Crexi at 10: How this CRE Tech Leader Is Transforming Commercial Real Estate Through Data and Innovation

The Problem That Sparked Crexi’s Founding

The data is broken. 

That’s what Michael DeGiorgio thought eleven years ago when he had identified a glaring problem plaguing the commercial real estate industry. DeGiorgio sought to make CRE  transactions more transparent and modernize traditional listings; in other words, he wanted to fix the CRE industry’s broken data. 

“We needed a platform where brokers control how they sell, where data is open and accessible, and professionals can participate regardless of network,” he said. “The industry wanted someone to listen, not force them into boxes.”

So, he listened to the industry’s needs, and thus, Crexi’s journey began. In 2015, DeGiorgio launched the company’s open sales marketplace, which eventually evolved into the present-day PRO platform, which offers CRE professionals enhanced listing visibility and lead generation, AI-powered marketing tools, deeper property insights and more. 

 

Building a Platform to Fix Broken CRE Data

A lot has changed since Crexi’s early days, when DeGiorgio and some of the early team members worked out of a rental house in Venice, California, taking turns talking to brokers and building office furniture. Since then, the company has achieved countless milestones, including raising millions of dollars in capital, adding millions of users  and hiring more than 500 employees. 

This year marks Crexi’s 10-year anniversary, and while DeGiorgio is proud of all that the company has accomplished, he’s eager to see it achieve even more moving forward. 

“I feel strongly that we are at the crux of big changes within the industry and that Crexi is at the helm, setting things in motion,” he said. 

Below, DeGiorgio shares more about the company’s growth journey, its impact on the CRE industry and his excitement for the future. 

 

Milestones That Defined a Decade of Growth

Describe the journey leading up to Crexi’s 10-year anniversary.

Eleven years ago, I sat across from a potential investor in Newport Beach and laid out a frustration that I had observed and was plaguing the industry: the data was broken. There was minimal transparency around a transaction, how information was being collected or who had access to it. Beyond the apparent data quality issues, the traditional method of listing properties online was becoming outdated, workflows were inefficient and the transaction process was often messy. The leasing side of CRE was potentially even worse, with limited digital tools to manage the process end to end. Last, there was tremendous room to increase speed and liquidity, much like the internet had done for stock trading years before. I felt we needed a platform where brokers control how they sell without being forced into rigid formats, where data is accessible and where any professional has access regardless of their network. The industry had been wanting someone to listen to their true needs instead of forcing them into boxes. 

We launched the open sales marketplace for free in 2015 with four listings. In 2018, we expanded our PRO platform to include free and registered users, as well as added the open lease marketplace. In 2019, we released Intelligence and our Auction platform. We raised our Series A funding round in 2017 and Series B round in 2022. 

Reaching 10 years proves that you reshape resistant industries by solving real problems, not forcing adoption.

 

 

Leading With Vision and Grit

What role did you play in making Crexi what it is today?

I’m CEO and founder, and my journey to this milestone started in the trenches at Auction.com, doing data entry before getting pulled into transactions and running client management for real estate investment trusts, private buyers and institutions across every property type. The experience showed me the industry wasn’t progressing at the speed I knew it could. Making the leap to start Crexi was certainly a risk but one that was clearly needed. 

In the early days of Crexi, we rented a house in Venice, California, where a small team and I did everything from talking to brokers about pain points to writing specs, closing partnerships, answering tickets at 2 a.m. and even building office furniture. The role shifted dramatically as we scaled from 100 employees in 2020 to 200 in 2021 to over 500 today. Now, I focus mostly on strategic direction and serving our core mission of creating access. 

One of my most important early decisions was getting great engineers onboard who I trusted. I wanted to create a foundation of teammates who encompassed all the traits I wanted to see us maintain as we grew: high integrity, hard work, grit, being savvy, being outside-the-box thinkers, and people who wanted to work for a purpose and have some fun while doing it. My job now is protecting, but also expanding, our DNA while we scale by meeting with teams weekly, reading customer feedback daily and pushing back when we drift toward easy instead of right. I was told by one of my mentors and our first investor, Fernando de Leon, that you know a business works when the founder gets punched and gets back up, and we’ve taken hits from market shifts, competitor moves and product failures, but each time, we adapted faster.

 

“My job now is protecting, but also expanding, our DNA while we scale by meeting with teams weekly, reading customer feedback daily and pushing back when we drift toward easy instead of right.”

 

Transforming Commercial Real Estate Through Technology

What does Crexi’s 10-year anniversary say about its influence on the CRE industry?

CRE ran on relationships but was built on a system of broken data that no one was ever sure they could fully trust or use to help make a solid prediction about the market. At Auction.com, I watched deals take months when they should close in weeks, and I saw brokers spend hours on tasks that needed minutes because the tools and data were fundamentally flawed. We built Crexi to fix that foundation and inject transparency and trust back into the CRE workflow. 

Crexi reaching ten years proves that we were right about the industry wanting transparency and access. It proves that those who believed in the mission and vision did not misplace their faith. It proves that the dedication, grit and hard work of those who have had a hand in building Crexi was worth every late night, every setback and every moment of doubt. We’ve facilitated $1 trillion dollars in transactions, but what keeps me hungry is knowing we’ve only scratched the surface of a $20-trillion industry, and the best parts of this story are still being written by our team, our customers and the professionals who’ve built this movement alongside us.

A Look Back: Milestones and Moments That Shaped the Journey

Share some of the team’s most memorable moments from the past decade. 

The summer of 2015 in the Venice house: There were just a handful of us who would build furniture during the day and code at night with no customers and no revenue, but we had pure conviction. Closing our Series A funding round in 2017 validated the business model and gave us resources to build what would become PRO in 2018. This was our first monetization stream, and I wasn’t sure how brokers would receive it. Instead, they embraced it because we’d earned their trust by solving real problems first. Hitting one million registered users in 2022 felt surreal because I remembered every early user conversation, every feature request and every late night wondering if we were building the right thing. 

That milestone wasn’t about the number but about watching professionals grow their businesses on our platform over years. Broker number one, a Texas guy who listed a strip mall on day three of our launch, is still active, using every product we’ve built. Crossing 100 employees in 2020 was when the company fundamentally changed. We weren’t a startup anymore. The industry turned to us because face-to-face deals stopped overnight, and we had to scale fast while maintaining quality. Growing to 200 employees in 2021 and then over 500 by 2025 required building systems, processes and leadership that didn’t exist before.

 

 

What does the future hold for Crexi and its people?

Hitting 10 years is just the beginning in my eyes. Walking through our office now, the energy is electric. People are excited about what comes next. I feel strongly that we are at the crux of big changes within the industry and that Crexi is at the helm, setting things in motion. For jobseekers, they should know that we solve problems that matter at Crexi. Our work impacts people managing millions or even billions in assets, and the mission has remained the same for the past 10 years: creating trust, transparency and access for an entire industry. If you want to work on hard problems with people who care about outcomes and where your work is fast but rewarding, this is the place. 

We’re still in the Venice house mentally, just with better furniture.

 

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