Smart - The most misunderstood word in real estate?

Marble from the staircase to the Boston Public Library.

Everywhere in real estate you hear people discussing, often bragging, about ‘Smart’ buildings. ‘Our buildings are smart’, ‘we have the smartest buildings’ ‘let me show you how smart our building is’. And so on.

Don’t be taken in.

Because the foundational point to understand about ‘Smart Buildings’ is that …..

….. it’s not about the building.

Now, to be clear, having a building be smart, in a technological sense, is vitally important. Certainly do not invest in a building that isn’t already smart, or at least has the potential to be made smart. But ‘smart’ on its own is now necessary but not sufficient.

Smart buildings tend to be awash with obligatory dashboards, but these are often seldom looked at, and the data poorly analysed. Does a tree make a sound if nobody is there to hear it?

Smart buildings also tend to boast about their accreditations. We are gold this, and platinum that. But often these awards are awarded either before anyone actually occupies the building, based on unrealised designs, are ‘pay to play’ and/or the result of measurements taken at a particular moment in time. 

The fact that this building performed to this level, on this day or month, really is not telling us very much.

And we have all heard of the buildings that worked brilliantly in theory, but not in practice.

Starting with the technology is not Smart, it’s Dumb.

In reality there is only one place to start to be ‘Smart’’ ….

You have to start with human needs and work back to the technology required to satisfy them.

Ideally one should be designing a desired customer and user experience before even thinking about the technological ‘smarts’. One should be viewing the real estate as the output, not the input. This relates back to those Brand values we’ve discussed elsewhere. Where we are developing what it is our particular Brand stands for. Where we are co-creating, in multi-functional teams, what it is that we want to achieve. At a human level, for our customers:

So…

What is the experience of our building? 

How does it feel to be in our building? 

What human skills do we want to catalyse? 

Who is this building designed for? 

What will this building enable our customers to do? 

And what can be done in our building better than anywhere else?

This last point is absolutely crucial. If our building is not the best place to do X, then why would anyone come to it? Wouldn’t they go to wherever is the best place for them to do whatever it is they wish or need to do.

It is a brutal question, but reiterating the point that post covid we have realised we really do not need an office, it has to be addressed. Even the smartest of smart buildings, at a technological level, will prove to be extremely dumb in reality if it cannot attract customers. No one will come to your building just because it is smart.

Necessary but not sufficient.

We have to have a laser like focus on the real meaning of smart in a real estate context:

’Smart’ buildings serve the people in a building.

‘Smart’ buildings improve the day to day enjoyment of spaces.

‘Smart’ buildings HAVE TO enable happy, healthy and productive people.

The bottom line is that ‘Smart’ buildings improve the lives of people. If they do not, they’re not smart.

You will have guessed by now that being smart is, once again, a human + machine endeavour. We have to start with the experience we are trying to create, that meets the wants, needs and desires of our existing or targeted customers, but then move on to creating and curating the technological infrastructure of hardware, software and services that will enable it.

Investment into ‘smart building’ technology continues apace, and will likely do so for many years to come, because we ARE demanding more and more from our buildings. We are seeking user experiences that really do redefine what it means to be in a ‘smart’ building, and there is a lag between desire and ability. We want sustainable buildings, that look after the health and wellbeing of people, but also enable them to be as productive as possible and are also a pleasure to be in. 

Being net zero and better than ever before is a tall order. 

So it’s no surprise to see big money going into developing digital twins, virtual power plants, IoT connected heat pumps, smart glass, occupancy and security tech, and other products and services. And this is a very good thing.

We just need to never forget the purpose of all of this - to create a better built environment. For us humans.

That’s what ‘Smart’ means. Or should do.

Relationships, Networks, Ecosystems - ‘How can we help?’

Caravan of Marco Polo traveling along the Silk Road. Geography and Map Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Relationships, Networks and Ecosystems are really going to matter in the future of real estate. As we move from being a ‘product’ industry to a ’Service’ led one we need a different approach to how we deal with our customers. We need to move away from a transactional mindset and rethink where our value lies. There will always be a place for deals and dealmaking in real estate but the deal we will have with our customers will be a different one. And it will be based on relationships, networks and ecosystems.

