The team at Building Engines is celebrating an exciting feature story in VentureFizz “Building Engines: A Property Management Software Success Story”
Even with a growing number of real estate tech companies in the Boston area, it’s clear that Building Engines has solidified itself as a major player in the industry.
It has a platform built on 17 years of innovation, a history of success-against-adversity, and an ever-growing team to take it to new heights.
The article may reveal some things you didn’t know about our organization:
1. The company’s first product vision was to build a PIM (Personal Information Manager) for property managers, before expanding into a comprehensive operating platform for real estate managers. At the time, the firm was named Requestcom, Inc.
2. The rise of the internet gave way to our growth, with our two founders, John Childs and David Osborn, recognizing the opportunity of the internet and mobile technology as a means to transform an antiquated business.
“John was fascinated by technology and the application of the Internet as a way to expedite building management information,” said CMO Scott Sidman, who has been with the company since 2003. “Oz came up with the idea of applying the Internet and mobile technology to all of the daily activities of a professional property management team.
3. September 11 had a major impact on the industry,
9/11 changed the way that people access and enter buildings – customers began to use our technology to control and manage the access of people entering the building, giving rise to the Visitor Access Manager Module.
4. “Engines” was added in 2004 as the company added and improved functionality and features to our modern-day, integrated platform of powerful data and communication “engines.” We became Building Engines, Inc. in 2004.
5. We thrived despite the 2008 crash, which affected the stock market and real estate market.
“Post-crash, we hit this inflection point when owners, usually focused on buying and selling buildings, turned their focus back to managing them,” the CMO said. “Transactional funding dried up, so the owners focused on promoting efficiency and ways to maximize NOI [Net Operating Income]. The logical answer was technology. We were well positioned when that transition came and the market started to buy. That was the beginning of our accelerated growth.”
6. We took our first round of funding in 2016, raising $26M with WaveCrest Growth Partners, a private equity firm to accelerate growth and product development.
7. Our new office is pretty sweet, boasting the best view of Boston (we think, anyway) and 16,000 square feet of collaborative workspace. Our grand opening was a blast.
8. Our acquisition of AwareManager pushed us over the 2B square foot mark.
“We think about things in terms of square feet—that’s kind of the industry metric for everything. Before this acquisition, we were at about 1.7 billion square feet across the United States and Canada, which is somewhere between 17,000 and 18,000 buildings. We’re gaining around half a billion square feet more through the acquisition, so we will just cross the 2 billion square foot mark, which is a great number for us.” – CMO Scott Sidman
Thank you to the team at VentureFizz for the great writeup, and to all of our customers and partners who have been part of our journey to-date.
