Can tenant experience apps lure workers back to offices?

The com­mer­cial real-estate indus­try has been slow to adopt tech designed to help clients get more val­ue from the build­ings they use, but that is chang­ing. A flur­ry of so-called ten­ant expe­ri­ence apps have emerged in recent years, enabling users to book meet­ing rooms, order from the on-site café, cre­ate online forums, adjust light­ing lev­els and even mon­i­tor a building’s air qual­i­ty.

The aim is to do for office space what apps have already done for bank­ing: make life eas­i­er for clients. The tech also offers land­lords access to rich data about their real estate, which could aid their efforts to remain rel­e­vant once the Covid cri­sis is tru­ly over.

The 10ha Broadgate office cam­pus in the City of Lon­don is one of the lat­est adopters. Its own­er, British Land, is using a white-label sys­tem from Aus­tralian start-up Equiem to offer enhanced ser­vices to its occu­piers, which include adver­tis­ing giant McCann World­group, invest­ment bank Peel Hunt and cin­e­ma oper­a­tor Every­man.

Tenants’ extras

“Peo­ple are accus­tomed to engag­ing dig­i­tal­ly in all oth­er areas of their lives, so it’s uncon­scionable for prop­er­ty not to do it,” says Sal­ly Jones, British Land’s head of strat­e­gy, dig­i­tal and tech­nol­o­gy. “Our busi­ness is about cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful places – and this adds a dig­i­tal lay­er on top of that.” 

The sys­tem is in still in “soft-launch mode”, she says, but it will be ful­ly acti­vat­ed once employ­ees return to Broadgate in larg­er num­bers. British Land plans to imple­ment it at three fur­ther cam­pus­es around Lon­don there­after.

It may seem like an unusu­al time to invest in this kind of tech, giv­en the Covid-dri­ven trend towards flex­i­ble work­ing, but Jones believes that it will help her company’s build­ings become “more entic­ing” in a com­pet­i­tive mar­ket.

“It adds to a set of tools we already use for gath­er­ing data on aspects such as ener­gy use and foot­fall,” Jones says. “Now we’ll be able to gauge things from the ten­ants’ per­spec­tive. We’ll see how much they like our spaces, what retail­ers they’re engag­ing with and what events they like and don’t like.” 

Excite­ment about ten­ant expe­ri­ence apps has fuelled a spate of invest­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US. Chica­go-based Rise Build­ings was acquired by real-estate soft­ware firm View The Space for $100m (£71m) in March, for instance, while Boston’s HqO raised $60m in series C fund­ing in April. 

Per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, some of the best-known providers have increased their rev­enues sig­nif­i­cant­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Equiem, which report­ed record sales in the first quar­ter of this year, now serves 500 build­ings world­wide, while HqO tripled its sales and dou­bled its head­count in the year to April.

Bridging the gap

Samuel War­ren, HqO’s man­ag­ing direc­tor for the UK and Ire­land, believes that ten­ant expe­ri­ence apps can help to “bridge the gap between the phys­i­cal office and the dig­i­tal work­place” once the pan­dem­ic is over. They also com­ple­ment land­lords’ strate­gies to attract and retain ten­ants by offer­ing a more “con­sumer-first approach”.

He explains: “The growth of flex­i­ble work mod­els means that the work­place and its com­mu­ni­ty have evolved past the four walls of the office build­ing. Land­lords need to find ways to cre­ate valu­able expe­ri­ences, for both those who are return­ing to the office and those tak­ing a more hybrid approach.” 

Nick Romi­to, co-founder and CEO of View The Space, believes that the apps can also play a key role in Covid-era health and safe­ty. He says that the return to office life will neces­si­tate “best-in-class tech­nol­o­gy to bet­ter man­age ten­ants’ chang­ing require­ments”. Such sys­tems offer func­tions such as “touch­less build­ing entry and insights into build­ing san­i­ta­tion and when com­mon areas were last cleaned”.

Mar­ket research con­sul­tan­cy Future­source pre­dicts that demand for such apps will con­tin­ue grow­ing. Fears that the pan­dem­ic has put an end to office life have been over­played, accord­ing to its asso­ciate direc­tor, Chris Mcin­tyre-Brown.

“Although many firms might go ful­ly vir­tu­al in the next five years, com­pa­nies will still need to meet and col­lab­o­rate,” he says. “A lot of office space could be repur­posed as flex­i­ble meet­ing space. Apps will play an impor­tant role in per­son­al­is­ing these and mak­ing them more attrac­tive to their users.”

The office as a living space

Mcin­tyre-Brown sees the growth of apps as part of a wider trend towards so-called smart offices, with younger employ­ees in par­tic­u­lar expect­ing more from their work­places. “For gen­er­a­tions Y and Z, it’s this idea of the office as a hotel – the gym on site, bean­bags, the ping-pong table,” he explains. “That has been hard to realise from a tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tive, but that is chang­ing.”

But not all ten­ant engage­ment apps are cre­at­ed equal, warns Ronen Journo, senior MD at Hines. His com­pa­ny, one of the world’s largest real-estate devel­op­ers, uses apps at five of its com­plex­es to sup­port activ­i­ties rang­ing from data min­ing to “pro­mot­ing the brand”, work­ing with providers such as HqO, Rise and the Office App. 

He notes that the app mar­ket is becom­ing crowd­ed, which makes choos­ing the most suit­able tech an increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult task. 

“There is so much ener­gy and activ­i­ty, but you need to be able to sift through the noise,” Journo says. “Ten­ant engage­ment apps are nev­er going to be the ‘iOS’ of a build­ing, so we need to be prag­mat­ic and con­sid­er what makes sense and what’s real­ly going to add val­ue for the occu­pants.”

To be suc­cess­ful, the apps need to act as a “thin veneer”, inte­grat­ing the ten­ants’ tech­nolo­gies seam­less­ly into a coher­ent and intu­itive inter­face. “This is crit­i­cal, he says. “That way, we can eval­u­ate what ameni­ties we’re offer­ing and inter­act more with our clients, ulti­mate­ly bet­ter serv­ing their needs.”