Delivering a great service can only occur if you are working with great data. That enables you to monitor how you are performing and provides you with the feedback loop that allows for continuous optimisation. In the context of the workplace we need to know, in realtime and at a very granular level, how the building is performing, in terms of providing exceptional environmental conditions, how the space is being used, and to what purpose. To what extent are we providing the spaces and services that enable individuals to perform their tasks as efficiently and effectively as possible. I.e are we providing 1st class ‘Space as a Service’?

Our aim, apart from the obvious one of pleasing our customer, is to create a working environment that is tightly attuned to personal need. That actively and continuously learns from qualitative and quantitative data what a customer wants, needs and desires and seeks to provide it. We have talked elsewhere about thinking of ‘workplace as software’ and this is at the core of that concept. By constant iteration, by a process of ‘Build, Measure, Learn’, our workplace gets better as time goes on. For our customer. Their off the shelf workplace becomes increasingly made to measure.

And the benefit to us is powerful, as competing with made to measure is hard. Our customers could leave for a competitor but then they’d lose all the personalisation now incorporated into their workplace and would be back to off the shelf. The learning process would have to start again.

Our value proposition is that we are creating the perfect space ….. for you.

But we cannot do this alone. Which is where relationships, networks and ecosystems come in.

We need to build close relationships with our customers because we need to understand a lot to deliver a lot. And these relationships need to be built on trust. For us to really understand the wants, needs and desires of our customers, which is essential to delivering a great service, we need a lot of data. However, having been burnt repeatedly by companies extracting data from us only to then ‘productise’ us, many people are very wary, rightly, of being tracked. So we need to be extremely upfront and transparent as to the trade we are offering customers. We need to be able to explain why we require X, Y, or Z data and how it enables us to provide A, B or C service. And how we are storing the data, how we are respecting privacy, and what else we are doing, or not, with their data. 

Our approach to customers data needs to form part of what our Brand stands for. Make no mistake, within the real estate industry we will see increasing examples of customer outrage as companies fail to handle data properly. And in a ‘Space as a Service’ world the price could be very high. Reputations take years to build but days to destroy. Try to be Apple, not Facebook.

Networks and ecosystems are required for two reasons. To help satisfy a customers real estate, and non real estate, needs.

Starting with real estate needs these are becoming more complicated for companies. In the old school, highly office centric world it used to be the case that all employees came into a single office building, every day, Monday to Friday. So a companies real estate needs usually amounted to securing one building per geography. Increasingly though, as companies move to a hybrid way of working, and then on from there to a fully distributed model, they might need a network of spaces. They might need a CBD base, some flex space, some co-working space, some ‘Club’ type space, some ‘Near Home’ space. And they might need these available across multiple geographies. And ideally they’d like them all wrapped up into a single offering, managed from a central online location, and managed and billed together. In other words, their needs are ‘complicated’.

How much of this could you satisfy on your own? In reality probably not much. Which is where networks and ecosystems come in. We are supposed to be the real estate experts and we are in the service industry, so we should be building our own support network, and ecosystem of partners that would allow us to tick off many if not all these boxes. We should be putting in place the arrangements that would allow us to service most of a customers real estate needs.

Because if we don’t, someone else will. And that someone will then ‘own’ a very important part of the relationship with our customer. And once you lose your relationship with a customer you are but one step away from being commoditised. Many landlords will learn this lesson over time; in a space as a service world owning the customer relationship is vital. Landlords could easily find they have no relationship with their customers, and step by step move from being ‘king of the castle’ to interchangeable suppliers.

On the flip side todays leasing brokers might morph into this sort of super advisor, where instead of making money signing up clients to leases, they have a more ongoing, less transactional role advising and organising away all the complexity of future real estate needs. Getting rid of problems can be a very lucrative business.

And then we have a customers non real estate needs. Unlike most consumer goods companies, who need to know a lot about their customers but seldom have any real world contact with them, our customers spend 90% of their day inside real estate. Our customers are with us most of the time. Historically though we have known very little about them. Which will change dramatically in a space as a service future. As we have discussed many times, we need to know a lot about our customers in order to provide them with a great user experience. In so doing we ‘should’ be able to discern what non real estate needs they have that we might assist them with. These might be hospitality services, or learning and development ones, or digital skills we can aggregate demand for. Or ….. whatever. The point is not to be prescriptive but to listen, learn and provide, where possible. What can you supply? Where do you fit in? How can you help?

