Few people know the ins and outs of commercial real estate like Hightower CEO Brandon Weber. Not only is he the co-founder and CEO of a successful real estate tech company that recently inked a lease on its own 8,000-square-foot office space: he spent over six years learning the business from the ground up as a landlord rep and tenant rep broker. And today, he’s using his expertise to evolve the CRE world with his leasing management platform Hightower.
“Hightower is a platform that allows commercial owners, commercial landlords, and commercial brokers, teams, and firms to consolidate all of the information and workflow related to their leasing business,” says Brandon.
In just two years, Hightower has already forged relationships with many of the biggest names in commercial real estate like Starwood Capital, Shorenstein, Durst Organization, Rudin Management, Two Trees, JLL, and CBRE, and is currently serving customers in five countries and more than 375 cities around the world.
Instead of trying to hunt down results through “a myriad of Excel spreadsheets and file folders on their desktop, phone calls, and emails”, Brandon says, real estate owners, landlords, and brokers can use Hightower’s software as a “command center for their leasing business to view everything on one unified platform that works as elegantly on their mobile devices as it does on the web.”
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Hightower’s beautiful and innovative software is changing the way owners and brokers work.
Hightower’s Need for Reliable Connectivity
Like many other tech-based companies, Hightower simply can’t function without reliable internet access. “We’re in a fiber-connected building. Looking back on it, we wouldn’t be able to go to a building that didn’t have fully lit fiber given how much load we put on the system already,” says Brandon. “In fact, we’ve spent so much time and capital making sure that our connectivity doesn’t drop. We’ve got sophisticated failover systems to safeguard against downtime.”
Explaining further about the need for reliable connectivity in the modern business environment, Brandon said, “One amenity that’s becoming critical is bandwidth. Any creative class or technology tenant – and frankly every tenant is becoming a technology tenant – is going to look at that now as more of priority number one.”
The Problems Facing Office Tenants
But even Weber, a former vice-president for CBRE and well-known expert in CRE tech, discovered that finding the ideal office space was far from a walk in the park. “It’s totally ironic that I’m a former commercial broker who used to represent tenants and I’m a founder of a commercial real estate technology company, and the office space search felt like I was back in 1995,” lamented Weber.
The problem, according to Brandon, wasn’t a lack of knowledge or preparation, but instead the same issue faced by many other business leaders – a complete lack of easily-available data. “All that information is under lock and key or, frankly, not in any place that’s easily aggregatable.”
“The search experience that tenants want is very, very different from the search experience tenants have – there’s a lot of room for the industry to grow in terms of how transparent we are with the information that tenants need to make decisions.”
Brandon pointed out that “commercial tenants, just like residential buyers and consumers, want all their information at their fingertips. They want the ability to search for available space on their own. They want the ability to understand what’s going on with that building, the specifications of that building. They want to be able to compare those buildings side by side without a broker.”
After a comprehensive search, Weber was eventually able to track down a great site for Hightower’s new home – the entire third floor of a three-story loft building at Grand and Centre Market in Little Italy.
Where CRE Tech Is Headed
According to Brandon, we’re on the cusp of big changes in CRE tech for brokers, owners and investors. “Commercial real estate has essentially been hibernating from the standpoint of technology adoption and innovation for the last 10 or 15 years, and it’s just now starting to wake up.”
He also feels that many of those innovations are likely to be centered around mobile devices. “Commercial real estate is inherently one of the most mobile-focused, mobile-centric industries that you’re ever going to run across. People are in the field all day, every day, and mobile technology is now at a place where it can transform the way they do their business.”
“Another mega trend that we’re seeing is that there’s an increasing competition for tenants, and in tenant retention demands.” He continued. “The logical extension of that is building owners have to get creative and get more innovative in how they’re marketing their space and their assets to tenants who have increasingly evolving needs and demands. So if you’re an owner who’s still thinking about how your space looks and functions and you market your space the same way you did three or four years ago, you’re going to lose the battle against the owners who are innovating in terms of how they present their space, how they get to those tenants, and then how they provide amenities and capabilities to those tenants, with WiredScore being a great example of a capability that matters.”
For investors, Brandon believes one of the biggest problems is that “owners are sitting on mountains of data about their portfolios, about the deals that they’re doing, and they go completely unanalyzed, un-utilized to help them fine tune the way they do their business.”
“In the next three years, in order to stay competitive, owners are going to have to figure out how to harness the data about your business to make better decisions,” he added. “I think there’s this striking realization now that that’s a problem we need to solve. We need to solve it quickly, and Hightower is fortunate to be a solution or at least one of the solutions that is gaining a lot of traction for capturing and aggregating and structuring all of that data about their business.”