![2x1]()
Summary List PlacementThe pandemic has upended the real-estate industry, forcing offices and shops to reinvent themselves and causing millions of Americans to relocate or reconsider their home bases for work, financial, or personal reasons.
Against this backdrop, we're spotlighting professionals who are thriving, seizing opportunities despite, or because of, COVID-19's effects on commercial and residential real estate in the US.
These 30 young professionals stood out as the vanguard of the next generation in real estate, from prodigies who've risen through the ranks and innovated at established firms to startup founders looking to disrupt pockets of the sector with deeply traditional roots.
Selecting these finalists was challenging. We received hundreds of nominations for inspiring figures, from bosses, colleagues, clients, recruiters, and others in the industry. We asked that nominees be 35 or under, be based in the US, and stand out from their peers. Our editors made the final decisions.
We've included people with a variety of roles and experiences. Some come from finance behemoths like Blackstone and JPMorgan, others from industry mainstays like CBRE, Colliers, Savills, Cushman & Wakefield, and JLL. Top-selling, trend-setting brokers hail from Compass and Brown Harris Stevens. Then there are the startups, like Mosaic and Doorkee, whose names you might not recognize now but are bound to sooner than later.
Below, meet the rising stars of real estate in 2020, listed in alphabetical order by first name.
Adam Pittenger, 31, Moved
![]()
Adam Pittenger moved apartments in New York nine times in eight years.
Before starting Moved, a company that pairs people relocating with moving companies and storage services, the Lehigh graduate worked as a product manager for the dynamic-pricing startup Qbeats and social talent sourcing software firm SelectMinds, which Oracle bought.
"I began my career in the New York startup scene and happened to move around the city a lot, from apartment to apartment," Pittenger said. "The more I moved, the more frustrated I became with the experience and finally set out to fix it."
Moving was a stressful task embedded in an old-school industry primed for disruption and modernization. So in 2016 he founded Moved, touted as a one-stop shop for relocators that gathers multiple price quotes for movers. Customers can get the best deal — as well as related services from packing supplies and updating addresses to coordinating with property managers and finding locations to donate unneeded items.
The millennials who were its primary clientele relocated more than other generations, tending to rent rather than buy. A concierge for the whole process that is, at its heart, a software company, Moved also offers a human assistant to wrangle tasks and scheduling, as well ensure the best and fair prices. The tools are free for users, but many vendors pay Moved a commission.
In 2018, Moved announced that it had raised $3.2 million in seed funding from Lowe's Ventures, the early-stage investment division of the home-improvement juggernaut, as well as other firms. As of November 2020, Pittenger told Business Insider, the company has raised $7.7 million with Lowe's, RET Ventures, AngelPad, FJ Labs, Company Ventures, and others.
This year, Moved's services became more relevant than ever, Pittenger said in a Medium post in April. Because of the coronavirus, Moved started offering contactless moves. As COVID-19 led students, young professionals, and families to migrate to new locations, demand skyrocketed from people who needed to move out of apartments or empty out office space but who could not be on-site.
"Our founding was based on a simple concept … moving sucks," Pittenger wrote on Medium. "The global pandemic currently on hand hasn't altered that mission. If anything, it's strengthened it."
Ashley Socarras, 35, Lloyd Jones
![]()
Ashley Socarras is the executive vice president of acquisitions at Lloyd Jones, a Miami-based real-estate development, investment, and management firm that operates in Florida, Texas, and other parts of the southeastern US.
Her interest in the industry dates back to college. While studying criminal justice and police science at Florida International University, Socarras found her passion outside the classroom.
"In college I accepted a part-time position in a commercial real-estate office. At the time, I was majoring in another subject, but it wasn't long before I realized that real estate was the industry I wanted to be in," Socarras, who also earned an MBA from FIU, told Business Insider.
Socarras, who is bilingual in English and Spanish, started as an analyst at Lloyd Jones in 2016 and has been promoted four times since.
Socarras has played a critical role in the acquisition or disposition of more than 4,000 multifamily units across the southeast valued at over $750 million. Lloyd Jones itself is an established private-equity firm that acquires, improves, and operates multifamily real estate in growth markets on behalf of its institutional partners, private investors, and their own principals.
She has also played a key role in bettering Lloyd Jones' financial models, which have streamlined the underwriting process for her team of analysts.
Brian K. Hinds Jr, 33, Bridge Investment Group
![]()
Brian K. Hinds bought his first multifamily property when he was just a 24 year old working as an investment banker at JPMorgan.
Hinds, who had developed an aversion to renting while earning his bachelor's degree at Rutgers, renovated and lived out of the Newark, New Jersey, property, which had three units and a basement. It was his first introduction to real estate.
Now he's a vice president at Bridge Investment Group, focusing on acquisitions and developments for the firm's opportunity zone strategy, finding, negotiating, and doing due diligence on East Coast targets. Investment into opportunity zones, or low-income areas, have been popular with real-estate investors because of tax-break incentives coupled with pouring money into a community that needs it.
In this role, he's been able to help lead development in neighborhoods like the one he grew up in Brooklyn, New York, working with local politicians to make sure the development will "help the community."
Earlier this year, Hinds brought a deal to his adopted hometown of Newark, a $191 million, 370-unit multifamily building across the street from Newark Penn Station.
"There are not a lot of major institutions jumping at the bit to do a deal in Newark, it's hard to get institutional capital into Newark," Hinds said.
Part of his strategy to close the deal was to show that he invested his own money into the city, with the three-unit home he purchased back in 2012. The deal went through.
"For me, that's my bragging rights," Hinds said. "It's not often that you get to brag about a city you live in and a project you did there."
Derek Wilson, 34, Cortland
![]()
As vice president of construction and renovation for Cortland Build, a global company that specializes in new-builds and renovations, Derek Wilson oversees multifamily renovation projects, budgets, reports, and more.
The 2008 Ohio State graduate joined Cortland six years ago as a manager overseeing the construction cycle of individual job sites from permitting to occupancy, primarily for multifamily apartment buildings or complexes in Kentucky and Tennessee. Under his watch, Cortland's rentals and condos were transformed into "lifestyle communities" with ample, modern amenities for residents like clubhouses, gyms and events. Adding to the challenge is Wilson's charge to overhaul residential complexes while they are already occupied.
Cortland is a multifamily real estate investment, development and management company with more than 180 apartment communities made up of more than 60,000 homes across the US.
