Mr. Romito, 30, is the founder and chief executive of View the Space, a new real estate technology business that creates online video tours, primarily of office space, and provides data-tracking services to commercial real estate companies, among them SL Green Realty, Vornado Realty Trust and Silverstein Properties.
Before starting the business last year, Mr. Romito worked as a commercial broker and tenant and landlord representative.
Q. How has business been so far?
A. Business is good. We launched the beta version of the Web site about a year ago, and this April was when we took the beta logo off and decided that we were at a point where we could start charging for the product. We’ve grown extraordinarily fast, but that’s a good thing.
Q. Are you profitable yet?
A. We had profitability in May, then like most start-up companies we scaled up. We hit profitability again in October.
I put in all my life savings, which was roughly $50,000 to $100,000, with my wife’s help. As we were going into the market and trying to get people to believe in our dream it gets rough. But we actually got really lucky and found some great partners — a syndicate of hedge fund professionals who knew commercial real estate and invest in start-ups — who liked our idea. We raised about $650,000.
Q. Let’s talk about the services you provide.
A. As you probably know, commercial real estate is an antiquated business, more or less reluctant to embrace technology. We thought we were a crazy enough bunch to change that. We decided we could improve the process by taking it online from start to finish. So for us that means video. We’ve created a style of shooting video for office space that’s really never existed. Ours is the closest thing to actually being there, where you fly through the space and you actually feel like you’re in it. You just can’t touch the walls.
On the landlord side, we allow you to track how a person is interacting with the tour. So you get to see 1) the prospect who’s looking at it; 2) how many times they’ve watched it; and 3) how engaged are they with it. You’ll actually be able to tell whether a specific firm has taken the tour 10 times — that’s a very, very high level of engagement — and they’re a serious prospect so I’m going to follow up with them.
Q. What kind of analytics software accomplishes this?
A. We had to build a pretty serious back end of data that’s taken us awhile. You’ve got I.P. addresses all over the place, so we had to build a library of those, which we can identify for the most part which companies are viewing your space.
Q. And how do the clients see this information?
A. They can see it in real time whenever they want — from their dashboard. And if they’re not online we’ll e-mail it to them.
Q. Has this service helped to sell property faster?
A. Yeah. We’re at about 1.5 million square feet leased on View the Space since December 2011.
Q. How many clients do you have right now?
A. Over 50. We’ve got most of the larger commercial real estate institutions both on the public and private side.
It’s funny, when we first started, our thesis was that we would get all of the smaller landlords on board first because we have more access to them. But because we worked so tightly with the brokerage community to build this, SL Green caught wind of what we were doing very quickly and they ended up being our first big client.
So it’s kind of like a domino effect where you get the SL Greens of the world soon enough the Silversteins and all the other players want to find out what you’re doing.
Q. Where do you hope to see your business in, say, the next five to 10 years?
A. We think that technology is here to stay in commercial real estate. And we see us growing, hopefully, in every major market. We’re actively in 10 markets right now.
New York right now is probably 60 percent of the activity that we have.
Q. You don’t have a technology background, do you?
A. I don’t. During the first year of development I was still a broker. I tried to outsource the first part of this to India, which was a very painful process. You’ve got to start your day at 4 a.m., because of the time difference, and the language barrier was very difficult. Not only was I trying to learn Hindi, but also the language of technology.
Q. So when you’re not learning new languages, what do you do for fun?
A. I surf. That was more or less my life growing up on the Jersey Shore. In Toms River.
Q. Were you or your family affected by Hurricane Sandy?
A. My mom lost her house. She got a couple of feet of water, and now they’ll have to demo the house.
But as long as everyone is O.K., it’s just stuff. I think everybody down there is so resilient, and this is like when everybody really comes together.
The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito
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The 30-Minute Interview: The 30-Minute Interview With Nick J. Romito