In the tech industry companies talk about CAC and LTV. What is the Customer Acquisition Cost and what is their Life Time Value. The higher the life time value the more one can pay to acquire a customer. Why don’t, can’t we think more like this in real estate. Stop thinking of customers as transactions but instead see them as long term ‘guests’ whose lives we can improve in multiple ways.

Via our relationships, networks and ecosystems.

Sustainability - The Third Fly Wheel for #SpaceasaService

M.C. Escher’s Day and Night - 1938

Sustainability is often thought of as an ‘extra’. This is what we want to do, now what do we have to spend to tick the ‘sustainability’ box? How much am I going to have to pay to keep Greta happy? And so on.

In reality sustainability is actually the third leg of the #SpaceasaService super stool, the other legs being Health & Wellbeing and Productivity. Acting together each of these operates as a flywheel for the other. Each factor maximises the other. If you want space that enables people to be as productive as they are capable of being, then you need to put them in an environment that takes care of their Health & Wellbeing. If you want to take care of people’s Health & Wellbeing then you need to put them in a sustainable building, because sustainable buildings require the technologies that enable excellent environmental conditions. 

Put simply sustainability is where safe, happy, healthy, productive and frugal meet. It is a critical ingredient, not an extra. A part of the core offering in #SpaceasaService.

However, ‘Houston we have a Problem’. According to research by Carbon Intelligence, given the carbon reduction trajectories of different asset classes, by 2035, 50% of buildings won’t be ‘Paris Proof’. I.e they will fail to meet the targets laid down in the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by 196 Parties at COP 21 in Paris, on 12 December 2015. The consequences of which will be lower asset values, lower rental yields and stranded assets. 

At a huge scale.

Jean Eaglesham and Vipal Monga, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on November 20, 2021, entitled “Trillions in assets may be left stranded as companies address climate change”.

In their words: 

‘The International Renewable Energy Agency has estimated that $7.5 trillion worth of real estate could be “stranded”; these are assets that will experience major write-downs in value given climate risks and the economic transition.’

At a climate conference in Copenhagen in May 22, a representative from GRESB stated that 25% of the assets they report on are already categorised as stranded assets, and only 7% are aligned with the Paris Agreement.

These are worrying statistics. Even if you’re of the more sceptical persuasion they’d need to be orders of magnitude wrong to not be worrying. If it’s your money in these assets, or you’re responsible for other peoples money, it is hard to not be concerned. We could be looking at value destruction at a level unprecedented in real estate history. This is way bigger than a cyclical market crash.

There is though some good news. This is a subject upon which incentives are aligned. Investors are demanding sustainable assets. Given their own mandates they are finding it increasingly hard to even consider investing in assets not considered ‘sustainable’. Regulators, at the local, national and supra national levels, are now wielding increasingly large carrots and sticks. In many cases one can take advantage of tax breaks, preferential loan terms and the like when building super sustainable, but one is also liable to large and growing fines for not reaching certain sustainable targets.

For example, In New York, Local Law 97, sets carbon reduction targets of 40% by 2030, and 80% by 2050, for NYC real estate. To achieve these goals, Local Law 97 sets building CO2 emissions limits and a building that exceeds these limits after 2023 will be subject to a $268 per metric ton (MT) tax.

In the UK Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard regulations (MEES) will start to apply to commercial buildings from 2023, and those below a certain standard cannot be leased. Yes, cannot be leased. It is estimated that circa 10% of buildings will fail this test. That is bad enough but when the target rises as planned by 2030, it is estimated 85% would fail. There is even a stepping stone stage, where you have to achieve a certain rating by 2027.

In short, unless legislation is retracted we are going to see a massive upgrading of stock or a massive number of stranded assets. Most likely we’ll be seeing both.

Of course there are two ways to look at this regulatory ‘burden’. If you’re on the wrong side of it you’ll be mightily aggrieved, but if your assets are high quality, sustainable ones you’ll be in a very strong competitive position. 

In fact, if you have high quality, sustainable assets today you are already in a strong position because the demand for such assets is booming, not least of all because the best companies are already insisting, as with investors, on them. Try letting an unsustainable building to a leading company. You have no chance. But also try letting unsustainable space to modern, progressive, start ups or early stage companies. They in turn are being driven by the wishes of their employees, who more and more are taking a high minded approach to where they work. Besides everything else, sustainability is great Branding.

