Commercial Investment Real Estate November/December 2017 | Page 38
Evaluation Criteria:
Comparison of Building A and Building B ence the space without actually having to be
there physically.
• Does building A or B have the infrastructure to
support working outside of the physical office?
• Does building A or B help to engage employ-
ees? For example, does it offer wellness facilities,
classes, and robust Wi-Fi?
• Does the neighborhood have a good vibe? What’s
the walk score?
• Does building A or B offer long-, medium-, and
short-term flexible space options that align with
the organization’s needs?
• Does the tech and internet infrastructure in
building A or B support the organization’s needs
today and during next three years?
• Does building A or B support the firm’s culture
and brand? Integrating Changes
These are high stakes questions for a potential
tenant. Measuring the quality of the user experience
of a building for clients, backed by solid data, is a
skill set that brokers need to acquire.
Embracing Tenants’ Experiences
Speaking of data, engagement data about space
usage will be another critical factor for modern ten-
ants as they determine how to optimize their work-
place to meet the needs of their people.
Can a landlord provide the businesses leasing
space with information about, for example, how
often the boardroom on the 12th floor is being
used? Or the percentage of desks occupied at any
one time?
Brokers who understand this crucial information
will help tenants drive more value out from their
spaces, while transforming how they conduct busi-
ness within commercial real estate.
Finally, in the user experience-driven world, bro-
kers will need to rethink the way they tour spaces
and gather feedback about the property. Formerly,
the broker conducted a typical tour by showing the
tenant’s top executives their corner offices and then
calling it a day.
Today, however, leasing agents need to focus their
tours on how their space will make every single
member of the leasing tenant’s team happier and
more productive. And that old 20-page tour bro-
chure won’t cut it anymore either.
Consider using simple online surveys to gather
employee space pain points and feedback prior
to the search. Brokers also can leverage virtual
tours to quickly scale the number of people
(and decision-makers) who are able to experi-
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November | December 2017
To give landlords the best possible advice, brokers
need to become experts on the modern organiza-
tion. After all, if brokers don’t understand how
companies operate and are actually using space,
they are not going to be useful advisers to land-
lords. They may even lose deals.
This approach means recognizing the new trends
and understanding what today’s tenants need. Then,
the most valuable thing brokers can do is to educate
their landlord clients about these shifts and give
them practical, actionable advice to help them suc-
cessfully pivot toward a user-experience mindset. To
get started, brokers should consider the following:
• Find the latest resources on the topic, such as
blogs, research reports, case studies, and tweets
by experts in the field, and share them with the
landlord clients. Get the landlords thinking about
the matrix above. Discuss how their properties
benchmark on each factor against a competitor’s
set. If they compare poorly, brokers should share
their thoughts for improvements.
• Set up a couple of tenant discovery sessions for the
landlords where they can sit down with a modern
tenant outside of the deal process and discuss their
top concerns and needs.
• Being comfortable with data also is particularly
important for brokers. They often will be working
directly with tenant representatives to get their
clients into their spaces.
These potential tenants are making data-driven
site-selection decisions and have more information
accessible than ever before. They will expect land-
lords and the landlords’ representatives to be ready
to answer any of their questions as they come up,
with responses backed up with the appropriate data.
Brokers will be able to make deals happen much
more quickly if they can answer in kind.
These changes may feel unsettling to brokers.
However, they’re actually a huge opportunity.
If brokers can master this new landscape and adapt
to the expectations of modern tenants, they can dif-
ferentiate themselves from the traditional brokers.
The result will be to set these brokers apart, provid-
ing them with long, successful careers. All it takes is
a willingness to learn and a shift in mindset.
Brandon Weber is co-founder and chief product
officer at VTS in New York City. Contact him at
[email protected].
COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE