Jay Crotty, the co-founder of SkyView Advisors, believes that the commercial real estate industry is at a crucial point in its history. Crotty started his career at the traditional brokerage model in 2001. After several years of success in the multifamily sector, he stepped away in 2008 to buy and sell an electronic component and aerospace hardware company. However, his passion remained in commercial real estate. He came back into the industry several years later to form SkyView Advisors with Ryan Clark, an attorney and his lifelong best friend. They set out on a mission to revolutionize the way commercial real estate is bought and sold.
With ample experience and a significant footprint in the industry, Crotty and his colleagues have a track record, but they have also worked hard to bring in experts from outside the traditional model.
The founders view their firm as a technology company and talent development business that happens to sell real estate, one of the largest markets in the world. It has invested in Salesforce, Microsoft, and custom AI solutions to make a more efficient business model.
Multi-Industry Tech Offerings
SkyView Advisors specializes in three asset classes: self-storage, manufactured housing, and healthcare real estate. It has created an offer portal that allows clients to submit their best and final offer through the website. According to Crotty, restrictions during the Covid pandemic were a great accelerator for this kind of use and interaction, particularly among the 55-year-old demographic.
“We’re thinking about this for other industries, and how we can lead in this way,” Crotty said. “Every member of our team thinks about it and talks about it all the time.”
There is plenty of room to grow in manufactured housing, as well as in other industries and markets. The historical demand for resilient asset classes such as manufactured housing, healthcare real estate, and self-storage is fueled by long-term owners who are ready to sell. Crotty said he and his team have been studying manufactured housing for a long time, and there are other asset classes they continue to investigate.
“From the very start of the company, we knew we were going to go into multiple asset classes,” Crotty said.
Inspired for Change
Innovation being one of its core values, SkyView Advisors takes it upon itself to lead the trend.
“A great model for us is Rocket Mortgage, if you think of what that marketplace was… highly fragmented, there are still people sitting in wood-paneled offices. But it’s become more about a ‘mortgage in a box.’ You can pull up the phone app and get a mortgage.”
SkyView Advisors has handled more business than any other brokerage for self-storage to this point in 2023 and had $1 billion in transaction volume last year.
Crotty and Clark have built a system that delivers exceptional value in self-storage, creating millions of dollars in additional revenue for owners over the past decade. This system is designed to ensure the same quality of service across other asset classes, including manufactured housing.
“We’re business people first, entrepreneurs,” Crotty said. “There’s not been a ton of innovation, and why would you when it’s been such a great business, a great builder of wealth? But it will change, it has to change.”
