PropTech Firm Waypoint Opens First East Coast Office
San Francisco-based PropTech firm Waypoint is expanding to New York City, establishing a new office in that city to handle its East Coast operations.
The move comes on the heels of strong growth for the company, which offers a financial performance analytics and management platform for commercial real estate. In 2018, Waypoint brought thousands of new buildings onto the platform, growing total recurring revenue by 350%, CEO Diane Vrkic said. The company analyzes more than $300B in assets under management on the platform.
“As the commercial real estate industry’s first performance management platform, we have a huge responsibility to be a leader in our field. We have really hit our stride this year, partnering with leading commercial real estate investment management firms,” Vrkic said in a statement. “Having a presence in New York allows us to scale to the needs of these relationships. This helps us more effectively solve our clients’ biggest challenges in order to realize their assets’ full potential. Waypoint’s platform creates measurable value for our clients.”
The company anticipates matching last year's revenue growth rate again this year.
Vrkic created Waypoint to address a need she noticed for easier, quicker ways to gather the necessary information on operational performance to make informed decisions and drive improvement.
The new office is in a professional suite at WeWork's Fulton Center in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood to start, though there is an expectation the company will outgrow that location as it adds to its sales team this year. New York will be the main location for the company's business development team and serve as a second headquarters.
The company's workforce is expected to continue growing as demand for PropTech increases. The company now has 20 employees in San Francisco and three in New York, but plans to double in size in 2019, growing to 50 total employees by the end of the year.
Calling technology the new disrupter in real estate, Vrkic said investors and property owners are now looking to companies like Waypoint to measure performance.
Venture capital continues to pour into PropTech, a category that was overlooked by investors not too long ago. But a maturing market has drawn more interest from property owners, operators and investors.
