VTS, a commercial real estate management platform previously known as View The Space, has raised $21 million in new funding to help real estate owners, brokers and investors leverage data to make better decisions.
OpenView Venture Partners led the Series B round, with participation from existing investor Trinity Partners, which values the company at around $100 million, according to sources.
“Real estate is an enormous market, it’s the largest asset class in the world,” says Adam Marcus, who led the round for OpenView. “Yet the way that people manage their properties today is archaic, it’s all on Excel and information is passed back and forth on paper.”
With VTS, brokers, owners, and investors can collaborate in real time, and from any device, to manage their portfolios. All information about available spaces and prospective clients is plugged into the platform, and an analytics dashboard aggregates data about specific buildings and tenants as well as market trends.
Considering that commercial real estate is a $12 trillion industry, being able to make data-driven decisions can save a lot of time and money for everyone involved.
If a building owner in New York can determine that brokers are reporting a 25 percent rise in tech companies looking for new spaces, for instance, that owner can knock down some walls, build a bunch of conference rooms, and tailor the space to house a startup. Then they can work with brokers who represent tech companies to make sure they’re spending their marketing dollars effectively.
Before launching VTS, co-founders Ryan Masiello and Nick Romito spent nine years as commercial real estate brokers in New York, so they’re well aware of the pain points they’re trying to solve.
VTS currently reports around 1.5 billion square feet being managed on its platform. (For reference, Manhattan had 520 million square feet of office space as of 2013.) It’s already being used by many of the largest landlords and brokerage firms in the country, including Blackstone and JLL.
The funding will be used to boost growth in the U.S. and expand internationally, with offices in Sydney and London slated to open before the end of the year.
“We don’t want to be a part of the ecosystem, we want to be the place where all commercial real estate happens,” says Romito. “It may take two years, it may take five, but the speed at which we’re growing is maybe 10x what we anticipated.”