McKillop, an executive vice president, will be based in Los Angeles and bear responsibility for building the brand’s presence throughout that region, including, very likely, opening an East Coast office. Before taking this new role in September, he was senior vice president of technology, products and services at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.

Suffolk, England–based Toolbox Group was formed in 2000 and now operates in 22 countries. The company provides specialty-technology and strategic-marketing products and services to the commercial real estate industry. Its Mallcomm digital platform, available in 16 languages, enables firms to run virtually any aspect of a property remotely, including management and customer engagement, plus a range of such building-related services as climate control, the booking of meeting rooms and much more. The likes of British Land, Klépierre, Savills and Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield use the Mallcomm technology at roughly 250 properties, in the aggregate. Two notable shopping centers are Westfield World Trade Center, in New York City, and Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.

McKillop joined Westfield in 2016 and experienced several major shifts there. “We went through a demerger, then a consolidation, then an acquisition — so I feel like I had four jobs when I was at Westfield: four distinct periods, like geological periods, almost.”

At Westfield, he met members of the Toolbox team through deploying Mallcomm at the Westfield London and Westfield Stratford City retail centers. In 2018 Westfield began rolling out the product at all 20 of its Westfield-branded centers, and McKillop liked what he saw. “It resonated with me instantly,” he said. “Taking everything I had learned at Westfield around deploying technology in a physical space and all the challenges of that paradigm and mixing it all together into one job opportunity, I decided to jump for it.”

McKillop is hard at work promoting Mallcomm not only at the largest retail centers, but also at the mid-tier ones, where a single general manager might be juggling the operation of as many as five properties. The software is intended to help save time and money by facilitating a manager’s supervision of a property without the need to physically travel to it, McKillop notes.

To be sure, his was something of an unusual route into the real estate business. “I was a musician in my pre-tech career,” he said, describing the way his passion for music was influenced by his brother Rob’s membership in the heavy-metal band Exodus in the 1980s. He became absorbed in the thriving music scene of Berkeley, Calif., and learned guitar from virtuoso Joe Satriani, before moving to New York City to study jazz and contemporary music. “It was just an unbelievable experience,” he said. “I got to study with Miles Davis’ bass player and Aretha Franklin’s drummer and things that you couldn’t re-create if you tried to. But I switched over to tech in the mid-90s, and I actually came up through the startup world.”

Indeed, McKillop worked at such companies as EarthLink, PeoplePC and Spot Runner, and he also did a stint at Creative Artists Agency, in Los Angeles, managing a corporate IT team. Joining Westfield brought him into retail real estate, and Westfield’s embrace of technology in turn led him to Mallcomm. “I really loved the idea of marrying the physical and digital world together,” he said.

McKillop continues to play music as a pastime.

“I don’t have the time to be in a band or anything like that,” he said, “but I still have a deep love of music, and it is sort of a core piece of my DNA.”