Wilson quickly rose through the ranks to become the company's director of construction in the Midwest, where he oversaw the renovation of over 5,600 apartments. In 2015, he was awarded Cortland's Construction Manager of the Year, and in November 2018 he was promoted to his current role, vice president of construction and renovation. Since then, he's led the completion of more than 8,000 apartment home renovations. Today, based in Columbus, Ohio, Wilson manages active renovation projects in 10 states with a profit & loss statement of about $140 million. He has taken the pandemic in stride, acknowledging and addressing the safety concerns around construction sites calmly and with a steady hand.
As a leader, he has implemented changes to better many sides of the business, including budgeting, reporting, business intelligence, staffing, cost control, and contracting. For example, Wilson has led the charge to improve his firm's approach to renovations, pushing not just his company but the construction industry forward with new efficient initiatives. For one, he was instrumental in Cortland Build's adoption of a cloud-based construction management technology, BuilderEdge, which has played a key role in streamlining his firm's supply chain integration, speeding up projects' turnaround times, increasing volume, and delivering a better resident experience (because more efficient construction means less disruption in their daily lives).
He notched these accomplishments in addition to managing the purchasing of overseas materials and onshore logistics, and creating a "kitting solution" for packaging, delivering, and storing full product renovation sets to renovation sites.
Emily Neff, 32, CBRE
![]()
Emily Neff's year changed drastically in March as offices closed across the world. Her clients, who usually would ask her about how much office space they need and how they should use it, were now asking her how they could use the offices at all.
"That's been a curveball that's been thrown at us," Neff said.
Neff stepped up to help CBRE pioneer its Workplace Reset service, which prepares companies to reenter the office during a global pandemic. She's been navigating clients on which safety measures to put in place, which signage should be set up around the office, and overall office design. She's also been advising them on the price of all these changes.
"We help clients understand how much it will cost to make these changes and reopen, and are those costs worth it," Neff said. "We help them understand the road map to reopen."
While she's become a trusted confidante for some of the biggest corporations in unprecedented times, Neff's original plan was to advise families, as a financial planner. She studied it at Ohio State, and spent her first year out of school at the life insurance and retirement provider John Hancock.
When she realized that her career path would require as much sales as consultation, she began to look for a new career. She started at CBRE in 2011.
"Real estate brought what I wanted: engaging with people to help them implement their plans," Neff told Business Insider.
Early on at CBRE, she worked on the internal strategy team, called Workplace 360, eventually managing from 2013 to 2016. Her team helped to pioneer new ways to set up the office, making it more flexible, useful, and higher service for CBRE employees, with the hope of also passing on those learnings to CBRE's clients.
Though she's been focusing on external clients for four years now, she looks back fondly on the influence she had in that time, and the lessons she's brought to her external clients.
"The 10 CBRE offices that opened within those couple of years are a direct impact I made on the company," Neff said.
Drew Sterrett, 28, Lex Markets
![]()
Drew Sterrett had an epiphany while chatting with a colleague as they both worked into the night at his previous job as a private-equity analyst at the investment firm Tungsten Partners.
"We were speaking about alternative investments, and I realized that real estate is one of the oldest and largest wealth creators, yet there is no way to own it directly through public, liquid securities," Sterrett said. "How could that be?"
In 2017, Sterrett, who is 28, cofounded LEX Markets, an exchange that will allow landlords to securitize and sell ownership interests in property. In December, the company will begin securitizing its first deals, he said.
LEX won't market or sell the securities itself; rather, it will handle the technical and logistical aspects of converting real-estate equity into tradable stocks and operate an exchange on which they can be sold. For tax and financing reasons, the firm said owners would be able to use the platform to sell only minority ownership interests in property below 50%.
Until now, the closest thing to buying real-estate securities was to purchase shares in a real-estate investment trust, a type of public company structured to own property assets. Sterrett points out that owning direct securities versus REIT stock will allow investors to enjoy the tax benefits of depreciation from the property.
He also believes the shares will remain better connected to the underlying property's value. REIT prices have fallen in recent years below the net value of their assets because of outside factors, such as interest rates and the trajectory of the stock market.
Sterrett estimates there will be billions of dollars of demand in the real-estate equity securitization market, from which LEX could earn a lucrative stream of fees.
"We have some of the largest asset owners looking to do equity recapitalizations through this kind of securitization," Sterrett said.
Eric Siegel, 33, Basis Investment Group
![]()
For Eric Siegel, assistant vice president at Basis Investment Group, real estate wasn't part of his original plan. He started off studying psychology at the University of Rochester, but when he discovered the price of graduate school — and that he was the only one on his dorm floor paying for his own education — his life took a turn.
"I wanted to understand money more, and I needed to think more seriously about how it works," Siegel said.
He transferred to Baruch College to study finance, and after graduation, amid the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, he worked at a small bank writing loans, and then at a small investment bank. He saw firsthand the destruction that the recession caused across the real-estate sector, and his fascination with how the system worked drew him further into real estate.
He now works in the structured-equity group at Basis Investment Group, where he does everything from sourcing to preliminary analyses of deals. The tasks range from ground-up redevelopment to purchases of properties from hotels to self-storage. In June, he worked on the team that invested $22 million in structured equity into a multifamily property in Indianapolis, Basis's first fully sourced and closed transaction since the start of the pandemic.
He told us that he's especially proud to be sourcing opportunities for the firm's $410 million property fund, which is invested across a range of asset classes. According to a retirement-plan presentation for Connecticut state employees, the fund generated returns of 7.68% in the 12 months ending June 30.
Since the pandemic started, Siegel relocated from New York City to Bogota, Colombia, where his family lives. Siegel said that Basis, where he isn't the only professional with immediate family overseas, is an easier place for him to work than other companies where he'd be the odd one out. It's one of the rare real-estate investment funds run by a Black woman, Tammy K. Jones.
"The first thing I do when I get my bonus, I send it overseas," Siegel said.
Erik Conover, 31, Nest Seekers
![]()
Erik Conover is the YouTube-famous real-estate agent followed by nearly 1,500,000 people. A graduate from Northeastern University with degrees in public advocacy and rhetoric as well as a minor in business marketing, he's leveraged his marketing knowledge into a YouTube channel, which he started in 2015 and has garnered 111 million views since.
