The tech scene in New York has its roots embedded in the industries that are endemic to the city. In no one city are there are more professionals with deep domain expertise and industry insights than in NYC and this body of knowledge stems across finance, fashion, media, and healthcare just to name a few. It was just a matter of time before the tech world converged to focus on real estate startups, another industry that this city has traditionally been known for and New York is now home to the MetaProp Accelerator which dubs itself as “world’s #1 real estate technology accelerator”.
A total of 5 companies were selected to receive up to $200K (initial $25k in exchange for 6%, with option for follow on for $175K in a convertible note) in investment and mentorship from over 200 industry experts for the 16-week program. Today, we present to you a series of interviews highlighting each of these real estate focused startups.
CHECK OUT THE 5 NYC REAL ESTATE STARTUPS FROM METAPROPS INAUGURAL DEMO DAY
SocialSign.in
Traditional forms of effective advertising is often taken and more often quite expensive. If you are looking for a new way to make yourself heard in the endless streams of ads, SocialSign.in makes WiFi guest login screens a way to target customers. With minimal effort on your part, you can get take the CRM data and have it sent straight to you in a frictionless manner.
CEO Mike Perrone talks us today about the company’s mission – “to show the world the previously untapped value of Guest Wi-Fi as an acquisition channel”, as well as where they plan to go with their tech in the future.
Give us a brief description of your company.
SocialSign.in enables the best commercial venues to turn their guest WiFi into an incredibly effective marketing and sponsorship channel. SocialSign.In’s customers use our technology to cultivate a highly qualified, valuable audience using the foot-traffic they already have. Our research shows that more people will use our customer’s guest WiFi and then visit their homepage, social media or apps combined. Our technology works without needing to change user behavior, having to install an app or face user permission challenges. Each visitor is accessible to serve personalized offers and engaging content while generating valuable CRM data and promotable email relationships. Take advantage of your current foot traffic in real time using SocialSign.in.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
The opportunity size is tens of billions of dollars in the commercial real estate market alone. We also service the live entertainment and professional sports industries, which are comparable in size.
What’s the business model?
SaaS plus
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
The Company has signed several major commercial owner operators with a significant increase in future sales pipeline opportunities through Metaprop’s industry connections.
What was the experience like working with the MetaProp Accelerator?
Working with Metaprop accelerator was beneficial to help quickly expand in this specific vertical. The program expanded our industry knowledge and leveraged real estate connections through Metaprop’s connections. Our estimate is that we tripled our speed to this market by participating.
You previously went through TechStars NYC – how did being in an industry-specific accelerator compare?
Working with Metaprop accelerator offered the company access to a greater depth of industry expertise and business development acceleration than a generic startup incubator could have. This was particularly valuable for us because we intended on focusing on commercial real estate as a key vertical.
What was your favorite part about being in NYC?
Diversity of industry and people, this diversity lends itself to a balanced and interesting ecosystem.
What’s the one thing about your company/progress that you’d like to announce to the world?
We are proud to be the premier company leading the charge on a new and incredibly effective marketing channel.
Notion
Does it ever seem like one day your home or apartment is in good condition and then one by one things start going bad? A smoke detector goes bad one day, an alarm breach the next day, and finally a blown pipe leak! Well it may just seem like bad luck, but these deteriorations have been in the making for years and you are only noticing them now. If you don’t want to be surprised by these types of malfunctions, then you have the opportunity to monitor it with Notion!
CEO and cofounder Brett Jurgens is “proud to announce the launch of the most affordable and simple DIY home monitoring system ever.” AND chats with us about how we should to take notice of our surroundings in the digital age..
Give us a brief description of your company.
For over 2,000 years, spaces have not been intelligent. Apartments, homes, multi-family buildings and most office buildings are wasting billions of dollars on water leaks, inefficient energy usage and operational inefficiencies. $10B is lost every year to water leak damages alone, and energy costs could be decreased by 30%/year with more efficient programming and monitoring.
Notion keeps owners, building managers and maintenance staff connected to their properties anytime, anywhere. Through a single sensor with eight powerful functions, a mobile app and data tracking and analytics, we help you save money by tracking and monitoring things like water leaks and temperature fluctuations; we give you peace of mind by monitoring and alerting you and/or your staff the second a restricted area is accessed; and we give you insight by providing you with data you’ve never had before.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
Global Home Security is currently a $31B market and expected to be $47.5B by 2020. More specifically DIY Home Security, a new category, is expected to reach $1.7B by 2020 in the US alone. Only 20% of homes in the US have a monitoring system. This means 112m homes do not have any kind of monitoring system.
What’s the business model?
Our business model hits on the consumer, insurance and property managers/owners.
- Consumer: cost of hardware with plans for monthly recurring revenue for premium features & services.
- Insurance: cost of hardware plus monthly recurring revenue for API / data access per system / end-user.
- Property Managers / Owners: monthly recurring revenue for hardware and data access per system / end-user.
What inspired your business?
Ryan (cofounder) and I have been childhood friends who had always aspired to start a company together. One day, Ryan came home to a newly adopted puppy howling at the low battery chirp of a smoke detector. The idea of a smart sensor that could alert him of the many potential events that could happen when he wasn’t home became our guiding light at Notion.
