Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/704472
to deal-analysis tools, tenant health met- rics, interactive site plans and more. Its creators came up with the idea after feel- ing frustrated with the inefficiencies and missing data sets in real estate, Romito says. He managed a 3 million-square-foot portfolio of office and retail space before teaming with Ryan Masiello (a former JLL broker) and Karl Baum (former head of a Goldman Sachs engineering team) to start VTS. "Boston Properties was one of our first meetings," Romito re- called. "I went in with a Pow- erPoint presentation, showed them what we were building and asked them what they thought. They said: 'Guys, we have been dreaming about a platform like this. If you build it, we'll buy it.' They did, and it has been an unbelievable partnership." A s a c o - f o u n d e r o f Ravti, Alex Rangel brought to life an idea he first had while working as a sales engineer for an HVAC manufacturer: to transform the $100 billion commercial HVAC sector through a strategy similar to the one that fare aggregators and search en- gines in the travel industry use. In a little more than three years, Ravti has landed such clients as CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Regency Centers and Stiles Corp. Backers include Y Combinator (the incubator known for investing in the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit and Twitch). "We don't just pick up the phone and call American Airlines anymore; we go to Kayak or Expedia," Rangel said. "These aren't necessarily mind-blowing technology tools, but they do give you all of the prices of everyone transparently, so that you no longer have to make one call for each airline. Ravti essentially provides that Kayak or Expedia kind of experience for [the HVAC needs of] large owners and prop- erty managers." Ravti's functionality includes online competitive bidding for HVAC projects and equipment, along with tools for tracking the condition and the budgets of HVAC units, portfoliowide. "It basi- cally allows shopping center landlords to have a single platform to understand exactly what the current condition of the equipment is," said Marc Elias, a Tampa, Fla.–based leasing agent with Regency Centers. "I use it all of the time in lease negotiations. It helps me understand if there are any maintenance issues in the past, and it gives me the current condi- tion of the unit, age, tonnage, voltage — those kinds of things." The expense of commercial HVAC equipment makes knowing its precise condition quite important in lease negotiations, Elias notes. Leasing agents also want to know whether particular units will be in com- pliance with the terms of the lease. Before Ravti, leasing agents phoned or emailed property managers to request HVAC reports. Managers would then call contractors to check out the units and produce the reports. "It could take anywhere from 24 hours to two weeks for the contractor to get out to that site and send the report back to the leasing agent," Rangel said. "Now leasing agents can click on their phones to make sure units are compliant and see the equip- ment history along with things like its age, size and last repair date." This means Elias and other leasing agents at Regency Centers, which has employed Ravti for two years, no longer need to scramble for HVAC contractors, or physically climb onto shopping center roofs to eyeball any HVAC equipment. This, in turn, can enable them to turn around lease outline drawings and tenant letters of intent more quickly. "Time turns into deals," Elias said. It is the promise of greater efficiency that makes this new wave of tech tools so exciting, Moss says. This applies not only to industry professionals, but also to customers, he says. Indeed, the poten- tial to improve the customer experience is precisely why DDR has been working with Google Indoors–approved photogra- phers to take 360-degree images inside its properties, he says. The goal is to more ac- curately geo-tag finer property details that can be misrepresented in Google Maps. "Sometimes the automated geo- tags are not even close — they'll incor- rectly show a tenant in the middle of the parking lot," Moss said. "We're uploading our site plans and tenant lists, and so they are truly accurate. We then work with Google to geo-tag them. It makes a massive difference in the convenience to our customers, and the tenants appreciate this level of ef- fort and attention to detail." S C T 52 S C T / A U G U S T 2 0 1 6 VTS enable S owner S and S T o quan T ify por T folio performance from a S ingle da S hboard.