An entrepreneur, host, traveler, fitness enthusiast, and content creator, Conover isn't the typical agent. Growing up in the working-class town of Absecon, New Jersey, Erik was conditioned to work hard, and he brought his ambition to New York City in 2013, where he started his YouTube channel two years later.
Having built his YouTube following over the past three years, Conover uses his platform to showcase property, and since launching with Nest Seekers he's been showing nonstop. On day one, as a licensed agent in New York, October 5, he came out of the gates with over $100 million in listing inventory, and currently holds a number of notable listings worth tens of millions of dollars.
In 2018, he realized real-estate content resonated with his audience, and that there was major interest in the luxury real-estate arena. From there he's collaborated with top agent and Bravo star Ryan Serhant, Kevin O'Leary from ABC's "Shark Tank," and brands like Dyson and American Express to further his industry presence.
Previously named to Business Insider's list of New York's biggest influencers, Conover is always looking forward, and has plans to bring his real-estate content abroad.
Jason Tenenbaum, 31, Prologis
![]()
Jason Tenenbaum recently moved to Miami to take up the helm of industrial real-estate giant Prologis' South Florida market.
Tenenbaum, who as market officer oversees leasing and operations for its properties in the area, was promoted in May after four years of rising through the ranks in its New York and New Jersey offices. He used to manage leases and operations at specific buildings, but now he's managing a market with 600 tenants, with somewhere between 150 to 200 transactions a year.
Tenenbaum has always loved buildings, studying architecture at Clemson University, before an opportunity at Cushman & Wakefield as an office leasing broker brought him to his current role.
"I started to develop my brand and to see what I liked of other people's styles in order to see the type of professional I'd like to become," Tenenbaum said.
He joined Prologis, the largest logistics real-estate investment trust in the country because he wanted to learn the ownership and development side of the business and learn it from the "biggest and the best."
One of the biggest deals Tenenbaum has worked on was the subject of some major news this year. Prologis Bronx, a 200,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bronx that was once a carpet and home goods store, was leased by Amazon after its former tenant, Walmart's Jet.com, left the space.
The warehouse, which Prologis bought in 2017, was an early example of logistics companies converting other property types into last-mile distribution hubs as e-commerce numbers climb steadily year after year.
"It kick-started a wave of focus in the boroughs on multistory projects, I'm really proud of it," Tenenbaum said.
Jessica McCarthy, 28, Blueground
![]()
Jessica McCarthy landed her first job in home decor six years ago, first as a design manager and then the creative director for Decorist, an online interior-design startup that pairs professionals with homeowners or renters looking to make over their spaces without any in-person site visits.
What's now evolved into a full-fledged e-design industry was then a nascent field, she told Business Insider, and she saw opportunities to "disrupt" traditional interior design with tech smarts and virtual tools.
"Online interior design is the future because it creates accessibility in an industry that has always been very traditional and out of reach for the normal person," McCarthy told Business Insider. "A client can live in middle America and work with a well-known designer in NYC. This has never been possible until now."
Along with a base of everyday clients, McCarthy worked with celebrities and influencers like actress Jamie Chung, Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine, "Bachelorette" 11th-season lead Kaitlyn Bristowe (who just won "Dancing With The Stars") to retool their homes, with her work recognized by Architectural Digest, Vogue Living, and Elle Decor.
The Los Angeles' Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising graduate then pivoted into real estate, joining global proptech startup Blueground. Founded in 2013, Blueground is a furnished apartment-rental company that leases more than 3,500 apartments in desirable locations in 12 cities from Chicago and Seattle to London and Dubai.
After the units are secured, McCarthy oversees the team that furnishes them, equipping them with top furniture, luxury linens, high-speed Wi-Fi, a workout Mirror, and other gadgets. The move-in-ready apartments are then rented out for as little as 30 days up to multiple years.
As the company's first global director of design, McCarthy is responsible for making Blueground's rentals stylish and homey despite limited square footage. The role allows her to "reimagine the intersection of real estate and hospitality," said McCarthy, who is based in San Francisco.
When designing Blueground apartments, she struggled to find furniture that toed the line between traditional and trendy. So McCarthy spearheaded the launch of Blueground by Home, a collection of exclusive furniture from end tables to sofas available for sale, with new products added in September.
John Fagan, 32, Doorkee
![]()
John Fagan is the cofounder and CEO of the startup Doorkee, a digital platform that connects people moving out of apartments with people who want to move in.
The New York-based peer-to-peer company aims to supplant rental brokers (who can command hefty fees) via a combination of software and help from departing tenants.
Fagan was a lawyer and management consultant before he struggled during his own apartment search. He knew in August 2017 that his apartment lease would not be renewed that December. Most landlords couldn't say if they would have available units that far in advance.
Just by searching listings on their own, Fagan and a friend found a pad with a private roof deck, but brokers got involved and wanted $8,000 in fees, Fagan told Crunchbase News. They lost the apartment while trying to negotiate down the broker fee.
"I had an abysmal experience finding a new apartment, and I wasn't alone — everyone has a moving horror story. Intuitively, I knew the solution to fix the broken rental process, and I couldn't let my institutional inexperience hold me back," said Fagan, who earned a bachelor's and a JD from Fordham University.
Fagan told Business Insider in September that because he and Franklin lacked real-estate backgrounds, they looked to New York landlords to invest in the company and guide them into the industry.
"Not having real-estate experience was a double-edged sword," Fagan said in September. "It took us a lot longer after identifying the problem [of exorbitant and unnecessary broker fees], we had to take one and a half years to get the lay of the land."
In 2019, Fagan and Jordan Franklin launched Doorkee. In June, Crunchbase reported that the company is backed by a $5.7 million seed fund. Major landlords including Simon Baron Development and Stonehenge, which operate a total of 40,000 New York City apartments, have supported Doorkee with funding or are clients.
The platform incentivizes departing tenants to give early notice of their plans to move out — about $1,000, on average — in exchange for providing prospective tenants with access to their apartments. They can offer virtual or in-person tours.
Apartment seekers can then find and close on their next apartment on their own schedule, months earlier than before, and long before the apartment is posed on traditional real-estate listing sites. Landlords are on board because Doorkee can reduce vacancies between tenants from three to six weeks to days, plus they save on the costs of listing the apartment and a potential broker fee. Doorkee is free to post. Landlords pay Doorkee a fee if the new lease is signed on the platform.
