Real estate veteran Maureen Waters joins MetaProp NYC as partner

MetaProp NYC has tapped real estate industry veteran Maureen Waters as a partner to help the firm expand to the other coast.

Waters started at the New York-based proptech-focused venture firm at the beginning of April. She is based in San Francisco and will help MetaProp build out a West Coast presence.

She joined MetaProp with a more than 20-year pedigree in the real estate industry.

She has experience as both chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer at real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, and she also served as the head of real estate for Bill Gates Investments.

Waters was most recently the president of Ten-X, a proptech company that looks to streamline the buying and selling process in commercial real estate, for over a year, and with the company for a total of four years.

She told Venture Capital Journal that her new role sprouted from a conversation she had with MetaProp co-founder and managing partner Aaron Block, who she worked with at Cushman & Wakefield, about a potential start-up pitch.

“Aaron, through that process, proposed this role for me I hadn’t thought about,” Waters said. “I ended up thinking it through and really loving the business model.”

She joined as the firm’s only current female partner and will be focusing on expanding the firm’s portfolio, supporting existing companies and helping with the firm’s accelerator program at Columbia University.

Waters said that she’s happy to be in a role that combines all of her past experience including restructuring and building companies as well as working on corporate and enterprise partnerships and connections.

“I ran a mid-stage start-up and I’ve been on the other side. I understand it from both sides,” Waters said. “I was really excited about the opportunity because you don’t usually get to do all of that in one place.”

She said she’s most excited to work with companies who are working toward making the industry more virtual.

She gave the example of companies that provide virtual building tours or virtual building access. Waters said in the wake of coronavirus that many aspects of this virtual adoption have actually accelerated.

“I think it’s an interesting time,” she said. “I think we continue to see very strong activity. While I think there are folks that are on the sidelines, we are very active.”