So investors, regulators and customers incentives are aligned. This is a rare thing in real estate and can only lead in one direction. To succeed you have no choice but to create sustainable assets. So even the bad news, that getting to where you need to be is going to be an expensive journey, is neutralised. Of course all these costs are a bad thing but you’re not alone. All your competitors are in the same boat.

There is also a very considerable long term benefit from the need to create sustainable buildings. And that is that:

‘sustainability is the mechanism by which technology is injected into real estate.'

In order to create sustainable buildings, which as we said above are one leg of the three legged #SpaceasaService super stool, owners and developers will have to install technology into their assets in a manner hitherto unprecedented. They will have to think about the entirety of how their buildings perform, and invest in a panoply of technologies that they most likely would not have considered previously. At long last the real estate industry will be forced to become technologically savvy and in turn will undergo a wholesale digital transformation.

There are even more sustainability forces transforming real estate. In Europe, which is ahead of the other two global superpower blocks, China and the US, there is the EU Taxonomy. This is a framework designed to help define what are considered environmentally sustainable economic activities. At its launch in March 2020 this was stated:

“The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the need to redirect capital flows towards sustainable projects in order to make our economies, businesses and societies, in particular health systems, more resilient against climate and environmental shocks and riskswith clear co-benefits for health.’

And right at the core of the taxonomy you will see sustainability linked to the Capital Markets. The point being that money and sustainability go hand in hand. No sustainability = no money. Want money, get sustainable. The bond is defined in Law. At least in Europe, though the US and China are bound to follow, even if in their own idiosyncratic ways.

All of which is a very good thing. Where this is leading is to an increasingly bifurcated real estate industry. There will be assets that are sustainable, that promote Health and Wellbeing, and that enable people to be as productive as they are capable of being. These assets will most likely be operated in a #SpaceasaService manner, where the wants, needs and desires of individuals will be used as key inputs to how spaces are designed and curated. And there won’t be all that many of them. There will also be assets that are none of the above. They will be either in low demand, orstranded entirely.

At one end of the market we will see assets where occupancy and utilisation, satisfaction and Net Promoter Sores will be higher than ever, with commensurate high capital values, and at the other end extraordinary value destruction. In the middle there won’t be much; demand for average work spaces will be very low. Home trumps average easily.

Once this tsunami of change becomes obvious to all, we’ll (hopefully) see a great resurgence in real estate, where all the stranded assets are demolished, rebuilt or renovated. Where we rethink what types of real estate we need, and where we need it. And where we put people at the centre of our thinking.

Sustainability is about more than saving the planet; it’s also about saving us. It’s the driver of change we need to genuinely ‘build back better’. And that’s no bad thing is it?

Health & Wellbeing: You want productive employees don’t you?

Summer evening on Skagen Sønderstrand - Peder Severin Krøyer 1893

The waning of the pandemic has left us with 3 zeitgeist defining realisations. First that we can, should we wish to, satisfy most of our retail needs online. Physical sales have rebounded but online ones have not diminished much from the boost they received via enforced lockdowns etc. Secondly that remote working …… works. Or largely does. Circa 70% of knowledge workers say they can work more productively out of the office than in it. And thirdly, that buildings can kill us. Put a large number of people in close proximity in badly ventilated spaces in the presence of an infectious virus and you’ll end up with ill, to very ill, to dead people.

We have actually known about this for years, decades even, but largely ignored it as mostly people simply got ill, or the flu, but seldom died. So collateral damage, as it were, did not warrant doing much to mitigate the situation. Well I think we’ve learnt our lesson over the last couple of years, and for most individuals, second only to the commute, is fear of unhealthy environments back in the office.

So almost all landlords and companies are now having to address those health & wellbeing issues that only the most progressive landlords & companies paid much attention to pre pandemic. Covid has in effect forced us, en masse, to do what we should have been doing anyway. And hallelujah to that.

For more reasons that you might think. Promoting good health & wellbeing is a good, worthwhile aim in its own right, but it is also one of the three flywheels that, operating in unison, are the necessary drivers of a happy, healthy and productive workplace. The other two being productivity and sustainability. 

Ultimately a company is looking for a productive workforce. As Paul Krugman famously wrote, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it’s almost everything.” The more output we can get from each unit of input the better. Lazy but super productive people are a good thing, as they are the ones likely to find the quickest, fastest, easiest, most efficient way of getting things done. But either way, without productivity growth none of us are going very far.

