**CREtech New York Introduces New Features for 2025 Event**
CREtech’s eighth annual CREtech New York event will take place on October 21-22 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side. As in previous years, the event aims to bridge the worlds of property technology (proptech) with the commercial real estate sector, including major property owners and investors. New in 2025 is a greater focus on commercial tenants.
“A big emphasis for me this year has been to get more corporate occupiers to attend,” said Michael Beckerman, CEO of CREtech, in a conversation with Connect CRE founder and CEO Daniel Ceniceros. “These would be the heads of real estate for large corporations, sharing how they’re rethinking the office: return to work and the office experience.”
To reflect this focus, CREtech is collaborating with the New York City chapter of CoreNet Global on a key panel titled “Real Estate Strategies from the Leading Corporate Occupiers.” Featured speakers include Frederico Egli, Head of Real Estate at IBM; Don Watson, SVP of Global Real Estate, Facilities, and EH&S at Oracle; and David Kamen, VP of Global Real Estate at Cigna Group.
Another major innovation at this year’s event is the introduction of a more structured networking format. Historically, attendees relied heavily on informal connections and spontaneous interactions to make business contacts. Beckerman pointed out that this approach doesn’t scale effectively at large events.
To address this, CREtech is launching a Hosted Meetings program designed to efficiently connect proptech solution providers with qualified buyers through scheduled, prearranged meetings. “We’re going to be moving much, much more aggressively into this meetings zone within CREtech New York,” said Beckerman.
He emphasized the simplicity of participation: “If you participate in some of our meetings, it’s a very light lift—just four meetings, 15 minutes each,” he said. Each meeting is curated to align with the buyer’s specific needs. For instance, a company interested in using artificial intelligence for property management would be matched with a vendor specializing in exactly that.
Beckerman noted that AI adoption in the real estate sector could outpace other tech integrations. One reason is that many C-suite executives are already beginning to use AI tools like ChatGPT in their personal lives, making them more open to professional applications.
“We’re starting to see some great use cases for CRE in customer responsiveness—where agentic AI handles maintenance requests, or aggregates various data streams to simplify operations and support investment decisions,” he said.
Beckerman concluded, “AI is coming at the real estate industry with the message: ‘We can tackle your inefficiencies and help you operate better.’ You can deploy agentic AI as your 24/7 sales team or property management staff. This is the transformation we’ve been waiting for.”
