The operating system for commercial real estate - leasing, data, marketing, and tenant experience on a single platform.
VTS, photographed at scale: 13 billion square feet of buildings, one login. New York City, est. 2012.
In 2011, two friends who grew up surfing the same New Jersey beaches put every dollar they had into an unlikely idea: filming empty office space in Manhattan. The company was called View the Space, and the pitch was modest - HD video tours so a broker could show a floor without walking a client through it. It found an early believer in SL Green, one of New York's largest landlords. But the real product was still hiding inside the founders' own frustration.
Nick Romito and Ryan Masiello had both spent years as commercial real estate brokers before they wrote a line of code. They knew the industry ran on spreadsheets emailed back and forth, deal pipelines tracked in a dozen incompatible files, and market intelligence that was often months out of date by the time anyone read it. So they pivoted. View the Space became VTS - a platform for managing leasing and asset portfolios - and the company set out to become the place where the work of commercial real estate actually happens.
What VTS does
VTS builds cloud software for the people who own, lease, and operate commercial buildings. At its core is leasing and asset management: a shared system of record where landlords and brokers track available spaces, deals in motion, tenant relationships, and portfolio revenue in one place instead of scattered files. Over the following decade the company layered on marketing tools, a real-time market data product, and - through acquisition - a tenant and resident experience platform. The result is less a single app than a connected stack that follows a building from the moment a space goes on the market to the day a tenant swipes into the lobby.
Who its customers are
VTS sells to institutional landlords, asset managers, and brokerages - the largest names in the business. Its customer roster reads like an index of global real estate capital: Blackstone, Brookfield Properties, Hines, LaSalle Investment Management, BXP, Oxford Properties, JLL, and CBRE. The company reports more than 45,000 real estate professionals and over 1.2 million total users on the platform, spanning 42 countries. That concentration at the top of the market is the point - once the biggest asset managers standardize on a system, the brokers and tenants who transact with them tend to follow.
The problems it solves
Commercial real estate long ran on disconnected tools - deal pipelines in spreadsheets, marketing in another system, market data bought from third parties and already stale. VTS consolidates that work.
How it's different
Because so much of the market's leasing flows through VTS, the platform can turn that activity into live market intelligence that standalone tools can't match. Competitors sell modules; VTS sells a connected system whose data gets more valuable the more the industry uses it.
Bars scaled for comparison. Figures per VTS public announcements (2025-2026).
VTS grew from a single leasing tool into a connected stack. Each layer feeds the next - and the data across all of them now fuels the company's AI push.
The flagship leasing and asset management product. Shared tools and insights for everyone accountable to portfolio revenue - spaces, buildings, markets, and tenants in one system of record.
Digital marketing and online listings for brokers and landlords, with real-time insight into listing performance, demand, and virtual tours.
Real-time market intelligence built from leasing activity flowing through the platform - designed to replace outdated third-party market reports.
Tenant and resident experience plus property operations, built on the Rise Buildings and Lane acquisitions. Now the largest resident experience platform in the world.
An AI layer across the platform. Asset Intelligence turns static lease documents into dynamic operational insight that powers compliance, renewals, and asset-lifecycle decisions.
Business model
VTS runs a B2B enterprise SaaS model. Landlords, asset managers, and brokerages pay subscription fees for platform access, typically priced by portfolio size, square footage, or seats. Growth comes from expansion - selling additional modules (Lease, Market, Data, Activate, AI) deeper into a customer's portfolio - and from acquisitions that add entirely new product layers, as Rise Buildings and Lane did for tenant experience.
Where it fits within the market
VTS operates in proptech, specifically the commercial real estate software category. Its competition includes broad platforms like Yardi's CommercialEdge and MRI Software, valuation and asset tools like Altus ARGUS Enterprise, and tenant-experience specialists such as HqO and Entrata. VTS's distinction is breadth backed by data: rather than owning one slice, it aims to be the connected system of record across leasing, marketing, data, and tenant experience - with a scale of proprietary building data few rivals can match.
Expertise
The company's core expertise is domain depth. Its founders came out of brokerage, and that shows in a product built to match how leasing and asset teams actually work rather than forcing them onto a generic CRM. On top of that sits genuine data and engineering scale - the ability to aggregate leasing activity across billions of square feet and, increasingly, to apply AI to tasks like lease abstraction that the industry historically did by hand.
Institutional landlords, asset managers, and brokerages - including most of the largest names in global real estate.
Romito and Masiello launch a video-tour platform for NYC office space and sign anchor customer SL Green.
View The Space, Inc. is founded in New York, soon pivoting from video tours to leasing and portfolio management.
VTS merges with rival leasing platform Hightower, consolidating the CRE leasing software market.
Digital marketing and online listing tools arrive as the industry moves to virtual leasing.
VTS launches its real-time data product and acquires Rise Buildings (~$100M) and Lane to build tenant experience.
CBRE leads a $125M+ Series E, takes a board seat, and values VTS at $1.7 billion.
VTS launches VTS AI and reports record growth across 13B+ sq ft and 42 countries.
AI-driven lease abstraction arrives for asset management teams inside the platform.
Founders
Nick Romito - Co-Founder & CEO. Spent years as a tenant-rep and landlord broker in NYC before founding VTS.
Ryan Masiello - Co-Founder. Former broker at Cushman & Wakefield and JLL, advising landlords and tenants in the Manhattan office market.
Karl Baum - Co-Founder & former CTO. Software engineer, previously a Vice President at Goldman Sachs.
Funding
Co-founders Nick Romito and Ryan Masiello were lifelong friends who grew up surfing together in New Jersey.
VTS began as "View the Space," a service for HD video tours of NYC office space, before pivoting to leasing software.
Both principal founders worked as commercial real estate brokers before building software for the industry.
Co-founder Karl Baum was previously a Vice President at Goldman Sachs.
CBRE is both one of VTS's largest investors and one of its customers - and holds a board seat.
VTS builds cloud software for commercial real estate - covering leasing, asset management, digital marketing, market data, and tenant/resident experience - on a single platform used by landlords, brokers, and property teams.
VTS comes from "View the Space," the company's original name when it offered HD video tours of office space before pivoting to leasing management software.
VTS was founded in 2012 in New York by Nick Romito (CEO), Ryan Masiello, and Karl Baum. Romito and Masiello were commercial real estate brokers before starting the company.
VTS was valued at $1.7 billion following its $125M+ Series E led by CBRE in September 2022, and has raised roughly $451M in equity in total.
VTS is used by 19 of the 20 largest global asset managers and over 45,000 professionals, including Blackstone, Brookfield, Hines, JLL, and CBRE, across more than 13 billion square feet of real estate.