Sridhar Potineni (left) and Wayne Gearey.
Sridhar Potineni and Wayne Gearey
Chief information officer; head of geospatial and econometric analytics at Newmark
In the continual competition to fully integrate technology into commercial real estate services companies, Newmark has made significant hires in recent years to lead just such efforts.
In 2021, it brought on Sridhar Potineni as its chief information officer, and in August of this year Wayne Gearey joined the Manhattan-based firm as its head of geoanalytics and econometrics, a unique role in a CRE services company.
Under Potineni’s leadership, Newmark has developed two significant tech initiatives. The first is a data and artificial intelligence platform that extracts and improves the quality of unstructured commercial real estate data. The second is Workframe, a collaborative software platform and service for providing real estate information as well as for planning, designing, operating, and managing CRE properties.
“Commercial real estate is full of unstructured content and documents,” said Potineni. “So, not only did we have an opportunity to fill a data platform, but we were able to improve the coverage of the data, because we were able to extract all the data at a reasonable quality and populate the data platform. So that creates a solid foundation from an information point of view.”
Gearey joined Newmark with a vision to integrate geospatial artificial intelligence (geo AI) into CRE. With a background in geographic information systems (GIS) and machine learning, Gearey plans to combine GIS, application programming interfaces and geo AI to enhance location selection — which he calls location economics — for clients.
In discussing his work, Gearey emphasized the importance of leadership in democratizing AI insights, as well as moving from data silos to information parity. He and Potineni underscored the young and agile nature of Newmark as a company, which they said allows for rapid innovation and the hiring of top tech talent to create value quickly.
“Now our goal, and what really made this interesting, not only was it working with these other people to create innovation, but it was going to a positive-sum game where we’re creating and moving from data silos to information parity,” said Gearey.
