Tech

Brokers and owners take to cyberspace for tenants

When the real estate pros decide to drop a couple of million bucks on a hot property, the neighbors are expected to pay attention.

But the millions that are trading hands aren’t in Hudson Yards or the new World Trade Center site — these properties are all in cyberspace.

There, a new batch of websites are changing the ways brokers and owners share leasing information, owners seek out contractors and tenants find offices.
The websites — Honest Buildings, View the Space, 42Floors.com and Hightower — were created because their developers felt their current choices fell short and that good tech could improve the situation.

It takes money to develop websites both for engineers and even for their own office spaces and all have found real estate angels to invest in their dreams and make them user-friendly realities.

Here’s our roundup of the hot new web sites for the commercial real estate connoisseur.

View the Space

View the Space started out with photos and videos to get potential tenant prospects excited about the spaces. But its name and functions have since morphed into a digital drop box for keeping track of spaces, tours, lease proposals and signed lease details across multiple buildings and portfolios.

“Our users are asset managers, portfolio managers and brokers,” explained founder and CEO Nick Romito who now refers to the product as “VTS.”

Building owners pay for the services on a per building basis while their brokers are the power users. The in-house broker uploads all the space and building information so that all the documents, including the leases and proposals, are stored on the site.

“We become the centralized place for all the data,” Romito said.

As a broker for eight years in New York, Romito was juggling so many Excel spread sheets and notes about space tours, tenants and availabilities for the buildings he was responsible for that he developed View the Space to easily keep track of the paperwork, leads and stages of the deals.

Seven million dollars in financing was just obtained from Trinity Ventures, along with Thomas Byrne, an early backer of Loopnet and others. The site is headquartered in New York but available in 14 cities where it streamlines the leasing process through HD video tours, targeted distribution and real-time analytics. More cities are coming in the future.

The VTS offices are on a full floor of 360 Seventh Ave. — right next door to Romito’s apartment building. Eloise his small dog, tags along on his short commute to where 20 employees are packed into the space.

Honest Buildings

Honest Buildings helps its users find specific wants and needs near real estate.

Honest Buildings is a site that brothers Josh and Jared Kushner of Thrive Capital have sunk their funds into — some $4 million along with other investors. It solves a simple problem: How do you find someone competent to do X at your property?

“X” can mean a lot. Have an historical landmark that needs iron work? HonestBuildings will offer up companies through a simple search function. The site should really be called Honest Contractors because browsing is free and finding engineers, architects and other skilled firms is easy.

Figuring out who is a good match means clicking into the formal referral portion called HB Match, which does entail speaking with a rep and can take a few days. But the user is never charged.

The screened matchup is then made to, in this case, appropriate architects and iron specialists, who each send back between a 2 and 5 percent referral fee to HB if they win the contract.

Just like LinkedIn and Facebook, real estate executives can also list themselves with their photos and send messages to each other through the site.

Although New York-centered, both companies and individuals are listed from around the globe.

One search quirk is that as the right search bar is used to scroll down through the numerous companies and people, the bar will suddenly jump up as more companies pop into view.

42Floors

42Floors.com, an office listing website, whose name is based off of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Entrepreneur Jason Freedman was so frustrated by searching for office space in San Francisco for previous startups, that he actually became a broker to learn more about the industry.

Eventually, he decided he could do it better and more intuitively. That insight led to the development of 42Floors.com — a name chosen from the Douglas Adams novel, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” wherein “42” was the “Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

Listings are free for the listing brokers and owners. Once a prospective tenant clicks that they are ready to see a space and fills out their information, customer service reps will call back to pre-qualify the tenant.

Rather than just focusing on the exteriors of commercial buildings, 42Floors is filled with interior images of the spaces that are available to lease. All the photography is provided free to the brokers. “No one has gone to more lengths to put pictures on line,” said Freedman, who has also partnered with View the Space to use that website’s space tour videos.

Tenants are referred to 42Floors’ partner brokers to do what brokers do best: provide information about the space and building along with the pricing if it is held back from the listing.

Because 42Floors is technically a brokerage, their income is derived through fees from the tenant’s new broker and advertising.

Hightower

Hightower is a Web and mobile platform aimed at following leasing deals along with other documents and building info, and provides real-time analytics. All the data can be imported into Excel while leasing information such as floor plans for spaces can be shared.

Founder Brandon Weber is a techie who came out of Microsoft’s Excel and Zillow before joining CBRE in Seattle. Weber founded the now New York-based company last year with cloud expert Niall Smart and web designer Donald DeSantis who is connected to music industry technology companies and also did a stint as a real estate broker.

Investors who provided the $2.12 million in seed money include the Kushner’s Thrive Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, David Tisch, and Aaron Levie.