CREtech New York Brings New Elements to 2025 Event

CREtech’s eighth annual CREtech New York event is slated for Oct. 21-22 at the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side. As in previous years, the primary goal of the two-day event is to bring together the proptech sector and major commercial real estate owners and investors. This year, there’s a new element: commercial tenants.

“A big emphasis for me this year has been to get more corporate occupiers to attend,” Michael Beckerman, CEO of CREtech, told Connect CRE founder and CEO Daniel Ceniceros. “These would be the heads of real estate for large corporations, sharing how they’re rethinking office: return to work and the office experience.”

To that end, CREtech is partnering with CoreNet Global’s New York City chapter on a panel titled “Real Estate Strategies from the Leading Corporate Occupiers.” Confirmed participants include Frederico Egli, Head of Real Estate, IBM; Don Watson, SVP, Global Real Estate, Facilities and EH&S, Oracle; and David Kamen, VP of Global Real Estate, Cigna Group.

Also on tap for this year’s conference is a new approach to the age-old process of arranging meetings at large-scale in-person events. The traditional, informal approach of relying on contacts who happen to be attending the same event to set up appointments—or hoping to get a few moments with a speaker who is surrounded by attendees as he or she comes off the stage—is “very unscientific,” Beckerman said. “It just doesn’t work at scale.”

To bring more effective time management to the process, CREtech is rolling out a Hosted Meetings program, bringing proptech solutions providers and qualified buyers together through prearranged meetings. “We’re going be moving much, much, much more aggressively into this meetings zone within CREtech [New York],” said Beckerman.

The message to the real estate industry is “if you participate in some of our meetings, it’s a very light lift,” he continued. “Four meetings, 15 minutes each,” matched up with the buyer’s specific requirements. For example, a buyer looking to integrate artificial intelligence into property management will be matched up with a vendor who does just that.

Compared to the real estate sector’s gradual integration of technology in general, the use of AI could become widespread more quickly, Beckerman said. It’s likely that C-suite executives who otherwise aren’t especially tech-savvy have begun using Chat GPT and similar platforms in their daily lives, he pointed out.

“Now we’re starting to see some great use cases for CRE on customer responsiveness—using agent AI to respond to customers if they have a maintenance request or aggregating all sorts of disparate data to simplify the manual inputting of information for people to make decisions on acquisitions or dispositions,” said Beckerman.

He continued, “I think it’s coming at the real estate industry and saying, ‘AI can attack a lot of your inefficiencies and make you run better.’ You can use agentic AI as your 24/7 sales organization or property management team. So I think this is the big one. This is what we’ve been waiting for.”