The Story of Northspyre: Building the Future of Real Estate Development
Sometimes the most transformative companies start not with a grand vision, but with a simple desire to solve an everyday problem. For William Sankey, who recently appeared on Category Visionaries, that problem emerged while managing billion-dollar real estate developments in New York City.
As an assistant project executive on Madison Square Garden’s billion-dollar renovation, William had a front-row seat to an industry paradox. “These people are the very best at what they do, some of the very best in the industry, but they spend a lot of their time doing a lot of tedious administrative work,” he recalls. Teams would spend months reconciling 16,000 data points just to understand project status, only to make decisions based on information that was already two months old.
Moving between different development firms only confirmed the pattern: “all these companies looked completely different on the outside, but on the inside, in terms of how projects were delivered, everybody was leveraging convoluted, error prone spreadsheets. Everybody was spending 30% to 50% of their time doing low value administrative work.”
Rather than immediately jumping to start a company, William took an unusual path. “I probably should learn to code,” he thought, “so it was mostly to future proof myself, just in case me and my number crunching ended up being out of a job.” For three years, he lived a double life: “I was a software developer by night, real estate developer by day.”
The breakthrough came when William built a small tool to automate parts of his work. Partnering with co-founder Mark Newport, who William describes as “a much smarter guy” and “brilliant engineer,” they transformed the prototype into something more ambitious. But the real validation came from an unexpected source.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York was planning a $400 million expansion. Their director of real estate, faced with staffing up for the massive project, took a chance on Northspyre’s prototype: “I was just getting ready to hire a couple of people because this project is pretty massive… but you know what? I’ll give this a shot and if it doesn’t work, I’ll hire those people.”
The early days weren’t easy. “The one time we ever missed payroll… we had $700 in our company bank account, and then we got paid by a customer $40,000 check came in and we’re like, we’re alive for a few more months,” William remembers. Even Y Combinator rejected them twice, skeptical that real estate developers would adopt new technology.
But Northspyre’s deep industry expertise proved crucial. They maintained this advantage by continuing to hire real estate professionals: “we have quite a few people on our staff that have actual hands-on experience running and delivering projects. They really get it. They haven’t just done a few user interviews.”
Six years later, Northspyre has expanded from New York to manage over $125 billion worth of projects nationwide. But William’s vision extends far beyond just replacing spreadsheets. “I hope five years from now that we’re leveraging that platform that we built to do these other incredibly ambitious things around data,” he says.
They’ve already begun this evolution, recently launching a product that analyzes their vast project database to help developers make better decisions about costs and vendor selection. As William explains, this addresses both “execution error” and helping customers “make the right assumptions because the other reason is the budget was wrong to start with.”
The ultimate goal? To transform how cities themselves get built. “If you can take people’s focus off of this sort of burden of the tedium of low value administrative work, what do you do when you get that time back?” William asks. “What we’re seeing a lot of teams do is they’re just building better projects, they’re making cities better, and I think they’re doing in a more predictable, repeatable fashion.”
For an industry that shapes the world we live in, that’s a vision worth building towards.