Photo by Tanner Van Dera on Unsplash

NEW YORK CITY—Backed by investors led by the technology investment arm of Brookfield Asset Management, with GLP, Tishman Speyer and venture capital firm Fifth Wall, VTS is aggressively investing in and expanding its software that helps landlords track and manage tenant leasing. It raised $90 million in a recent funding round in a record CRE tech venture financing. The company stated the funding will continue to deepen its current software capabilities, and accelerate the launch of its end-to-end commercial real estate leasing product Truva, which will go live later this year.

One real estate industry expert in the proptech space characterized the crux of the VTS software as providing owners the ability to do deals directly with the end users. “It's about eliminating brokerage commissions. So, this is really bad news for JLL, CBRE, Cushman or other brokerage firms,” he said.

He explained with a hypothetical that if an owner can increase their net income by not paying commissions to brokers, the impact on the value of their portfolio would be much larger than just the dollar amount of commissions that were saved, because real estate is typically valued at a multiple of net income, called a cap rate. If a cap rate is 5%, each dollar of saved commissions increases the value of the portfolio by $20 dollars.