The pandemic has heightened the need to secure a new home in advance and completely online. New York City landlords who historically have relied on certified checks and a paper lease are finding they need to adapt to combat the sky-high vacancy rate.
The next step: expansion. Fagan told Business Insider that while Doorkee operates only in New York City right now, he plans on rolling out the service to more cities in 2021.
Justine Chan, 31, Live With Plum
![]()
When Justine Chan was a child, she watched her parents build a real-estate portfolio in her home city of Singapore. The couple's smart investments in residential properties, which they used for rental income while holding down full-time jobs, allowed them to retire early.
Chan left the nation-state to obtain a bachelor of science degree from New York University and then an MBA from Yale. Inspired by her parents' approach to wealth-building, she purchased her first property after graduate school: a studio near Gramercy Park. It was this decision, she told Business Insider, that kick-started her desire to pursue real estate as a career.
She later sold that studio and bought another one, near Hudson Yards, that she could easily rent out. After that, she nabbed a three-bedroom apartment in the Melrose neighborhood of the South Bronx, asking $375,000. There, she used Craigslist and her own social-media networks to find roommates. In purchasing a total of five apartments in six years, she has acted as both an owner-occupant, landlord, and investor. Her most recent buy, just a month ago, is in Journal Square in Jersey City.
From her experiences, she noticed that single women were at a disadvantage in the home-buying process. In 2019 she launched Live With Plum, a platform with advice, tips, and resources for female buyers looking for primary residences or investment properties. (Plum is Chan's Chinese name.)
Single women make up about 18% of all home buyers, Chan said, yet materials that cater to them are limited. She plans to expand the site, Instagram account, YouTube channel, and Facebook group to be a "go-to resource on anything home buying for women."
The Plutus Foundation, a nonprofit that highlights media efforts to increase financial literacy, named Live With Plum a finalist for best real-estate content this year, during its first year of existence.
Armed with experience advising Fortune 500 companies with Boston Consulting Group, she got her real-estate license and is now a New York agent with Level Group, often advising female clients buying their first homes. She also works for FTI Consulting, where she specializes in ecommerce and beauty brands amid their broader retail and consumer practice.
Lydia Winkler, 29, RentCheck
![]()
After Lydia Winkler's first year of law school at Tulane, she moved apartments and never got her security deposit back. She thought it would be an injustice not to pursue it, she told Business Insider, so she represented herself and sued her former landlord in court. She submitted time-stamped photos of the move-out condition of the property into evidence — and won the case.
She realized the problem she faced applied to countless renters each year. A few months later, continuing her graduate work at Tulane with business school, she met a fellow student, Marco Nelson, who faced similar struggles with property managers. He became her cofounder.
In 2018, they launched RentCheck, a software platform that brings transparency to security-deposit deductions and helps property managers save time on inspections with easy, self-guided inspections that anyone can do from their smartphone.
Today, New Orleans, Louisiana-based Winkler and the RentCheck team are on a mission to make renting fair and transparent as they understand the least privileged people are disproportionately discriminated against in all aspects of housing, from greater upfront costs to unrefunded security deposits.
Winkler is also the founder of REEP Now (Relief Effort for Earning Parole), a nonprofit that provides parole advocacy and support to people eligible for parole in Louisiana. Winkler holds a JD and MBA from Tulane University and a BA from Kenyon College. Winkler was included in Gambit's 2019 40 under 40, Biz New Orleans 2019 New and Notables, and participated in Techstars Atlanta 2019.
Matt Jackson, 34, Angelo Gordon
![]()
Matt Jackson grew up on a farm in West Virginia, far from the financial centers of the country. When he set off for college, the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, he got his first taste of the world of finance and real estate.
"Candidly, I didn't know what I was getting into with respect to the level of competition." Jackson told Business Insider.
He quickly adapted, spending much of his time working in the university's Samuel Zell & Robert Lurie Real Estate Center and became a teaching assistant for real-estate professors.
A co-portfolio manager at Angelo Gordon, which has acquired $19 billion in properties across the US since it began investing in 1993, Jackson manages the firm's portfolio of current assets and it's pipeline of upcoming deals.
He has risen through the ranks at the firm since he started in 2009 as an analyst. After three years, he was selected to take on the firm's regional investments in the Southeast and Texas. The firm hadn't yet done much investment in those areas, which gave Jackson the opportunity to build a business, but also meant he had to find new local partners to work with.
One of Jackson's career highlights has been Angelo Gordon's deal with Vornado to redevelop a struggling Washington, DC, mall, the Georgetown Parks, into a successful mixed-use development that combined condos with retail. Angelo Gordon purchased the property for $61 million in 2010, and the property was sold for $272.5 million four years later.
Now, he's managing earlier-career analysts, some of whom are starting their careers in financial crisis, just as he did. While the circumstances may be different, Jackson says the most important thing he can do for them is to let them know that it's natural to be anxious right now because everybody feels worried when they face uncertainty.
"It's about making sure people know they aren't alone in having concerns and that you are always available to talk. No one has all the answers. What's more important is to focus on knowing what you can and cannot control," Jackson said.
McKenzie Ryan, 28, Compass
![]()
Formerly a national-level athlete, McKenzie Ryan trained for the Olympics as a rhythmic gymnast. She was attending Horace Mann, a co-ed private K-12 school in New York, when she began selling real estate. She is a graduate of Hamilton College.
Ryan immersed herself in the industry by working across different sectors of real estate, in development at Related, in retail leasing at Winick, and at top-tier residential firms. When the financial crisis emerged in 2008, Ryan began identifying strategic investment opportunities for buyers. Before receiving her high school diploma, she had closed a number of multimillion-dollar deals.
Forbes named Ryan, 27, one of New York City's top power brokers, the youngest person ever to receive the recognition. Ryan is the founder of the Asset Advisory Team at Compass. Based in New York, the team focuses on developing long-term strategies for their clients' assets. With an expertise in marketing and branding, she regularly delivers her sellers' full asking price, and negotiates impressive deals for her buyers.
Recently, Ryan sold a West Village townhouse that had been on the market for four years for its full asking price. She specializes in helping her clients buy and sell historic trophy properties and has amassed a social-media presence of more than 25,000 followers on Instagram.
