Real-estate tech startup VTS to launch industry’s first online commercial office marketplace

The commercial real estate market has been slower in its adoption of mobile technology tools. However, one real-estate tech startup is changing that. VTS is a New York-based leasing and asset management platform startup company that is making it easier for landlords, brokers and property owners to manage their portfolios and market assets.

In a first for the global commercial real estate industry, VTS, today unveiled its plans for the VTS marketplace. With over nine billion square feet and nearly one-in-three office buildings in the US already managed using the VTS leasing and asset management platform, and between 75 and 90 percent average market share in the major U.S. Class A office markets, VTS is uniquely positioned to offer professionals the most accurate and comprehensive marketplace in the industry.

Until today, landlords have had to separate the marketing of their space from the process of managing a tenant through their pipeline and executing an actual lease. No software platform has automated and streamlined the end-to-end marketing, leasing, and transaction for an available space. Instead of an easy and simple process, landlords, tenant reps, and tenants today exchange phone calls, emails, and Word documents back and forth for weeks and months – hence the infamous phrase “time kills all deals.” The commercial real estate market is undergoing a sea change as tenants and their brokers expect to move from a slow and painful leasing experience to an easy, fast, and flexible leasing process with tenant needs as the key driver.

Founded in 2011 Brandon Weber, Donald DeSantis, Karl Baum, Niall Smart, Nicholas Romito, and Ryan Masiello, VTS, backed by Blackstone Group LP, is the commercial real estate industry’s leading leasing and asset management platform. Landlords use VTS to maximize portfolio performance by transforming their leasing and asset management process, enabling them to acquire the right tenants faster, sign the right deals at the best economics, and optimize the renewal process—reducing costly downtime. Brokers can manage their deal pipeline and get tenants into empty spaces faster, collaborate across teams and work easily with their landlord clients using VTS for Brokers. The VTS platform manages more than 9 billion square feet of commercial real estate and a user base exceeding 34,000.

Built on the industry’s #1 leasing and asset management platform, the VTS marketplace will provide the infrastructure for landlords, agency brokers, tenant reps, and tenants to lease online. Unlike almost all existing listing sites, the VTS marketplace will enable both landlords and brokers to dramatically improve the marketing and leasing of spaces. Agency brokers and landlords using the VTS platform and the VTS marketplace will be able to run the entire leasing process online using real-time market data to dynamically price their available space and lease negotiations. Tenant reps will be able to service their clients in an entirely new way with the ability to search for space both on the market, as well as off-market via VTS’ “future supply” data.

“The VTS marketplace is the culmination of the VTS vision to transform commercial real estate, making every player in the ecosystem – landlords, agency brokers, tenant reps, and tenants – more efficient,” says Nick Romito, CEO and co-founder of VTS. “VTS is already the system of record for inventory and deal management for landlords globally — there are currently more than 500,000 active deals in VTS, and over 500 million square feet of leases were executed in the VTS platform over the last year alone. Now, the VTS marketplace allows us to provide every player with the infrastructure to complete the full deal cycle for deals of all sizes, streamlining a process that has, for decades been highly inefficient and expensive for everyone involved. By modernizing such an old process everyone in the ecosystem wins.”

In addition to its core customer base, which includes Blackstone, Brookfield, Hines, CBRE, JLL, and more, flexible workspace providers will also be leveraging VTS’ marketplace and technology infrastructure to capture tenant demand and help manage their transactions online. “The success and scale of VTS’ core operating system make partnering with VTS to help drive customer demand to our workplace locations a no-brainer. VTS is a proven partner to our landlord partners as well as the brokerage community, and the team has a clear vision of how technology can digitize the leasing process that we are very much aligned to,” says Ryan Simonetti, Founder and CEO of Convene.