Brendan Wallace’s Post

Transcript

So one of the questions that we're often asked is. What was the deal or what was the company that gave you the insight to this kind of unique model that 5th Wall became And specifically that model is how we brought in SLP's. These non traditional investors, these owners and operators and developers have real estate could be customers of the tech we were investing in. And I have a very specific answer to that. I remember distinctly which deal it was who did it and why I thought it was so powerful and it was really the. Conception. It was the genesis of 5th Wall that came out of seeing that deal. And that deal was when Blackstone where I actually used to work Blackstones Real Estate Group invested in VTS, the leasing and asset management software. This deal predates 5th Wall, but I remember reading about it in the Wall Street Journal at the time. And I was like, holy, this is, this is like an amazing deal on so many levels. One, because you have Blackstone, which is the biggest name in real estate. They are the largest institutional owner of, you know, commercial buildings in the US and they are going to play kingmaker for this company. I'm not sure if the article actually mentioned the term kingmaker, but I certainly interpreted that way and at the time VTS was very much. In a head-to-head competition with another software business and this kind of squarely gave them a huge competitive edge. It also sent an amazing signal to the rest of the real estate industry that Blackstone had endorsed this company as kind of the, you know, the solution of choice for them. And obviously that was going to lead to a lot of other large real estate companies adopting them. So much so that you know the the head of Blackstone Real Estate, John Gray was like on the website of VTS at the time. And so that deal totally inspired 5th Walls model. In fact, I went to Blackstone shortly after that and proposed that. We should do deals like that together and that actually got the conversation started around the business that 5th Wall would ultimately become. But that was a landmark deal. That deal I think put prop tech on the map. That deal put this unique model of kind of kingmaking between you know strategic investors and prop tech businesses. It was the insight behind that. It was I think game changing so. Congrats and by the way 5th Wall actually ended up investing in VTS shortly after we founded our first fund, we followed on to Blackstone. We brought in a lot of our strategic LP's groups like you know Heinz and others that had invested in our first fund. So we kind of piled on, but actually that deal totally predates us and it was awesome to see. So Congrats obviously to you know Nick and Ryan and the whole team at at VTS. Congrats to Blackstone. But that was the genesis of what ultimately became 5th Wall.