Michael Forman, 30, Blackstone
![]()
Michael Forman played a starring role in Blackstone's recent foray into Hollywood film production. The 30-year-old principal at the Wall Street giant helped arrange its acquisition of a 49% interest in three Los Angeles film-studio spaces over the summer in a deal that valued the properties at nearly $1.7 billion.
As part of the transaction, Forman also struck a venture with seller Hudson Pacific Properties, with whom Blackstone plans to acquire or develop more studio properties across the country at a moment when demand for such spaces has surged amid a boom in streaming film, television, and other digital content. Forman will help manage the venture for Blackstone and find new opportunities to help it grow.
"This was a deal that will serve as a foundation for more investment to come," Forman said. "People have been consuming tons of content during the pandemic and we see there are real secular tailwinds behind the business of film production."
The deal and others have made Forman a key executive at the firm involved in increasingly vital categories of real estate when other segments of the market, such as retail and hotels, have been battered by the pandemic.
Forman, for instance, also helped set up a deal last year to purchase a majority stake in seven Virginia data centers and form a venture with seller Commercial Office Property Trust. In November, Blackstone agreed to invest alongside COPT in eight more data centers, which have seen a big uptick in demand from cloud storage users, streaming content providers, and e-commerce sellers.
"My job is to figure out where the growth in the economy is heading and how to support that," Forman said.
Forman grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey, attended Northwestern and joined Blackstone after graduating in 2014. Part of the recipe for success at the company is not just sourcing deals, but selling senior leaders at the firm, which is famous for its rigorous investment committee meetings.
"It feels like time is moving in slow motion," Forman said of sit-downs in front of top Blackstone execs like Stephen Schwarzman, Tony James, and Jon Gray.
"But when you prepare thoughtful materials and have addressed a lot of the questions already, it becomes a really interesting discussion."
Minjia Yan, 24, Millennium Commercial Properties
![]()
Minjia Yan is giving Sin City some soul. As an associate at Millennium Commercial Properties, a Las Vegas-based commercial real-estate firm, Yan has played a big role in its initiatives to build affordable housing for homeless and low-income individuals and families in the area.
She has supported the acquisition and development teams in underwriting projects, securing financing for transactions, and establishing public-private partnership collaborations with both the city and the state of Nevada.
Vegas may be known for the bright lights of the Strip, but Yan also emphasizes that its homeless population is also significant and worthy of attention. Vegas is ranked the worst metropolitan area in providing affordable housing, Yan said, and the state of Nevada has been the worst state in providing affordable housing for a number of consecutive years. She and Millennium have taken action to combat the issue.
"My company Millennium has been working with local nonprofits to provide affordable housing for the past 5 years. We worked with nonprofits to acquire and renovate old motels in Downtown Las Vegas area and turn them into fully furnished, affordable units," Yan told Business Insider. "The tenants are homeless or extremely low income individuals. The average rents are well below market rate and many of the tenants get a rent subsidized voucher from HUD. Most of the furnitures in these units are donated materials from the hotels on the Las Vegas Strip."
Yan and the Millennium team also came up with the idea of using shipping containers to lower construction costs and speed up completion time for housing for communities in need.
"We worked with a local nonprofit to build 10 container units as a pilot program," said Yan, whose project was profiled by Insider's Zoe Ettinger in March. "We got a lot of pushback from zoning and entitlements when we did the container housing project because container housing is a new concept in Las Vegas. We did not give up and we have successfully built a pilot project and demonstrated to the City and the State that this is something can be done."
Yan told Business Insider that during her senior year at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she studied accounting, she enrolled in a real-estate mentorship program where she met Jeff Chain, a local developer and the founder of Millennium Commercial Properties. Chain, who has overseen 5,000 acres of master-planned developments in Las Vegas and Phoenix, works on retail, office, and land development projects.
She went on to work for him after graduating from college ate age 20. After a stint in New York pursuing a master of science in real estate, she returned again to MCP.
She is also the host of a commercial real-estate podcast called Creative Talks, which she launched in April, after the pandemic hit. It has 40 live episodes with experts in the Las Vegas market and beyond, Yan told Business Insider, and is targeted at millennials int he field. So far, she's notched 2,300 downloads.
Yan sees Vegas, where she grew up after immigrating from China at age 11, as the perfect place to grow her career. "I'd love to create more development projects in this city and help this city grow," she said.
"Once I have become an expert in my niche market, then the opportunities are endless. I can be on the general-partner side of deals, I can set up a fund, I can be a developer, a broker, or an investor."
Morgan Relyea Colt, 31, Cushman & Wakefield
![]()
Morgan Relyea Colt always knew she would pursue a career in dealmaking — she just didn't know in which industry.
"Negotiating was in my blood," Colt said, referring to her father, Tim Relyea, a successful leasing broker who helps manage Cushman & Wakefield's Houston office.
Yet she was so uncomfortable with the idea of joining a business where she would be in her father's shadow, she initially planned to go into oil and gas commodities trading instead. On the eve of taking a job at Shell, Colt relented, joined Cushman, and has since established her own track record of success as a top leasing executive in Houston.
"I came into the business always being my dad's daughter, and every day I have to prove I'm my own self and can fill my own shoes," Colt said.
Before the pandemic, she helped Shell and BHP sublease a million square feet of space in Houston. Even though leasing activity has plummeted since the virus crisis, Colt just finished representing a company lease a large space in Tucson, Arizona.
"When the market is down, sometimes you have to get on the road and find work," Colt, who just had her second child, said. "It helps to have global clients, but a lot of being successful is the ability to be creative and help clients navigate a new market, whatever it is."
Colt chalks up some of her success to relentless networking. Several years ago she met an energy-industry executive at a wedding, kept in touch, and eventually got a meeting to pitch the company to help it with its real-estate decision-making. Within two years, she represented the company in a 200,000-square-foot lease.
"You never push services on someone," Colt said. "I want to be someone they can trust and who they know is going to support them and is always going to show up."
Colt said she knew early on in her career that she could be successful in her own right after a senior broker watched her give a presentation.
"He came in and sat in the back to watch and didn't say anything, but afterward he came up and said 'Hey, good job,'" Colt said. "I knew I had his respect.
"It's so important as a young person when you're coming into a business to feel like you can hold your own with senior people."
Peyton Johnson, 28, Savills
![]()
The upper ranks of the commercial services business are mostly male, white, and middle-aged. But Peyton Johnson is part of a class of young executives forging a new archetype for success.