But how do you get a productive workforce? There are of course many factors, but what is certain is that they need an environment to work in that looks after their health & wellbeing. You aren’t going to maximise productivity without doing so. The aim is to provide people with environments that enable them to operate at maximum cognitive function. Where they can work as well as they are capable of.

And how do you get an environment that maximises cognitive function, health & wellbeing? Almost definitely by focussing on creating the most sustainable building you can envisage. Exactly the tools and technologies that underpin sustainable buildings are those that enable you to create great environmental conditions.

The bottom line is that health & wellbeing, productivity and sustainability are flywheels for each other. They are not separate outputs. They are not different skillsets. They are three factors that have to be thought of in a unified way. Feedback loops abound and you need to be planning for all three as you consider each one. What differentiates a #SpaceasaServicemindset is doing just that. Thinking of the whole not the parts. Thinking of the ‘system’ that will enable these flywheels to fly. It won’t just happen. Getting two of them right is relatively easy, getting all three is not.

Let’s though now look at what IS required to create a ‘Healthy Building’. Here I am going to fall back on the definitive guide in this matter, Joe Allen, who leads the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health. His May 2020 book ‘Healthy Buildings’, co-authored with John Macomber, has been described as a ‘call to action for everyone to demand healthy buildings with cleaner indoor air’, but I am going to paraphrase the key points from an earlier paper he led entitled ‘The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building’.

For each of these you can dive as deep as you like, but at a generalist level, this is the gist of what matters.

Ventilation - plenty of it, fresh and recirculated, but avoiding street level (or car park) intakes and filter well. Maintain and monitor in real time and most likely exceed regulatory requirements. 

Air Quality - check the chemical emissions of your furnishings and building materials. Surprisingly nasty things can lurk there. Monitor humidity, CO2 and PM2.5 levels. Not annually, but continuously (same with ventilation). We’re looking to optimise, optimise, optimise.

Water Quality - careful with disinfectant levels, test water quality regularly, and look out for water stagnation in pipes.

Thermal Health - temperature & humidity are key determinants of how comfortable we are. Some like it hot …. Some don’t. Provide control or varying temperatures in different parts of your workplace. Monitor constantly. Don’t get into the trap of running heating & cooling at the same time. Getting this right takes thought.

Dusts & Pests - prevention is better than cure, avoid pesticides but have an ongoing plan. 

Lighting and Views - lighting that fights our circadian rhythms is a bad thing. Try to let nature do its thing. And views please. Happiness is a nice view. And vice versa.

Noise - is a productivity killer. Or an enhancer. Noise levels appropriate to the task/function are vital.

Moisture - enough is enough. Anymore is bad. Monitor and maintain ‘correct’ moisture levels.

Safety & Security - make sure everyone in your building is safe and secure. Meet fire safety and carbon monoxide monitoring standards.

Do read the source report* for this wafer thin summary. A lot of this is common sense but the devil IS in the detail. Most buildings run quite to very inefficiently, so there is a lot of low hanging fruit to create better spaces than your competition. 

The bottom line is that we know what is required to create a healthy building. For #SpaceAsAService operations the bar has to be higher than is traditional because the aim is to be better than the norm. Top operators will place providing great environmental conditions at the centre of their ‘Brand Promise’. In a post Covid world there will be great competitive advantage in providing spaces that genuinely are good for our health and well-being.

Human + Machine: The Unbeatable Double Act

Archimedes of Syracuse

We have to embrace the machines. And by machines I mean all forms of computationally powered software and hardware.

Not because if we do not they are going to take over the world, but because on our own neither are we. We may think humans run the world but in reality most of modern life is run by machines, and the things that work best are those where humans and machines operate in a smooth and symbiotic relationship.

Truth is that the machines, alone, will not ‘win the race’ but neither will humans. We have evolved to a state where we need each other. 

We need to be thinking about machines as leverage.

Archimedes of Syracuse said ‘give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’. Well today, machines are our levers and we are our own fulcrum. Humans and machines are complimentary, and if working together, hugely more powerful than working apart.

Human and machines have entirely different skill sets. Simply put what machines are good at is anything that is ‘structured, repeatable, predictable’. Anything that can be defined by a formula, however complicated, or that involves patterns, however obscure, is catnip for machines. Many humans are good at such things as well, but our brains cannot scale like machines can. Humans will never out perform machines at anything ‘structured, repeatable, predictable’.

