Robert Entin
Executive vice president and chief information officer at Vornado Realty Trust
When you own as many buildings as Vornado Realty Trust, you need a chief information officer with deep roots in the proptech industry.
That’s what the firm got with Robert Entin, who has been at Vornado for over 17 years and juggles his expertise between the corporate giant re-envisioning Manhattan’s Penn District and teaching the next generation of leaders in an academic setting.
After graduating with degrees in computer science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania when information technology was in its infancy, Entin founded Integrated Business Systems (IBS) in Clifton, N.J., in 1979. (This was when floppy disks were revolutionizing the tech industry.)
A portion of the company, which provides technology solutions for the real estate industry, was sold to Vornado in 2013, taking Entin with it.
Entin oversees the software programs that manage infrastructure throughout the buildings in Vornado’s portfolio such as cybersecurity and, in the past at least, the gradual integration of artificial intelligence into the business.
During a 2018 interview with VC firm MetaProp, Entin said he believed that AI would become an important part of analyzing the massive amount of data that will be collected by building technology in the future, but that machine learning still had a long way to go at the time.
Where Vornado currently stands in the rollout of AI five years later is not clear. The corporation did not respond to a request for comment.
Entin was skeptical of the integration of blockchain technology into the financial model of business in 2018, something which may have helped Vornado avoid a lot of the fallout that affected the banking sector in early 2023, when lenders found themselves overexposed to cryptocurrency.
Along with his business pursuits, Entin is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he teaches a master’s-level course on information technology and real estate. He originally began teaching this class at Baruch College before taking it to Columbia in 2016.