Does the thought of someone like Nest moving into your space keep you up at night?
No. We see Nest as a partner and are working on integrations with their products to provide our customers both insight into and control of their homes.
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
Before MetaProp, Notion was very much focused on the consumer marketplace. We had always believed that there was opportunity within multi-family housing working with property managers and owners, but through MetaProp we’re realizing this potential through the many introductions afforded to us to world-class property managers and owners. The net of these conversations has been significant interest and many proposals we’re working through as we speak.
What was the experience like working with the Metaprop Accelerator?
MetaProp has connected us with some of the world’s largest property owners and managers. Connecting with the right high-level executives at these large owner/operators has helped us better understand our value, which would have taken us significantly longer to identify without MetaProp.
What was your favorite part about being in NYC?
What’s not to like about NYC?! The energy is palpable and the proximity and density of valuable contacts is unlike anywhere else in the world.
Rentalutions
With home ownership on the decline and renting becoming the most viable option, there are more landlords watching over 10 or less properties. These landlords don’t often have the resources like that of a property management company to work with. With Rentalutions‘ platform, smaller landlords can level the playing field and save time and money. The simple Landlord platform makes everything easy for the landlord and tenant to make the process of renting seamless.
“Landlords love using Rentalutions because it saves them time on things they otherwise would be doing manually. Most DIY landlords have full-time jobs and would rather spend free time with friends and family, not repeatedly posting vacant properties or chasing down tenants for late rent. Our platform gives landlords their weekends back” said Ryan Coon, CEO of the Rentalutions. Read on to see what else Ryan had to say.
Give us a brief description of your company.
Rentalutions is the only all-in-one platform that helps DIY landlords easily manage their single-family homes, condo units and small multi-family buildings. More than 17,000 landlords currently use Rentalutions to manage rental units in 6,500 zip codes across the United States.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
According to the US Census Bureau, there are more than 8 million individuals in the United States who own and self-manage more than 24 million rental units. In the past, these landlords have managed their properties manually, oftentimes with pen and paper.
What’s the business model?
Our platform is 100% free for landlords with only one rental unit. Landlords who use the platform to manage more than one unit pay a monthly subscription fee that starts at $25/mo and is tiered based on the number of units.
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
Since joining the accelerator, we have grown by more than 50% by adding more than 6,000 landlords to our platform. We’ve also grown the team. When we started the program, we had three full-time employees. Since starting the program, we’ve more than doubled to six full-time and about a dozen interns and contractors.
What was the experience like working with the MetaProp Accelerator?
The MetaProp accelerator was a great experience for our company and for me. Aaron, Zach and Clelia have extensive networks in both the tech and real estate communities. As the CEO of a real estate tech startup, one of the biggest benefits for me was connecting with, and getting advice from, the founders and CEOs of more established real estate technology companies. The MetaProp program was instrumental in connecting me with the leaders of more established companies.
What was your favorite part about being in NYC?
The pizza. Being from Chicago, I’ll get crushed for saying this, but New York pizza is a lot better than the deep dish that Chicago is famous for. I especially fell in love with Joe’s (Greenwich Village) and Grimaldi’s.
Work-wise, NYC has the largest concentration of real estate tech companies in the world. Most of the later-stage companies that are more established, such as Hightower and StreetEasy, are in NY. By participating in the accelerator, and being in NYC, I’ve had the chance to spend time with Brandon Weber from Hightower and Susan Daimler from StreetEasy. They’ve provided really helpful suggestions and valuable advice.
What’s the one thing about your company/progress that you’d like to announce to the world?
A major product upgrade is coming in late Q1. This upgrade will include many of the most-requested features that our landlords are asking for; including the ability to customize rental application questions and the ability to fully edit the state-specific lease templates that we provide.
Radiator Labs
In the winter, your apartment’s heating system is blasting out heat at random hours of the night. Still, when it isn’t randomly shooting out fire, it’s making odd noises and wasting a lot of energy. If you want to cultivate your heat and think about your wallet (and the environment) then think about Cozy, the new system created by Radiator Labs. It can be installed in your home or apartment to eliminates waste from your heater.
CEO Dr. Marshall Cox tells us about their time with MetaProp as well “that they are expanding its offering” and giving you a better experience living in NYC apartments.
Give us a brief description of your company.
Radiator Labs, winner of the MIT Clean energy prize, the Popular Science Innovation Award, and the Verizon Powerful Answers award, has developed a product that eliminates the waste implicit in steam heated buildings. The system, called the Cozy, is a wireless, low-cost, and easily installed retrofit that drops on top of radiators to control indoor temperatures in buildings with radiator heat. In individual installations the system can eliminate overheating and vastly improve comfort. By retrofitting whole buildings, the Cozy redistributes steam flow to heat up colder rooms faster, saving up to 40% in heating costs and yielding a potential cumulative annual savings of $7 billion over the 120 million residential and commercial radiators in the United States. The Cozy is currently installed in 8 buildings in the New York City area, the majority of which are part of a technology demonstration study funded by the New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), which is externally validating energy savings over a two-year study period.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
In the US there are 120 million radiators, and well over 200 million worldwide. At current unit prices, this would yield a worldwide market of over $100b.
