{"id":228498,"date":"2026-05-12T13:27:37","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/228498\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T13:27:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:27:37","slug":"brooklyns-industry-city-a-surprising-oasis-for-proptech-startup-commercial-observer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/228498\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn\u2019s Industry City a Surprising Oasis for Proptech Startup \u2013 Commercial Observer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn resident Allia Mohamed, CEO and co-founder of rental platform Openigloo<\/a>, used to go to Brooklyn\u2019s Industry City<\/a> as a patron of its restaurants, shopping and events. Eventually, Mohamed also saw a place to grow her startup company.<\/p>\n

Living in what she called \u201cthe south slope\u201d of Brooklyn, Mohamed was intrigued with the idea of bringing the nascent Openigloo<\/a> to Industry City, a historic shipping, warehousing and manufacturing complex on the Upper New York Bay waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood. Although not known as a proptech startup incubator, the complex\u2019s 6 million-square-foot ecosystem offered bustling workspaces along with its other attractions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SEE ALSO: Scott Thomsen of LuxWall: 5 Questions<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words, it had a vibe. And it was walking distance from her home.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs someone in the neighborhood, I used to go to an event, go to Japan village and check out the restaurants, the holiday gifts and things like that for many years,\u201d Mohamed said. \u201cSo, when I was eventually looking for space, it made sense for me to inquire a little bit further.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an old saying in real estate that if you want to know where a company is headquartered, just find out where the CEO lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, guilty as charged,\u201d said Mohamed, laughing. \u201cBut I will say we had considered others. The Financial District was very close to me as well and I\u2019d spent years commuting to Wall Street. There\u2019s great commercial spaces there as well that were attractive. But, ultimately, we really liked the authenticity of the Industry City campus \u2014 the fact that people from all over the city come to this space, and that it wasn\u2019t just all bankers, all tech, all fashion or all lawyers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a kombucha brewery in Industry City, there\u2019s seamstress businesses, as well as tech entrepreneurs. So I just really like being in the type of ecosystem that is a little bit more dynamic and interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"OpenIgloo'sOpenIgloo\u2019s office at Industry City, Brooklyn. PHOTO: Designs by Casablanca<\/p>\n

Having founded Openigloo in 2020 with a single coworking desk in Industry City, Mohamed has led the company\u2019s growth on the campus through two subsequent distinct phases \u2014 as a small private office, and its current\u00a0 purpose-built headquarters, which she believes reflects a broader shift among proptech and startup tenants toward spaces that can scale alongside them operationally.<\/p>\n

\u201cOpenigloo is a marketplace to help renters find better buildings and landlords, but also the multifamily operators that work with us,\u201d said Mohamed. \u201cSo renters come to our platform to share views about their rental experiences, to access municipal data on properties that they\u2019re considering, and search for quality apartments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mohamed\u2019s personal experiences led to the company\u2019s launch.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason we started this platform is because I\u2019ve struggled as a renter in New York City,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve had my fair share of horrible landlords. I was frustrated by the fact that I had to hand over a million and one documents to get an apartment, but I really got no information in return on who was the landlord. Do they take care of their building? Do they take care of their renters? So that was the genesis of the idea. Since then it\u2019s evolved into a marketplace that has supported nearly 3 million New York City renters with their apartment hunt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Openigloo claims that it has built the city\u2019s largest crowdsourced database of apartment reviews, with roughly 1,000 new verified reviews added each month.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe biggest thing that renters have been attracted to with us is the trust layer and the information that we\u2019re giving them that they cannot find anywhere else on a granular level,\u201d Mohamed said. \u201cSo everything from, \u201cAre there any open violations in this building?\u201d to the landlord returning security deposits. That\u2019s how detailed we\u2019re getting. So renters are getting a lot of value, and that\u2019s what\u2019s allowed us to grow as a community of New York City renters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Openigloo uses proprietary artificial intelligence overlayed on general AI platforms to aid renters and landlords, said Mohamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is absolutely a part of our fabric as we continue to grow, as long as it helps renters find quality apartments,\u201d she explained. \u201cOne of the ways that we\u2019re leveraging AI is we know what renters are looking for, what they like, what their preferences are, so we can leverage those tools to make sure that apartments that are coming to market that meet their criteria are in their inbox in real time. Same thing on the landlord side, as we\u2019re saving the landlords a lot of time by making sure that the leads that we bring to their door are high-intent, authenticated and financially eligible for those spaces, and have all the information that they need before showing up for the tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is somewhat unusual for a tech startup to grow physically in one location. Mohamed had a vision based on her background in the financial industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked on Wall Street in sales and trading, so I grew up on a trading floor,\u201d explained the Ottawa native. \u201cIt\u2019s what brought me to New York City to begin with. There were definitely influences from that experience, such as the way that our office is set up today. I always loved being in an environment where you could stand up and scream at someone from across the floor and get their attention. So that\u2019s exactly how the Openigloo office is oriented. And it was great that Industry City had those types of spaces where I could bring that vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Openigloo has grown from two people at a coworking desk, to a few people in 900 square feet, to a company that has tripled in size within a 4,550-square-foot office. \u201cWe work in the real estate industry in New York, so it was important for us to be able to create our own space that really reflected our culture and personality,\u201d Mohamed said. \u201cWe got a blank canvas of 900 square feet, set it up how we wanted, and we started growing the team from there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mohamed declined to speak about the rent Openigloo is paying for its space, but said that the company will be located there for the next five years.<\/p>\n

Such location stability in Brooklyn is a core factor in Openigloo\u2019s identity and talent recruiting, said Mohamed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe team is largely made up of New Yorkers, many of them Brooklyn-based, and Industry City has become a natural extension of that,\u201d she said. \u201cThe new office was designed in-house as a \u2018builder\u2019s space,\u2019 with custom meeting rooms, a hands-on layout, and a strong emphasis on collaboration, more akin to a product studio than a traditional office.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe campus itself has become an extension of that \u2014 used for team events, content and day-to-day employee experience, which we credit as a meaningful factor in retention and growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brooklyn resident Allia Mohamed, CEO and co-founder of rental platform Openigloo, used to go to Brooklyn\u2019s Industry City…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[41317,98,100,99,9,24,63,31535,31536],"class_list":["post-228498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-allia-mohamed","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-proptech","tag-proptech-insider"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}