Former CBRE Exec Tapped To Lead Industry Strategy At Density

Peter Van Emburgh, CBRE’s former global head of corporate real estate has joined real estate tech company Density as head of industry strategy—a move that follows the executive’s own experience as a Density customer.

While at CBRE, where he oversaw the global corporate real estate organization and was responsible for a portfolio of more than 530 offices, Van Emburgh was instrumental in the development of Portfolio, which uses Density sensor data to show real-time, day-over-day return to office insights. The new benchmarking feature was designed to help real estate teams determine the performance and use of up to millions of square feet of space in seconds, the company said in a statement, enabling more efficient space management, benchmarking, and safety compliance.

In his new role as Density’s head of industry strategy, Van Emburgh will focus on accelerating growth, deepening and expanding relationships with global customers and partners, and bringing the customer perspective into the product development process.

“Density has a uniquely customer-first mindset and collaborated with me to design Portfolio to be exactly what I needed and simplify the ‘so what’ of space data,” said Van Emburgh. “On the client side, I saw first-hand the cutting-edge work Density does to solve big, vexing problems of space and building management.”

Portfolio automatically tracks weekly occupancy and usage changes, allowing occupiers to set safe maximum capacities in real time—an ability that’ll be useful as they navigate return-to-office strategies.  

“We’ve seen thousand-person buildings reopen only to reach no more than one percent of utilization,” said Andrew Farah, co-founder and CEO of Density. “Others that are officially supposed to be closed are at 28% utilization and climbing.” 

Density has raised over $100 million in funding since its founding in 2014 from investors including Kleiner Perkins, 01 Advisors, Upfront Ventures, Founders Fund, Ludlow Ventures, Launch, Disruptive, LPC Ventures, with participation from Alex Rodriguez, Julia and Kevin Hartz, Cyan and Scott Banister, and others.