Johnson, who is 28, was part of a Savills team that secured advisory and leasing work for Blackboard, a $3 billion education-technology company. Last year, she was a key member on a five-person team that pitched and won business from a $25 billion publicly-traded San Francisco tech firm.
Johnson has done it by focusing her expertise on data, in an industry that's been slower than other sectors in embracing technology and innovation. She has become expert, for instance, in a proprietary Savills platform of software and services called Knowledge Cubed that helps clients analyze complex real-estate portfolios and transactions.
"It helps me help them understand what opportunities are out there and how a client can best perform using data," Johnson said. "No one wants their broker to put their finger up to the wind and generalize what the prevailing market conditions might be. They want to be able benchmark their real estate and build a real strategy."
Working with major corporate clients across broad geographies has also helped sustain Johnson's pipeline of business at a moment when the pandemic has threatened to stifle young careers. She recently helped handle a nearly 25,000-square-foot office lease for the large tech client in Atlanta.
Johnson said her wide-ranging role at Savills helping to win business and service major accounts reminded her of her years playing soccer at Harvard, where she was a cocaptain.
"I was a center midfielder," Johnson said. "I feel like I'm always in the middle helping to keep the ship running smoothly so we're delivering seamless solutions to tenants and winning new clients."
Ryan Williams, 32, Cadre
![]()
A decade ago, while still a student at Harvard, Ryan Williams raised money to buy homes that had fallen into foreclosure during the Great Financial Crisis at a steep discount. The experience inspired him to launch the real-estate investment firm Cadre in 2014, which has built a digital platform that allows average investors the chance to purchase small stakes in the properties it acquires.
As the market has again been upended, this time by the pandemic, Williams said his firm could democratize the value creation that could come about as prices plunge and eventually recover.
"The main beneficiaries during the last crisis were institutions," said Williams, who worked at Goldman Sachs and then Blackstone before starting Cadre. "Our goal is to let more individual investors benefit this time from the recovery and get access to opportunities that in the past were out of reach."
Cadre has raised more than $130 million in three fundraising rounds and has purchased $3 billion of commercial and multifamily property since its founding. Williams said that its acquisitions continue, despite an investment sales market that has stalled amid the crisis.
According to Williams, the company is in the midst of buying a life-sciences-focused office building for $100 million in Tampa and an industrial property in Phoenix.
Williams also oversaw a notable recent addition to Cadre's executive team with the hiring of J. Allen Smith, the former president and CEO of Four Seasons luxury hotel chain, who joined on as Cadre's president at the beginning of the year.
"He has incredible experience," Williams said. "Allen and a number of our people are out in the market looking for opportunities to continue to grow."
Salman Ahmad, 34, Mosaic
![]()
As the CEO and cofounder of construction technology company Mosaic, Salman Ahmad has a goal to make homebuilding cheaper, quicker and more efficient. Based in Ahmad's hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, Mosaic uses its own proprietary software to manage construction on behalf of homebuilders, which enables developers, property owners and contractors to scale up their businesses — and ultimately build more homes for less.
Ahmad founded Mosaic in 2015 with a vision: for everyone to have a place they feel they belong. To achieve it, he provides homebuilders with software solutions that enable them to erect more diverse housing types as well as pushes to make those properties more available, attainable, and adaptive. Some examples of Mosaic's software are digital worksheets that revise construction schedules and eliminate unnecessary tasks and a tool that can calculate exactly how much lumber is needed for a project and have it delivered to the job site, which reduces waste and speeds up construction.
As demand for homes skyrockets and inventory hits record lows, Mosaic and Arizona homebuilder Mandalay inked a $100 million partnership in September to build 400 new single-family homes over the next two years. They'll use Mosaic's software, which can essentially convert architectural blueprints into step-by-step assembly instructions. Mandalay CEO Dave Eversen said Mosaic helped his company cut 20 percent off the time it takes to frame a house. There's a shortage of workers in Arizona already, and Mosaic's software doesn't supplant any of them.
"Our platform is designed to help solve the labor crunch by making people more effective and productive with the help of technology, not replacing people with technology," Ahmad told local publication Prescott eNews.
Mosaic's technology disrupting the traditional construction industry is also attracting investors. Also in September, as Business Insider's Alex Nicoll reported, Mosaic announced that it had closed a $14.25 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding to $24.75 million since 2015.
In 2014, Ahmad completed a PhD in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT; his research centered on software systems, programming languages and human computer interaction. He created his own series of new programming languages including Dog and Silo. After graduating summa cum laude from Arizona State with a bachelor's degree in computer systems engineering, Ahmad received a master's in computer science from Stanford, where he worked on machine learning systems for design. He has also worked with Microsoft to develop solutions for virtual data centers.
Shannon Richards, 28, JPMorgan Chase
![]()
Shannon Richards has shown why she's a real-estate finance executive to watch.
An LA-based vice president at JPMorgan Chase who focuses on originating large loans against commercial property, Richards arranged her largest deal ever, a $255 million mortgage tied to a portfolio of office and industrial buildings in Austin, Texas.
Not only was the transaction complex because of the multiple assets involved, the landlord needed to complete it within two weeks because it had planned to use some of the proceeds for another building acquisition it was closing.
Richards — who joined JPMorgan in 2017 after working in the commercial real-estate industry, at CBRE and then Colliers International — managed a team of 15 to get it done.
"Coming away from that deal, what resonates with me is how fantastic my colleagues, my organization, and the client all were, because everyone had to perform under a really tight deadline," Richards said. "It's amazing to get to a level where you can have total confidence in everyone you're working with."
Just like other areas of the business, such as leasing and sales, real-estate financing transactions could be affected as the pandemic and its aftereffects cast uncertainty over property values.
Richards has dealt with the dislocation by pivoting to resilient areas of the market. She just arranged a $55 million construction loan for an industrial property that's set to be built in Florida and that has been fully pre-leased by an investment-grade anchor tenant.
Richards's chief role at JPMorgan is to manage client relationships. She has to know both the bank's suite of services and products and the details of a prospective client's holdings so that she can offer solutions that anticipate their needs.
"Where you set yourself apart is really taking the time to understand a client's business and holdings," Richards said. "During the pandemic, when you're meeting with clients remotely, you want to be able to sit with them and plan so that you can provide the right solutions and support."
Thomas Jansen, 31, HR&A Advisors
![]()
Thomas Jansen started out as an architect.
