With women holding just 9% of C-suite positions in commercial real estate, according to the National Association of Realtors, and just 12.4% of similar posts in STEM fields, per the World Economic Forum, it shouldn’t be too surprising that women comprise approximately 10% of senior roles at proptech firms. A major exception, however, is Maureen Waters, newly appointed CEO of Measurabl, a sustainability data management platform for real estate.
In many ways, her journey has mirrored that of the real estate industry — including the growing acceptance of technology, sustainability and women in power in the business.
Waters was used to being the only woman in the room from her earliest roles in real estate. “When I started in real estate, going back to my Cushman days, technology was viewed as optional. Sustainability was thought of as a certification exercise,” she recalled. Even as sustainability became a standard, thanks to the “green” movement and its importance in reporting, “The rooms where the decisions were made were predominately male, and innovation was talked about but not really a part of the conversation. Today, real estate really has fundamentally shifted and is being digitized.”
Data now has the potential to influence asset value, underwriting and capital allocations.
“It has moved from being on the margins to influencing portfolio strategy,” Waters said. “Data has always been a critical element of real estate, but now that data is shifting that mentality to being more outcome-focused. That fits nicely into diversity and leadership.”
With a college background in architecture and design, Waters joined Hines in Houston at a time when significant development was taking place.
“I was very passionate about real estate and ended up going on the services side to be impactful around change,” she recalled.
After selling a startup to CBRE, she joined that firm, then moved to Cushman & Wakefield, where she spent 15 years serving in business development and marketing and, eventually, as executive vice president of brokerage in New York City.
But in time she was looking for a change of scenery. A client offered the opportunity to move to Seattle to run Microsoft Founder Bill Gates’ real estate investment arm.
“That’s where I got the technology bug and saw how technology could make real estate more efficient,” she said. But after completing her work for Gates, she quickly discovered that her real estate background wasn’t a natural fit for most tech companies.
She opted to take a step back career-wise and joined Ten-X, an online real estate transaction platform and marketplace, combining her new interest with her history. The opportunity to change the mindset of an industry that had historically been slow to embrace tech, and become a part of that adoption curve, appealed.
Ironically, real estate was an industry that was harder to diversify than tech, she said.
“In technology, there is more diversity, and a lot more diversity in sustainability and sustainable technology,” she said.
By the time Ten-X was sold to CoStar Group in 2020, she was serving as its president — just in time for what she called a real inflection point in the relationship between real estate and technology. Upon Ten-X’s acquisition by CoStar Group in 2020, she joined MetaProp, bringing a new aspect to her career — working with venture capital investors to select technologies, technology implementations and advising early proptech innovators.
One of those innovators was Matt Ellis, co-founder of Measurabl. The rest was history.
“I got to meet the team, and became passionate about what they were doing,” she said. “I committed to Matt and really helped him institutionalize the business.”
She joined Measurabl in 2023 as chief growth officer, was named president in September 2024, and CEO in December 2025, with Ellis moving into the post of executive chairman.
“Over the last 13 years, we built Measurabl into the world’s most widely adopted sustainability data platform for real estate. But that was only the beginning. Maureen is the CEO to do what’s next: break down paywalls for unprecedented, widespread adoption, assemble a deeper, broader ecosystem of partnerships and integrations and pave a clear path to being the industry’s source of truth for investment-grade sustainability data,” Ellis said in the announcement of her most recent promotion. “For two years, Maureen has been a driving force behind our strategy and disciplined execution. She’s the right leader and now is the right time for her to take the helm as we work to be the industry’s trusted sustainability data partner — delivering the highest-quality, standardized, decision-grade data on which real estate owners, capital partners and service providers of all types can rely.”
Focusing on the planet was a homecoming of sorts. Sustainability had long been important to Waters — she had grown up in a city with air quality problems with parents who were committed to environmental issues.
“We had equipment in our backyard measuring the air quality in our city,” she recalled. “I am also passionate about the climate and leaving the planet in a better place for future generations.”