The flip side of this is that humans are vastly better than machines at anything that involves Design, Imagination, Inspiration, Creation, Empathy, Intuition, Innovation, Abstract & Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Social intelligence or Judgement. These are the quintessential human skills and for now at least, we’ve not learnt how to imbue machines with them. Machines might one day outperform humans at these but it is not, most likely, something to worry about during the next decade or two.

According to a McKinsey report back in 2017, in the world of work Humans & Machines are pretty evenly matched. They wrote:

‘Overall, we estimate that 49 percent of the activities that people are paid to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adapting currently demonstratedtechnology.’

That 49% represents tasks that are ‘structured, repeatable, predictable’. If you think of workplaces where desks are lined up, like cells in a spreadsheet, that is the type of work probably being undertaken. Take input A, apply process B to it, and output C. We are all familiar with such tasks. Sometimes they are even quite complicated and mentally taxing. To a machine though they are just logical steps, and all around us we can see endless numbers of such tasks being replaced by ‘Robotic Process Automation’. All of this type of work is leaving the building. Half of what people are paid to do globally is ‘leaving the building’.

AI, as one of the most important technologies attacking the ‘structured, repeatable, predictable’ market is particularly adept at 'Communication, Perception, Knowledge, Reasoning and Planning’. In practical terms this means being able to understand the contents of photographs or videos, and the spoken word or written text. As well as being able to ingest, digest, and analyse vast data sets, looking for patterns, key words or phrases and taking predefined action based on what is found. 

With such capabilities, which are very much quantitative, it is not hard to understand why the famed computer scientist Andrew Ng, has said "If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can automate it using AI”. Which means that, if we look through the lens of Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, we humans need to be concentrating more on ‘Thinking Slow’, and leave the machines to deal with ‘Thinking Fast.’.

This though is all a good thing. Leave the machines to do what they are good at and concentrate on what we, humans, are good at. Surprisingly the great Artist Picasso summed all this up rather well. He said ‘Computers are useless, all they can do is give you answers’. And that is exactly the point; essentially machines are good at quantitative tasks whilst humans excel at qualitative ones. And therein lies the ‘jobs to be done’ of humans. Thinking up the questions for machines to answer.

So what has this got to do with real estate? Well, Winston Churchill provides the answer to that. He famously said in 1942, during a debate on how to rebuild the UK Houses of Parliament after they had been bombed:

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’.

This has never been more true than today, and is a key way to think about real estate, and the workplace, going forward. Because it is human skills that will be in most demand in a deeply technological world. As technologies continue their exponential development it is going to be human skills that are enlisted to shape just how those ‘superpowers’ are utilised. It is going to be humans designing the future, not machines. Value is no longer going to come from being really good at structured, repeatable, predictable tasks, because one by one machines are taking over those tasks. And moving further and further up the value chain as well. An absolute imperative of successful companies in the future will be that they contain people with very highly developed human skills who are able to discern, design and implement strategies that co-opt the extraordinary power of machines in the service of a human centric purpose. People who can use their qualitative skills to create products and services that are both technologically sophisticated and deeply human centric. Mostly the technology will be hidden, but the human front end will be the golden goose.

Who has the best environments for humans such as this to work in, with their servant machines? Who can create and curate environments that allow people to operate at the cutting edge of their cognitive ability? Who can develop places and spaces that inspire, that calm, that invigorate, that are empathically ‘fit for purpose’. And who understands what ‘fit for purpose’ is? Who knows enough about their customers, and operates space flexible enough, that it can adapt, morph and be constantly iterated to remain ‘fit for purpose’?

This is no easy task. Getting to a stage where you are maximising technology in the service of humans is a complicated, punishing task. Until you have cracked it. Then the technology, tuned to need, will enable space to operate like software. Where instead of stopping at ‘Build’, space is operated on a ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ basis. The longer it operates, the more it understands and the better it gets.

The workplace is going to become much more human, and much more technological. Make no mistake, the technology is vital, but the most important KPI will be creating spaces and places that catalyse human skills. Because if you don’t what exactly is the point?

Just remember we are living in a Human + Machine world, and neither side can win on their own, but the goal, the aspiration, the desire must be that the machine is their to improve the lot of the human. And real estate can most definitely play its part in making this happen.

Antony