely made the CRE industry rethink how it currently does business. Until recently, our industry was underserved from a technology perspective. Many players still operate with manual, offline processes. The coronavirus exacerbated the inefficiencies that already existed because of this and made a lot of people in the CRE industry realize that they need to adopt technology to streamline their whole leasing process. They needed to find a modern way to keep communicating not just internally, but also with their tenant clients — especially in this remote working environment.
Virtual property tours have also rapidly increased in popularity due to COVID-19 either because many people aren’t comfortable touring in person or they are physically restricted from doing so. Even after the pandemic has passed, I think they’ll still be used to narrow down a tenant’s options before they commit to an in-person tour. We’ve heard from tenant reps and tenants alike about how painful the process can be, and how they’ve wasted many hours visiting spaces because they didn’t have pictures or a virtual tour beforehand and couldn’t get a sense of whether a space would serve their needs.
What gaps did you see in traditional CRE marketing technology, and how does VTS Market address them?
There isn’t another CRE marketing product that brings all the key people in the leasing process — landlords, agency brokers and tenant reps — under one environment to transact and search for office space. Not only does VTS Market bring a landlord’s portfolio entirely online, we can also provide metrics and analytics to help them understand and optimize their marketing performance.
As a part of the VTS Market demand generation team, I make sure that tenant reps are seeing and sharing these spaces with their tenants. I also help landlords make strategic decisions about their marketing content. So we’re getting spaces online, driving demand and providing real-time data — which I believe no other platform can provide.
The relationships between landlords and brokers are at the heart of the CRE ecosystem.”
How does VTS Market change how brokers interact with landlords and tenants? Why was this change necessary?
VTS Market enables landlords and their leasing teams to arm tenant rep brokers with new information and digital content — including virtual tours, space photos and accurate floor plans — that they haven’t had access to before. This ensures tenant rep brokers can deliver a modern experience to their tenants.
Prior to VTS Market, tenant rep brokers often didn’t have access to accurate listing information or even photos to show their tenant clients before they saw a space, which was frustrating for everyone involved. Think about if you were looking to rent or buy a new home — would you go see a potential apartment if you’d never seen a photo or didn’t know how many bedrooms it had? Believe it or not, that’s what our industry was dealing with. With VTS Market, that’s no longer the case.
How did your existing relationships with commercial real estate companies inform this product?
VTS’s founders came directly from the brokerage industry so they definitely understood the highs and lows of the whole leasing process. Their real estate background has helped us understand our customers’ key problems and thus built trust within the CRE community.
The relationships between landlords and brokers are at the heart of the CRE ecosystem. Since the company’s founding it’s been clear that any product we bring to market needs to facilitate those relationships. VTS Market was the culmination of hours of conversations with both landlords and tenant rep brokers about the challenges they faced, and ultimately how we could make it easier for them to market and search for available space online.