She has moved quickly. At Measurabl, she has led the development of the company’s three-year strategy, 1Measurabl, and continues to drive cross-functional execution. She oversaw the launchof Navigate in 2024, the most significant product release in the company’s history, and launched the company’s Free Sustainability Solution in 2025, which has already seen adoption across 14,000 buildings across 47 countries.
She also has deepened collaborations across the real estate ecosystem spanning owners, managers, lenders, investors, policymakers, NGOs, nonprofits and solution providers. The company recently announced partnerships with GBCA (Green Building Council of Australia), USGBC California and S&P Global.
Today, Measurabl works with more than 1,000 organizations across 90-plus countries, representing more than 22 billion square feet and $3 trillion in assets under management — to measure, manage and objectively report on performance.
Now, she’s charged with orienting Measurabl even more closely to its consumers by supplying even more of their needs, something she saw was necessary during her venture capital days.
“You can’t just take one pain point out of a transaction and still complete it,” she said. “You have to automate it from end to end or otherwise it breaks down. But to get funded, you had to be feature-driven. We ended up having a lot of startups that were feature-driven. Now we’re in a phase where customers want comprehensive solutions. What we’re seeing now is a demand for us to consolidate into one platform the things we needed. Matt, as a visionary, always felt it should be an end-to-end solution.”
Her first steps as CEO in 2026 include conducting a 90-day, 17-city, multinational “listening tour” to meet in-person with 70 current and potential clients.
“I believe in-person is the best way to have conversations,” she said. “Listening to customers right now is critically important. We’re in year three of my three-year plan, to shift our mind set to a customer first culture, not our view of it, but what the customer would say.”
She continues to pioneer women in business, too. Emerging from the male-dominated real estate world, it followed that proptech, too, has been a man’s world.
“Appointments like this matter because the pipeline is still constrained — women-founded companies receive only about 2% to 3% of venture capital, which directly impacts how many women ultimately reach CEO roles,” observed Marissa Limsiaco, president of Otso, a proptech firm that automates and streamlines tenant screening for commercial real estate leases. “Research also shows that women-led startups generate higher revenue per dollar invested, so the opportunity isn’t about capability — it’s about access. Leadership moves like this help normalize women at the top of proptech and expand what the next generation sees as possible.”
Women comprise half of Measurabl’s team, not too surprising given that many pioneers in sustainability in corporate real estate have been women.
“I have progressed from a very male-dominated world to a very female-dominated world,” she said. “I hadn’t realized sustainability was very female-dominated. It was a pleasant, and welcomed, surprise. Matt actually is an exception, as many of our customers are women, as they lead the charges within their companies.”
But women are increasingly taking the reins via entrepreneurship, said Nikki Greenberg, founder and global ambassador of Women in Proptech.
“Some of the most groundbreaking proptech companies in the U.S. right now are being led and founded by women — from EliseAI to Tulu and Alfred, to name a few,” she noted. “Their success isn’t accidental. They’ve won because they’re solving real operational problems in ways that are both innovative and meaningful. Expect to hear a lot more from this next wave of female founders — they’re not just participating in the industry; they’re shaping its future.”
At press time, Waters was hoping to host a roundtable on women in proptech on International Women’s Day (March 8) connected to MIPIM, the global real estate conference in Cannes, France. And she continues to advise women looking to grow in their careers.
“As a woman, I get asked all the time: How do I advance my career path? How do I have the opportunity to be a CEO one day?” she said. “Mentorship and sponsorship matter.”
Mentorship should come from someone outside the business, who can look objectively at a company and the mentee’s performance. Sponsorship, she noted, should come from within the company. “It’s really important to have someone inside the company who’s willing to help you internally, and that is not necessarily a woman.”
But both real estate and proptech are making progress.
“It’s moving in the right direction, certainly in the capital markets,” she said. “And if you look at the proptech and VCs that are led by women, it’s becoming more streamlined.”
