SAVANNAH, Ga. – Real estate owners and operators are implementing technology that can better serve occupiers by giving them more control over building access, amenities and other levers that can help boost workers’ return to the office, real estate technology executives said during a presentation at Realcomm IBCon last week. But with all these changes come increased complexity that has to be managed.
“Every square inch of the property is being utilized between fitness centers, restaurants, frictionless lobbies and outdoor venues,” Tom Karounos, global head of building and hospitality at Tishman Speyer, said. His company develops and operates top-tier real estate across the country, with about $68 billion in assets under management. Rockefeller Center in New York City is one of their clients. “A lot of our customers are back five days a week …. So we’re trying to keep them comfortable in our properties and make it more welcoming for them to come back to the office.”
Attempts to make space attractive include adding AV conference rooms, golf simulators and high-tech gym equipment, according to Brandon Van Orden, senior vice president and chief information officer at Cousins Properties.
Karounos said he’s seeing more customers looking for conference room services. “A lot of folks don’t have high-end conference rooms within their space within our building,” he said. “They can’t afford it, and they just don’t have the expertise.”
Providing these spaces and services helps keep employees in the building, bring other resources or employees to the region and into the building while driving revenue for Tishman Speyer, he said.
Karounos said his company works with VTS and Swift Connect to provide a tenant experience app that enables occupants to manage their bookings. The goal is to give employees multi-building access and reduce the amount of time they spend at turnstiles entering buildings. “They may be in Building A today, and they may be somewhere in a different state the following day,” he said. “Now they can traverse that building frictionlessly in a different state.”
But effectively implementing and managing technology creates its own challenges for facility managers and real estate teams due to the increasing complexity of the systems, the executives said.
Previously, Tishman Speyer and other companies would roll out technology from the top down, Karounos said. “Now we actually do research and meet with our customers, not just our property management staff,” he said.
“There’s a risk and reward,” he said. “There’s a risk when you’re installing a lot of new technology in your properties [of] who’s going to manage it?” For example, he said, you can put in a world-class audio-visual system that, when unmanaged, can fail to work when it is needed most.
“When your Peloton or your yoga mirror doesn’t work, your [high-tech] gym is useless,” Van Orden said. “It used to be that if you could lift iron weights, it works. Now you’ve got a golf simulator. Talk about a maintenance nightmare. There are six different things that can go wrong on those things, and when one doesn’t work, the whole system’s useless.”
The amount of support these systems require is one of the biggest challenges moving forward, Van Orden said. Many real estate companies don’t have the engineering skill sets needed to handle the design and continuous support for these systems.
“We have one property that started out with Tesla chargers,” Van Orden said. “We didn’t charge. It was free to customers.”
When the company decided it wanted to start charging for the service, it ran into technical problems it didn’t anticipate, he said.
“There are some things you don’t think about, like designing the network for parking decks under buildings,” he said. “They don’t see the sky, so good luck getting cellular in there. So now we want to put in charging stations that accept credit cards with a point-of-sale system that has no cellular access. Good luck, right?”
Another issue is the cybersecurity risk as the technology ages. “You start adding these things, you add complexity from other vendors coming in and plugging things into your network and you always run the risk of cyber,” Karounos said. “We put all of our vendors, including ones that we approved, through a whole … cybersecurity questionnaire process. We take the vetting process very seriously and we partner with our procurement team to keep us honest, so there’s no kind of ambiguity.”
“We recommend vetting partners out and making sure that we have a good support model and good relationship with them,” Van Orden said.
