After 25 years of business, Tina Urquhart is responsible for concierge services covering 45 million square feet of space in 350 buildings, just in the DMV.
Starting with services like laundry and car valet in 1993, Urquhart built Charm City Concierge into a full-service concierge and experience management firm. Now she's adding technology to that list with the release of its new mobile app, Simpli.
Launched in May, Simpli allows tenants to use building amenities, reserve spaces, find events and otherwise improve their experience at work or in large residential properties. Property owners can track which amenities are used most and get feedback from tenants through the app.
Those include big-name commercial real estate firms like Brookfield, Boston Properties, JLL, CBRE and several others, making it a lucrative market for unique tenant data, Urquhart said. One of its first locations, the Valo Park development, has been its most successful, and 616 of 750 employees at cloud computing firm Appian are on the platform after rolling out in July.
She said Charm City has about $10 million in annual revenue, with most of the company's growth coming from its technology side.
"We spent about two years building the app. We felt it was the third component to a great workplace experience," she said.
Guided by tenant data, Simpli helps the company bring conveniences of all kinds to buildings – like food vendors, yoga classes and pop-up shops – along with standard services like online rent payment and maintenance requests. The preferences for events, vendors and experiences change from building to building, so Charm City is planning to create white-labeled versions of the app for different properties.
"It's more than just hiring an events person and putting on events," Urquhart said. "It's focusing on companies' needs and their cultures, so it's very different for each building."
Charm City plans to expand geographically as well, she said, into markets including New York, San Francisco and Texas – where its current big clients have more properties.
She also plans to update the company’s name:
"We're so far beyond Charm City now," she said.
Urquhart said her 100-employee firm is not only female-owned, but also female-heavy – with all women as its top directors.
"Commercial real estate has always been a man’s industry, and technology is also that way," she said. "So we feel like we’re breaking barriers."
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Urquhart's name, as well as the name of Valo Park. It has been updated throughout.
