Nick Romito (left), Ryan Masiello (top right), and Swaroopa Penikelapati.
Nick Romito, Ryan Masiello and Swaroopa Penikelapati
Co-founder and CEO; co-founder and chief strategy officer; chief technology officer at VTS
Never mind what happened last year or last quarter — or (sigh) pre-pandemic. Or even what’s happening today. What about tomorrow, or three or four months from now?
That’s a question that VTS, a Manhattan-based property management and data platform, tries to answer with its various business lines and products.
“In the most fundamental way, the information landscape is changing,” Ryan Masiello said. “So a big part of our business is really kind of taking an industry that has relied on backward-looking information since the dawn of time to make its most important decisions, and really starting to move everybody toward a real-time and ultimately predictive way of managing their business.”
VTS has hundreds of clients in commercial real estate, most of them in an office sector nervous about space utilization and asset valuations. These clients — and the marketplace at large — can use VTS’s VODI index, which predicts office demand six to nine months in advance by analyzing tenant searches. There are also an increasing number of VTS clients coming from industrial, multifamily and retail, according to the company’s leadership.
These clients are all drawn largely by a 12-year track record — an eternity in modern proptech — that’s provided VTS plenty of data to not only refine its own business but that its clients also can leverage. That includes analyzing data via the parsing abilities of artificial intelligence, which VTS embraced long before it was cool. (AI, for instance, powers VODI, which VTS launched in 2020.)
“That’s an area we’ve been focusing on constantly,” Swaroopa Penikelapati said.
As for the company’s own long view, Nick Romito says VTS isn’t currently looking to acquire or to merge. It will instead focus on product launches in an industry where the forward-looking enjoy an advantage.
“I think the proptech world is going to be a lot smaller next year than it was this year,” Romito said, “and I think that’s a trend you’re going to see continue.”