But after earning both a bachelor's and master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, he dipped a toe in the design world — then decided that he could leave a bigger footprint on a city's physical landscape through urban planning.
At HR&A Advisors, where he is a principal, Jansen leads real estate development research and analysis for major projects, mostly in Los Angeles. He advises clients on the implementation of large-scale projects, rezoning initiatives, and economic policies, often bridging the gap between the public and private sectors.
"My vision is to find an equitable win-win for cities, communities and developers to develop complex projects where there are conflicting interests and, at times, high expectations across the board," he told Business Insider. "I work for both public and private clients to help them understand each others' needs and to implement transformative urban development projects. I develop the creative financing and public benefits strategies (affordable housing, public parks, jobs) that are necessary today to meet community objectives and generate returns for investors."
Take one of his current major projects advising the city of San Jose, about an hour southeast of San Francisco, on a redevelopment proposal that would transform 250 acres of its downtown. In September, Google released renderings and details of the 79-acre campus called Downtown West it hopes to erect in the area, which would be open to the public and contain office space as well as housing and parkland. Jansen is negotiating with San Jose landowners as well as coordinating with transit agencies to build Diridon Station, which, he told Business Insider, "will be the best-connected train station on the West Coast with future high-speed rail."
His emphasis on transit-oriented development also makes cities more sustainable and increases access to urban areas that would otherwise be difficult to access without a car.
For example, for a joint venture of landowners around LA's Dodger Stadium, home to the current World Series champions, Jansen helped to lead real estate and economic analysis to inform the design and development of a proposed aerial tram from the city's main train station, Union Station, to the stadium. The gondola is expected to open in 2022.
Over the course of his career, Jansen's career has touched niches from affordable housing to economic development. In Downtown Los Angeles, his projects are responsible for producing tens of millions of dollars of affordable housing and community benefits and infrastructure financing plans to fund over $2.5 billion of open space and development. In addition he's negotiated deals for over $10 billion of mixed-use development.
Passionate about finding unconventional approaches and compromises for the complex projects he advises, Jansen believes his creative solutions and suggestions will become more common as the housing industry supported by middle- and lower-income earners struggles to recover from the pandemic. Private developers will require new and innovative ways to partner with the public sector that are mutually beneficial. Jansen will help developers deliver on community expectations that their projects will support equitable growth and affordable housing as well as contribute to their bottom line.
Tiffany Thurber, 33, Goldman Sachs
![]()
Tiffany Thurber, like some others on this list, kicked off her career amid a financial crisis. As a vice president in the Real Estate Financing Group at Goldman Sachs, she's now managing early-career bankers starting out during another crisis.
"I found that by coming in during a crisis, I was working on a really small team and got in at the ground level, and was able to grow as the economy was recovering and the team was growing," Thurber said.
"It ended up being a really great opportunity, even if joining a real-estate financing team in 2011 wasn't an obvious choice."
Thurber, who majored in finance at College of William and Mary, was drawn to real-estate investment banking because of the focus on tangible assets that affect day to day life, instead of an abstract financial instrument.
She's taken advantage of the opportunity to focus on financing industry-defining deals, like Blackstone's $18.7 billion purchase of GLP's logistics portfolio. More recently, Thurber worked on a CalPERS, America's largest pension fund, refinancing of the City National Plaza tower in LA, which closed this March.
Of all the transactions, she's most proud of an $847 million construction loan that Goldman wrote last year for the second phase of construction of The Wharf, a mixed-use development on the southwest waterfront in Washington, DC.
Her team needed to underwrite for a variety of asset classes, hotel, retail, multifamily, and office, and was estimated by broker Eastdil Secured to be the largest in the city's history.
Turner Rose, 34, JLL
![]()
Some young professionals jump into the commercial real-estate business for the chance to earn millions of dollars in a lucrative industry. Turner Rose says he's focused on making sure taxpayers don't get fleeced.
The senior associate at the services firm JLL works on a team that helps the US Air Force manage a vast portfolio of 50,000 residential units across the US that house its service members.
Most of the military's housing is rented long term from large private landlords, and Rose and his team bring private-sector expertise to assure the government gets the best commercial terms in those deals and they're structured to unlock capital for renovations and development.
"We're there to make sure the project owners are performing their responsibilities under the contracts they have with the government in the best way possible," Rose said. "We're making sure the government gets value out of a project."
For the past four years that Rose has been at JLL, he and his team have arranged deals that allowed the Air Force to develop and renovate thousands of new housing units.
This is Rose's second stint at JLL. After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2008, he worked for the company after spending a few years as a construction manager at the Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. He went to the grocery chain Lidl as a development manager before returning to JLL in 2016.
To make sure Air Force bases are being managed at a moment when the pandemic has cut off the ability to do regular site visits, Rose has helped develop a formal program to oversee the properties from afar using Zoom to communicate with on-site staff and other procedures, such as checklists.
"We're training people on staff, the Air Force military housing offices on base, and local construction managers to work together as a team with us to continue to ensure that we're providing the proper oversight," Rose said.
Tyler Biddle-Barrows, 31, Brown Harris Stevens
![]()
Tyler Biddle-Barrows' first client was a celebrity.
In 2012, he represented Charlie Sheen as a buyer's agent when the "Two and a Half Men" star bought a Los Angeles home for his girlfriend.
"I started at 18 interning then sold my first place at 21," Biddle-Barrows told Business Insider.
After a successful start with the Beverly Hills agency Hilton & Hyland, he took a leap to move to New York, where he's mimicked what he did in Los Angeles: cultivating a list of clients strong enough to rank him in the top 1% of agents in the city.
So far the Brown Harris Stevens agent has participated in about $90 million in sales. To do so, Biddle-Barrows had worked alongside top producing teams in three of America's major markets — Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami.
When the pandemic upended life in the spring, Biddle-Barrows' business goals immediately shifted, and he established a partnership with the private aviation provider Blade to serve as its exclusive real-estate partner.
Through the partnership, he enabled buyers, sellers, and property owners to safely travel by semi-private planes to and from Miami and New York, a creative deal that earned Biddle-Barrows confidence from clients and colleagues in times of uncertainty.
He sees the future of real estate as intertwined with other sectors, including tech, luxury, and travel, and he is determined to continue to act as an innovator in the field.
