By: Tom White

Being an entrepreneur means embracing ambiguity, regularly tackling hurdles, and getting up after falling down. These are integral parts of the journey, but there is no sweeter reward than receiving funding, growth, and exits–ask Maor Cohen, whose unwavering belief, steadfast dedication to delivery, and persistent effort are leading Pickspace to success.

You might say Maor was born with an entrepreneurial spirit. It indeed started to reveal itself when he was pretty young. An internship with an experienced entrepreneur allowed him to see how pitches were done, how decks were created, and how to achieve success. He was inspired. 

At university, he quickly founded a student entrepreneurship community of international students. The community practiced their pitches and created decks. Ultimately, ten startups were selected and met with colleagues at other prestigious universities: MIT, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Stony Brook and Boston University. Maor shares, “It was really powerful. In 2014, we also met with accelerators and some of the entrepreneurs from that program who are now very successful. We did it twice, once in the US and once in Europe. It was very inspiring.” 

After Maor received a Bachelor’s in law and marketing, he earned a Master’s in law with a focus on real estate management. He took a position at a law firm focused specifically on property management. “I was working with the actual people in the property management field. I immediately saw the gap there. There were many processes, and they were all done manually. We used different software to do one thing; there were so many different sources of truth. Even data entry from the contract to the system caused a lot of inconsistency in data. Ultimately, it led to loss of money, time and effort and caused a great deal of overall frustration.”

He introspected and crafted a comprehensive white paper detailing his love for the legal profession. Still, he also realized that his passions ran deeper. He wanted to integrate his legal expertise with his business acumen. And despite great success in the legal field, he became more determined than ever to pursue his passion for entrepreneurship full-time. Maor identified three fundamental interests—real estate, technology, and people–and, from there, leveraged his software background to develop solutions within those domains and ultimately intersect his passions.

“I also knew about the market chain and supply chain industry because I built software for them before. I knew technology; I knew how to define a good product, how to understand a problem and how to build a tech solution for it. And I wanted to make sure that I was still involved with people, understanding their issues, helping them and solving their issues.”

What does an entrepreneurial spirit do when he sees a problem? He builds a solution and builds a team. 

“I created Pickspace. After a year of working around the clock and bootstrapping in the beginning, I applied to Shark Tank in Israel. I went on television in 2018. They loved the idea, the product, the team. They invested. In 2019, we initially built the property management system, more for the commercial side and more specifically for the coworking industry.” Maor explains these types of coworking solutions, like WeWork, were very popular. “We got to a very good place with a beautiful product solving people’s issues.”

Maor then moved from Israel to the US. “My first goal was to find the right approach to penetrate the market.” One of Pickspace’s pre-seed investors connected him with Nadi Hassan, who built his system and knew that Maor wanted to grow it exponentially. 

They met up in New York. “We had an almost immediate connection as we are neighbors in our home countries. He’s from Egypt, I’m from Israel. So we had a lot in common right off the bat, from food to culture, to weather, to habits. He came from a payments background, payroll machine learning and automation of processes. He had a prestigious position at ADP.” Nadi also had a lot of experience building tech teams.

Nadi shared with Maor a system he had built for another company that he felt could be used for many other businesses. Maor agreed and ended up acquiring the code and the company. Nadi believed so much in Pickspace’s potential he left ADP in 2019 and joined as its CTO. “He loves real estate and also, of course, technology.”

From there, Nadi and Maor merged their codes and rebuilt the system, integrating all the advantageous features. “At the end of 2019, we were ready to go to the market and start selling. We had companies onboarding our system, and then Covid.” Fortunately, it wasn’t all bad. 

“A lot of the coworking spaces vanished or held their breath, and then they came back only two years later. So we needed to decide what was next. We knew that we had a good product to offer. However, our industry was very small, and we already understood that we had the ability to go big and build a solution for a bigger market. Even so, we decided to research what’s better, to stay in the coworking sector or go bigger to property management.” Maor and his team decided to go bigger. 

“Before COVID, we raised some money. And with that money, we actually decided to go deep on the product and move more on the property management side. The round before COVID allowed us to focus less on the coworking space and level up the property management software fields.” 

The team analyzed the different solutions out there and saw a gap. By enhancing user experience, user interface, service offerings and pricing, they knew they could provide a more flexible and advantageous coworking solution geared toward property management. 

Additionally, they expanded into fintech to incorporate embedded payment solutions into their property management software, thereby streamlining payment processes within their system.

“It was a very good decision because now we can manage everything internally, and it builds trust with our property managers and also helps save more on the processing fees. And, of course, it’s also helped because it’s another revenue stream.”

He adds, “We saw that we have the ability to win, or at least to capture a very good market share before any of the big ones decide to either buy us out or merge or do something big. In our industry, in the property management field, you’ll see a lot of new property management software companies; they come up, they show a better solution, and then the big ones will buy them for hundreds of millions of dollars. They are all actively looking for new property management solutions to buy.” 

Maor explains that the market is huge. That, combined with his firsthand knowledge of what works and doesn’t work in property management, has helped Pickspace capture a nice chunk of the market share. “I knew there were many things that we at Pickspace could do better, and we tackled those first.” 

Pickspace has refined its product and enhanced client experiences by offering an end-to-end solution streamlining the property management lifecycle. From listings and applications to tenant screening, contract management, and automated financial operations, the Pickspace platform ensures efficiency, accuracy, and ease of use. The tenant experience is equally enhanced with features that foster community engagement and streamline service requests.

“The portfolio of properties under our management doubled in 2023, and we’ve witnessed a doubling in our client base. Now we also oversee the management of hundreds of millions of square feet, demonstrating our platform’s scalability and capacity to handle substantial real estate volumes,” Maor shares.

Currently, Maor’s Pickspace offers one management system for all real estate portfolios, a full property management and accounting system, a full spectrum maintenance and work-order management and a complete vendor management system. Even with all those solutions, the goal is to keep growing and improving. 

Get everything you need for your real estate portfolio in one place. Check out Pickspace’s benefits today. 

Published by: Holy Minoza