It is not necessarily that the commercial Real Estate has changed in its essence, with few exceptions, as much as the clients have changed. Your user experience of your building is going to become your brand, and it is actually the brand which is going to become the value.
Hospitality portfolios of the Real Estate industry are by far leading in creating value with user experience field. Retail portfolios have mostly been up to date with tracking and improving their user experience as well as enabling unique offers with their loyalty programs. Meanwhile commercial office portfolios are vastly lagging behind.
It is clear that more than basic B2B Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is needed in order to capture this added value of user experience, although quite often that would be the ideal first step. Is it extreme for commercial office property and asset managers to go along the route of Seth Godin’s Tribes? Has WeWork’s co-working pursuit of user experience differed too much from industry mainstream like Regus? Can bringing hotel concept to commercial office market like Convene work in the long run? Time will tell.
Somewhere in the middle between basic CRM and Tribes we find Equiem and HqO. Perhaps they will be successful in adequately addressing the user experience of office buildings.
Interesting survey by HqO about user experience of commercial real estate.
“In the age of Uber, Airbnb, and GrubHub, consumers expect seamless digital access to the services and products they engage with during the day. Commercial real estate is no exception and tenants tend to choose no interaction over the challenge of contacting their property manager via traditional methods.”
…survey data demonstrates a clear disconnect between a new generation of tech-savvy tenants and the landlords who own and operate their office buildings.
The connected tenant is tech enabled, amenity-orientated, and community-driven, but some landlords are in fact still stuck in an age where they simply hand over a set of keys and fade into the background.”
Read more at: HqO
Equiem has taken a similar approach.
Ancient Real Estate mantra: “Location, location, location.” holds its ground firmly today as it did ever before, however there should be no doubt that user experience is important factor in real estate today and it is going to become a crucial factor of real estate tomorrow.