Our Investment in Occupier

Today, more than ever, companies are rethinking their real estate strategies and looking for tools to help make more informed and dynamic decisions. The pandemic interrupted our lives and accelerated key trends around the way we live, work, and shop. Ecommerce adoption jumped forward 5-10 years and remote work has been tested on a mass scale. As a result, every business is considering how to best use their offices, where to hire talent, and the optimal locations for stores and warehouses.

To manage their real estate portfolios, landlords have experienced teams of leasing professionals, brokers, asset managers, property managers, and accountants, these teams are often bolstered with industry leading software from JD Edwards to Yardi to VTS.

But what about the businesses that occupy those spaces? Most companies rely on email, excel, and PDFs to find space and communicate with their advisors. Leases and key real estate data is often buried in shared folders or, in some cases, managed on legacy software platforms or outsourced.

Andrew Flint, Matt Giffune, and Erik Pearson launched Occupier in 2018 to help companies modernize the way they find and manage real estate by centralizing the way they work. Today, Occupier is an integrated lease transaction, administration, and accounting solution that helps businesses and their advisors find and manage their leases globally. Occupier is becoming the system of record for tenants’ real estate data and surfaces key information, such as new leases, amendments, terminations, and key dates to the right people at the right times. Increasingly, brokers and CPAs are also relying on Occupier to streamline the experience of site selection, deal negotiation, lease management, accounting, and compliance.

One of the most compelling elements of Occupier is the founding team. As alumni of JLL and VTS, Andrew, Matt, and Erik are uniquely positioned to tackle this problem. Since we have gotten to know them, they’ve built a product led organization and continued to attract incredible talent to the team. We’ve seen Occupier collaborate closely with customers on their product roadmap, rapidly iterate and launch features, and grow their customer base by 400% in 2020 alone. Today, Occupier is used by leading companies including DraftKings, Outdoor Voices, Shake Shack, Bluestone Lane Coffee, and Bonobos as well as tenant representatives and advisors at JLL, CBRE and T3Advisors.

As companies scale globally, managing their real estate portfolio becomes more complex and software becomes more valuable. This need is increasing as businesses of all sizes consider more satellite offices and coworking spaces to accommodate distributed teams and more flexible working arrangements. In addition, new lease accounting standards coming into effect will require companies to account for real estate expenses on their balance sheet by 2022. Solutions like Occupier will streamline compliance, reduce friction, and save time on reporting.

Occupier has always been focused on helping tenants make smarter and faster real estate decisions that align with their business goals. As the commercial real estate industry continues to move online, there is an opportunity to provide more transparency, insight, and market intelligence to occupiers and to help facilitate more efficient transactions between tenants, landlords, brokers, and everyone else involved in corporate real estate.

We are excited to be part of Occupier’s journey and invest alongside MetaProp, Second Century Ventures, and other real estate leaders in Occupier’s $5M seed round.

Learn more about what Occupier is building by visiting their website or tuning into their podcast, Fully Occupied.