Maureen Waters of Measurabl: 5 Questions

In being named the new CEO at Measurabl last week, Maureen Waters capped a journey from commercial real estate change-agent to proptech chieftain.

Waters joined the giant sustainability data platform in 2023 as chief growth officer and was later promoted to president, where she led development of Measurabl’s three-year corporate strategy.

In charting Waters’s career path — which has ranged from multiple executive roles at Cushman & Wakefield, to head of real estate and asset management at Bill Gates Investments, president of property transaction platform Ten-X and a partner at venture capital firm MetaProp — she has made customer-focused growth a keynote of her many professional roles and achievements.

Shortly after her latest promotion, PropTech Insider spoke with Waters about what she’s learned from customers and how she hopes to learn more from them in her new role.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: As Measurabl’s new CEO, what are the top three things you plan to do?

Maureen Waters: We shifted our strategy this past year, doubling down on the data side of our business. We’re really end-to-end, or what we like to call meter-to-market solutions, with more than eight products. So, we are into more of a data and ecosystem play — data and infrastructure for decision-making for all real estate stakeholders.

Two, I am a big believer from my days at Cushman & Wakefield — where we created a customer-driven data platform — on focusing on how you execute and better align with customers. I’ll be very much a CEO that’s a customer advocate. I want to be out in front of the customers a large percentage of my time, so that I can understand their needs and ensure that we’re meeting or exceeding those needs.

The third biggest priority is to continue and execute on our three-year strategic plan, which I started two years ago when I joined Measurabl. It’s called 1Measurabl, and we’ll be executing further on that plan next year.

What have you been hearing from customers, and what do you expect to hear in your new role as CEO?

For the last decade, the industry has been focused heavily on reporting and collecting the data, responding to frameworks, and meeting compliance requirements. And that was necessary. But it’s no longer, in our opinion, sufficient. So, as we look forward to 2026 and beyond, I believe the conversation is more about moving away in some cases from reporting to having the data customers can trust and use for decision-making, whether that’s decision-making around capital improvements or getting better returns on their investments into sustainability — having the insights from the data that we can provide around their portfolio. 

There’s a journey there from acquiring and managing to really digging into the insights and being able to then move to decarbonizing the potential opportunities that come from those insights.

Are you seeing demand from any particular real estate sector compared to another?

We cover everything with our platform — we’re very active in office, retail and industrial — but from a compliance perspective, multifamily is still a growing business for us. From an optimization viewpoint, they’re very deep into their sustainability programs and they are really using the data to optimize their portfolios and energy costs, while focused on returns.

More broadly speaking, we’re seeing on the capital markets side of things that insurance companies have been focused on our data to help them assess physical climate risk and screen premiums around that. And I don’t see that changing. 

Our data is being utilized by the Citibanks of the world, Voya and others that view it as a tool to evaluate and potentially provide a green premium, or a sort of incentive for investors. The other piece of this is that we have embedded our data into the FTSE green index, so it is starting to become very much a part of the capital markets world. That’s why I say we were shifting our platform to more of an ecosystem platform where we can meet the needs of all of those different stakeholders that are within the real estate ecosystem.

Having come from traditional commercial real estate, what’s your sense of proptech’s development since you made the switch?

AI has gotten a lot of attention, but let’s see where that goes. From a proptech perspective, when I started right in the middle of COVID with MetaProp, proptech was probably at its peak, or at least one of its highest points, because there were so many real estate owners and investors looking to reduce costs and understand their operations differently through technology. 

And, so, I think that it’s shifted from point solutions that are solving for pain points to now AI, which is sort of an overlay on top of all of that, without any real understanding of where all this goes. Everybody’s waiting to see if it continues and how it impacts us.

Going forward, how do you see proptech, and Measurabl in particular, evolving?

A lot of large fintech companies, as well as large data companies, are very interested in our data, and some of them are actually investors in Measurabl today. As we think about proptech as a way of increasing value and efficiencies in real estate, you naturally progress down that path. It becomes embedded in the financial ecosystem and decision-making as we shift from the digitization and automation of real estate into more the financial aspects, along with a sort of transparency shift. It’s just natural that it will continue and evolve even further than we’re seeing today, especially with AI.

At Measurabl, we started to offer a free solution to our data earlier this year so that we could start to democratize this data a little more and get it out to more customers, giving them access to a free solution — not only to consolidate their data, but also to manage and use their data for decision-making. 

So we are really focused on continuing to build that investment-grade data around sustainability that can become the source of truth for those in the financial world, and, of course, in the real estate investment world.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.