What’s the business model?
Radiator Labs currently sells directly to larger portfolios, but will be connecting with distribution partners in the future to meet the needs of smaller portfolios and individual customers.
How is it different?
The business model is not necessarily new, but the product is.
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
Radiator Labs has significantly expanded its customer base, and will have over 1,300 units installed throughout 8 buildings by the end of January.
What was the experience like working with the MetaProp Accelerator?
It was great! A lot of exposure to many different perspectives.
What was your favorite part about being in NYC?
Radiator Labs is based in Brooklyn – it’s great!
OPTii Solutions
For anyone who has ever managed large areas, private or public, knows the amount of communication it takes to be efficient and Slackis not really optimized for the housekeeping industry. Keeping up with who is cleaning what, and when one party is leaving and another arriving is a big headache that not enough walkie-talkies in the world can fix. But what can fix this is the OPTii Keeper. Created by OPTii Solutions, the Keeper turns your phone into your best friend at work, doing everything that you can’t – except for the actual work.
Today we sit down with Steven Spurgin to discuss the company that “prides itself on efficiency” and some of the impressive traction that the company has already shown.
Give us a brief description of your company.
Believe it or not, hotel housekeeping operations is chaos with massive impact on profit and on guest satisfaction. Clipboards, paper, pen, walkie talkies, poor training, difficult quality control, and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted every year. Optii Solutions is software that brings order to the chaos and lets hotel owners and managers be proactive in servicing their guests. OPTii Solutions provides a housekeeping turnkey software solution branded “OPTii Keeper” that utilize mobile technology, predictive cleaning times, inventory reporting and fully automated dispatch to assure that hotel rooms of the highest quality possible are available for guests when required. OPTii solutions was the first to market and remains the innovation leader in housekeeping automation. OPTii’s solutions are consistently increasing efficiency by 10-20% and are enabling high quality, measured and monitored cleanliness at levels never before achievable.
What’s the size of the market you are attacking?
Primary market is $1B hotel housekeeping software solution market.
What’s the business model?
Software as a Service
What inspired the business?
Founder Soenke Weiss working in the hospitality industry in Australia was motivated in his career to reduce the largest P&L item – housekeeping labor, and build controls around the largest factor in guest dissatisfaction – hotel room cleanliness. This motivation led to a solution be developed with a number of 5-star hotels and casinos and expanding from Asia-Pacific to Europe, the Middle East and now North American.
Are there other uses of your software outside of the hotel market?
Housekeeping is just the beginning. Optii Solutions is perfectly suited for managing cleaning and maintenance of public areas – a tool set that is needed both in hospitality and in other real estate sectors. Optii is currently in Beta with OPTii Public area with a large integrated resort and casino.
What kind of traction have you achieved since joining the Accelerator?
OPTii has secured a large anchor investor in NYC, secured corporate approval from Starwood, and signed its second commercial cleaning company focused on hotel housekeeping. OPTii has also gone live with its first two U.S. properties and installed its first corporate operated Rezidor property – the Radisson Blu Prague.
What was the experience like working with the MetaProp Accelerator? ?
It’s a longer program that required me to commit flying into New York each week while meeting the needs of Optii’s international business. I was skeptical given the nature of our business.
There’s some fun but, make no mistake, Celia, Zach and Aaron are really serious about this program. They show up and respond to every call and every email quickly. Before the program even started, they matched us with some of New York’s (and the world’s) biggest names in hotel development, ownership and management. Now, we get a lot of tactical, “roll-up-your-sleeves” interaction during office hours. Most obviously, weekly CEO “forum” meetings (three of us are engineer CEOs, two of us are former banker CEOs) give us a chance to share best practices while keeping a relentless, competitive focus on our growth metrics. That’s really valuable when you’re a start-up with dozens of competing priorities. At the same time, every week (and usually behind the scenes), the MetaProp NYC team finds time to meet, make calls and send emails, to help us with business development, fundraising, strategy, recruiting, and marketing/PR. At the end of each office hours we get food, drink and networking/education time with friendly VCs, real estate execs, and industry journalists. Then, we come back the next week and do it all again!
This program can be intense, challenging, and exhausting. But, looking back, the growth and real estate access make me feel like we’re now bringing a fighter jet to a knife fight.
What was your favorite part about being in NYC?
On a personal level – NYC has always been one of my favorite cities in the world to work and play. On a professional level, NYC represents the heartbeat of commercial real estate and CRE Tech. Through MetaProps introduction to CRE and CRE Tech leaders, the company and me personally have gained relationships that are irreplaceable. These relationships – professional and personal represent the most exciting part of this journey.
What’s the one thing about your company/progress that you’d like to announce to the world?
OPTii is pleased to announce the formal Beta Program for it OPTii Pubic Area application, a cousin to OPTii Keeper. OPTii PA expands the management capabilities of luxury and resort operators as it is designed for managing and inspection of commercial real estate spaces. The company is accepting limited applicants for production Beta clients in both hospitality and commercial real estate markets.
