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One App, One Award-Worthy Building
A fresh property management team replaced a stalled platform in six weeks, unified everything into one tenant app, and put the results at the center of a BOMA TOBY Award submission.
About MetWest International
MetWest International is a 32-acre mixed-use development in the heart of Tampa's Westshore Business District, minutes from Tampa International Airport. It brings together nearly one million square feet of Class A office space across four buildings, One MetroCenter, MetWest One, MetWest Two, and MetWest Three, alongside a 56,500-square-foot retail village, Emerald at MetWest luxury residential, and a 175-room AC by Marriott hotel.
The development is owned by institutional owner MetLife and managed by Cushman & Wakefield, and it was named Best Mixed-Use Building of the Year by BOMA Tampa Bay. Cove is the platform that ties the day-to-day together for the team on the ground.
The Team and the Mandate
Natalie Stoughton, Associate Director, and Kim Callicoat, Sr. Property Manager, started at MetWest on the same day in October 2023, taking over a property that had been run by a long-tenured team. Their job covers two things at once: keeping the building and its systems running, and handling the reporting side so the owner can see how the property is performing. Tenant experience runs through both.
Natalie keeps coming back to one word. "[For] everybody in the industry, especially in Class A Office, it [comes down to] quality," she says. "It's our job to maintain quality, bring new items online to keep the interest of the employees, so that when each tenant goes to look at different space, employees like and want to be at MetWest." They came in with fresh eyes and a goal of getting the property to the best of the best.
The Challenge: A Platform That Had Stalled
VTS Rise had gone live only about six months before Natalie and Kim arrived, so switching systems again carried real cost. Tenants had already been told where to submit work orders and where to find building communications, and moving them twice inside two years served nobody. The trouble was that the platform worked against the team in two ways.
The engineers wouldn't use it. The application wasn't easy to use, and the engineering team said so. "When you have a bunch of frustrated engineers, it's really hard to bring them up as a team," Natalie says. "We're telling them, you've got to use this, and the application doesn't work." Tenants wouldn't use it either, put off by how many steps the simplest tasks took. When the team raised these problems with VTS customer service, the response shut the conversation down. As Kim recalls, "we didn't get, well, let's see how we can make that better. We got, sorry, that's what we have."
Fixes came with a timeline that kept moving: a quoted six to eight months that slipped to a year, and then, when Natalie followed up a year later, another nine months out. That was the breaking point.
"I went into Kim's office and I said, 'I'm calling Cove now. If they can do it in six weeks, we're moving.'"
Why They Chose Cove
Natalie had first met Cove's Mike Sensenig, Client Relationship Executive, at BOMA International, and what stuck with her was that he wasn't pushy and answered a lot of questions. Two things closed the decision. The first was the timeline. Cove committed to working through the team's requirements and bringing MetWest live in six weeks, against a competitor that had spent two years quoting and requoting a release date of added features and fixes. Both Natalie and Kim describe that timeframe as the deciding factor.
The second was the quality of the pre-launch meetings. "The meetings leading up to going live were productive, and I think that was a huge home run in our book," Kim says. "[We said,] 'This is what we're looking for,' and you guys [said], 'This is what we can provide.'" Implementation was led by Cove's Alex Jones, Enterprise Implementation Manager, and compared with peers who had been through rough implementations with other vendors, the team pointed to him as, in Natalie's words, "a very large reason we had such a successful implementation in the six weeks."
What They Run on Cove Today
MetWest markets the platform to tenants as MetWest Central, the single front door for the property. Amenities, conference rooms, work orders, and communications that used to live in separate systems now sit in one app.
- Work orders, at one to two clicks for a tenant to submit
- Preventive maintenance tracking and metrics
- Amenities, the property calendar, and retail specials
- Amenity reservations
- Tenant forms, waivers, and RFPs
- Access control through a Datawatch integration, so tenants can badge in with their phone instead of a key card
The volume gives a sense of the load it carries. Between August 2025 and July 2026, tenants submitted 2,699 work orders through the app. The team works to a 15-minute acknowledgement window, tighter for urgent issues at 10 minutes or less for a plumbing leak, and closed out 100 percent of these requests within their targets.
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"You don't have to go to six different apps to do what you need to do at MetWest. It's all on the one central MetWest Central app, and you can get everything you need to know about the office, going to the gym, the retail, the specials. It's all in the app."
Beyond work orders, the app runs the property's amenities and communications. Tenants book shared conference rooms through it, alongside two free fitness centers and notary services. Work order notifications, a monthly tenant newsletter, and building announcements run through the same system, and the team refreshes tenant contact sheets at the start of each year to keep the roster current.
The building keeps expanding because it is easy to expand. The team meets with Cove's Nick Bonfitto, Vice President of Customer Success, on an ongoing basis to add capability, with a QR code for visitor and vendor check-in in progress and a Datawatch scanner to support it. Those regular sessions are what keep the team adding more. As Natalie puts it, "there's no way we'd be doing as much as we do now" without them. Kim frames the same point from the adoption side: "it's been so easy that we're like, okay, well, we can just add one more. We all understand how to use this, now we're going to add another feature."
Putting Cove in the TOBY Submission
The written submission runs section after section of narrative, from 350 words on some to 4,000 words on tenant and occupant relations, each with supporting photos. On-site judging adds four to five judges, a four-page rubric, a building walkthrough, and a presentation that ran about an hour and a half. Cove appears across multiple scored sections: work orders, preventive maintenance, amenities, and tenant integration.
For Natalie, that was exactly the point. "The TOBYs are about management excellence, so it's about how are you best managing a property," she says. "To be able to say that we have this technology that we're pushing the envelope on constantly is a big pro." The team pulled statistics straight from the platform for the written submission, including work order volume and percentages by category, alongside screenshots of tenant forms and the app.
"We were so confident with how Cove was going to work that we were able to just pull up the website and say, here's this, and this is what our tenants see, and here are our PM [preventive maintenance] metrics, and here are our work orders that we've done."
Kim's point is that the metrics did the arguing. "We're really able to look at the metrics, show them the metrics of how we are managing the building," she says. "I think that was critical to our presentation." Natalie also made a point of using only her phone at the card readers for the entire multi-hour walkthrough. What caught the judges was the whole picture, not any single feature. The way the team sees it, competing platforms split similar features across separate portals, without one all-in-one tenant app.
The Payoff
Asked what the biggest return has been since the switch, Natalie's answer is short: a system that works, and one they can keep building on. Both are realistic about the award itself. Tenants don't shop for a TOBY-winning building; what they notice is how well it is run.
"I don't think tenants are like, 'Oh my goodness, this is a TOBY Award-winning building.' But what they do care about is how well the building is managed. And if you're doing this stuff, you are a better managing company."
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