Tyrone Green, 31, RE/MAX Next
![]()
Before switching gears to work in real estate, Tyrone Green spent seven years as an inpatient psychiatric counselor. He led group therapy sessions and provided direct care to patients who were mentally ill or recovering from drug or alcohol addiction.
"I used to sit and feel like my life was passing me by, and that I was not living in my purpose," the Chicago native and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate told Business Insider. "I felt a shift in my life where I experienced consistent feelings of restrictions and limitations in the workplace that later affected my personal life."
However, after attending a real estate seminar with friends, Green decided to give the industry a whirl as a part-time broker with RE/MAX NEXT in Chicago.
"I always knew I wanted to be involved in real estate," he said. "But after that event I decided getting my broker's license would be the vehicle I would use to get in the business."
In 2019, he was furloughed from his counseling gig and decided to pursue real estate full time.
That year, he brought in $2.8 million in sales — an impressive sum for an agent just starting out in the area — and was nominated for Chicago Agent Magazine's "Rookie of the Year."
Though he currently operates as an independent agent, he hopes to one day lead his own team. And Green, who grew up in North Lawndale on Chicago's West Side, hasn't lost sight of his desire to give back to his community.
"My long-term goal is to start my own real estate team and to win the community service award [from the Chicago Association of Realtors]," he said.
He told Business Insider that one way he plans on giving back is by making the home-buying process easier and more accesible for those in his modest neighborhood.
As he learned more about real estate, Green said, he realized that many individuals in his community don't purchase homes because they aren't aware of all the resources available to them that could help them become homeowners.
Added Green, "I want to help educate them."
Victoria Abbasi, 28, Colliers International
![]()
When Victoria Abbasi graduated from college with a marketing degree, she wasn't looking for commercial real-estate work. After a series of interviews at several companies for marketing roles, she joined Colliers.
"I didn't know anything about real estate, but what drew me to the team was that they were very passionate about their work with a real team camaraderie," Abbasi told Business Insider. "It was something I could dig my heels into."
Abbasi, who's based in Washington, DC, worked for five years as a client-services coordinator for Colliers Government Solutions Practice group, which represents landlords that lease office space to governmental agencies.
At the beginning of 2019, after spending five years on the marketing side, she spoke with a senior broker on the team about trying her hand with the transaction side. The broker worked with her weekly, meeting before work to run through the complexities of running a transaction, working with clients, and finding out which government agency needed space.
In June 2019, she became a full-time broker, representing landlords looking for government tenants. She represents Brookfield Office Properties, Boyd Watterson, KanAm, and MRP Realty. Since she began in that job, she's worked on more than 1.2 million square feet in deals, with $177 million in deal value.
Even though she's working with the same team, she said she's constantly learning in her new role. "Every single day, I have questions for one of my teammates on things like negotiation tactics," Abbasi said. "It's not something you can get a handbook on, doing real-estate transactions — it just comes with time."
For someone who was agnostic about real estate coming in, Abbasi has become a fixture of the DC commercial world. She's an active member of the DC chapter Commercial Real Estate for Women, first as a committee cochair, and she's now an incoming board member.
"Everything I got to do because of mentoring from other women. I'm now able to pay it back to the younger women in our industry," Abbasi said.
Vik Chawla, 31, Fifth Wall
![]()
Vik Chawla is a partner on the technology investment team at Fifth Wall, a venture-capital firm that invests in real-estate technology and has found success with its North American Real Estate Technology venture funds.
Chawla told Business Insider that his passion for real estate began when he was a child.
"I grew up in Danville, California, watching my mother, through tireless work ethic and a strong dedication to her customers, grow a small real-estate brokerage practice into one of the country's top residential sales teams," he said.
Chawla's mom, Jou Jou, worked for J. Rockcliff. His dad, Piri, was a CFO at Xerox.
In 2011, Chawla graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. From there, he joined the Blackstone Group, where he worked on advisory transactions spanning the energy, hospitality, and real-estate asset classes. During his time at Blackstone, he met Fifth Wall cofounder Brad Greiwell.
"Brad and I used to talk extensively about the arduous pains of building a national single-family rental business with less available technology than consumers had at their fingertips on mobile phones," he said.
"We quickly realized that there was a dearth of technology companies in the real-estate space, both on the consumer and enterprise sides — a problem which needed to be solved."
After nearly two years at Blackstone, Chawla worked at a hedge fund in the Bay Area until he was recruited to be the first senior associate hire at Fifth Wall in 2016.
Among the real-estate tech companies Fifth Wall has backed are smart home automation platform SmartRent, online real estate company Opendoor, and online notarization platform Notarize.
Looking ahead, Chawla told Business Insider that his goal is to "oversee a global investing strategy for the firm and bring what we've done in our North American Real Estate Technology venture funds to a global scale."
William Sankey, 33, Northspyre
![]()
New York-based William Sankey saw a bump in demand for his proptech startup as real-estate professionals who had previously worked in conference rooms were suddenly working remotely.
Northspyre, which seeks to modernize construction through cloud technology and data analytics, raised $7.5 million in a Series A fund-raise over the summer.
"At Northspyre, we've seen our highest engagement during the pandemic," Sankey said. "It's become a hub for how teams communicate and make their decisions."
Sankey's path to starting a proptech startup began when he studied architecture at Yale. "I was always fascinated with how cities were built and how they were developed," he said.
In his time studying architecture, he realized his ambitions were wider than studying one building, so he followed that degree by getting a master's in urban planning at Harvard.
While there, he began to focus on real estate, the "people making actual changes to the built environment." He started his career at JLL, working as a project manager for a few construction and development projects, including the $850 million transformation of Madison Square Garden.
In Sankey's time at JLL and other developers, he noticed a lot of the same problems in every build. Construction is notorious for costing more and taking longer than projections, and one major cause is the challenge of adequately tracking and understanding what's going on with the project.
In the evenings after his day job, Sankey started working with Excel spreadsheets to track multimillion-dollar projects, building a program that could automate a lot of this work. After partnering with a more technical cofounder, Sankey launched Northspyre in 2017.
Now he's running a startup where he's both CEO and the head of product, helping to develop new ways to use Northspyre's underlying software to make it more useful for real-estate development teams.
He's had to break out of his comfort zone and become good at selling the platform.
"Early on, when I would talk to people in the industry, they didn't know anything like Northspyre was possible," Sankey said. "They weren't Googling for a digital project assistant."
.png)
