Two Midwest commercial real estate brokers have formed a company to help investors manage their properties, and the energy and technology it takes to run them, as well as to invest in new technologies the firm can use in its own developments.

Evoke Partners’ founders say the company aims to guide owners of properties that use a lot of power such as data centers and cold storage facilities. Using energy market expertise, an area the average investor might not know about, to goal is to help lock in competitive rates and potentially create significant savings across a nationwide portfolio of real estate.

Evoke also could invest in property technology startups that will create other efficiencies. The company will put funding into ground-up developments and property acquisitions, co-founders Geoffrey Kasselman and Ra’eesa Motala told CoStar News.

“We are launching the company under the understanding that real estate and energy are bundled,” Kasselman said. “We have come up with a platform to unlock the value of that bundle strategically. The customer that we’re after is one that consumes a lot of real estate and a lot of energy.”

Although much of their collective experience comes in industrial brokerage, they said they plan to own several types of properties, including office, data center and boutique hotel deals in the works in the Midwest, and a West Coast industrial development.

Evoke Partners will be based in Chicago, where CEO Kasselman is based. It also will have an office in Minneapolis, where the firm’s president, Motala, is based.

Motala and Kasselman have chosen an uncertain time to launch a firm, with real estate deals in a slowdown nationally amid rising interest rates, corporate pullbacks and other economic worries. They also will be challenged to differentiate among an ever-growing field of property technology companies in which to invest the company’s dollars.

But they said they believe new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, will offer advantages to early adopters in the years to come. They also said they believe high-growth sectors, such as data centers to keep up with soaring cloud storage needs, will require greater sophistication in how property owners find and pay for electricity and natural gas.

“We feel like we’re real estate problem-solvers,” Kasselman said.

The founders said they have completed a combined 100 million square feet of deals as brokers, for clients in 147 cities, 45 states and 14 countries.

Kasselman’s career has included leadership positions at brokerages such as Studley and Newmark Knight Frank, and most recently at Chicago-based developer CRG. Since 2013, he also has been CEO of Op2mize Energy, which helps clients procure energy for their properties, including helping them with buying and hedging strategies.

In addition, Kasselman was global president of the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors, an organization through which he got to know Motala, in 2016 and 2017.

Motala is a former industrial broker at Lee & Associates and Minneapolis-based Rokos Advisors, before recently joining Op2mize Energy as chief revenue officer. Motala said she is active in the Urban Land Institute, serving on the organization’s Americas executive leadership committee and as chair of the ULI’s real estate diversity initiative.

Motala and Kasselman said social responsibility, such as diversity and green energy initiatives, will be core components of the firm’s growth. Evolve plans to add 10 or more employees this year, eventually adding offices in several cities and adding practices such as property management and construction.

They said they are starting with dozens of real estate clients and hundreds of energy clients. They are working on deals for clients in markets including Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Detroit.

Kasselman already invests in several property technology companies. He is on the board of directors or advisory boards of companies that he invests in. Kasselman said he eventually hopes to develop artificial intelligence programs to help forecast things such as when to buy and sell specific property types.

Startups that Kasselman invests in include two Houston-based firms: RealNex, which creates software used by commercial brokers for functions such as financial analysis, marketing, transaction management and tours; and Otso, a high-tech financial services platform for landlords and tenants.

Kasselman’s other investments include Pasadena, California-based InteliGlas, which helps smaller landlords run all aspects of their building — including heating and cooling systems, lighting, parking and security — from a single high-tech dashboard, while also identifying risks.

Evoke’s early stage development projects total more than $100 million in value, they said.

“We intend to harvest our own services and our own formula to outperform the market,” Kasselman said.