If you’re in commercial real estate, whether it’s office, multi-family, retail, or cardboard boxes, you’ve likely witnessed dramatic changes in the industry over the past couple years. The focus on the deal as the investment return driver has given way to a focus on operations and maximizing NOI during a longer hold period.

Institutional, private, and foreign investment ownership are demanding more accountability from management teams. This accountability boils down to a new emphasis on operational analytics. Much as financial performance is measured and quantified, operational performance must be as well. Operating standards, real time visibility, and quantifiable performance reporting are the differentiators for today’s professional management teams.

Are you capturing the right data? Do you have visibility, access, and insight into the data you have? How do you manage and transform your operational information? This data is gold; appropriate reporting and analysis generates actionable insights that enable you to improve risk management, tenant satisfaction, and productivity.

See BEI’s flowchart for tracking and reporting assets:

The best operators are now applying performance metrics to how they operate, and that is their vehicle to taking things to the next level. The game has changed. How should you adjust your thinking and practices to this new reality?

To hear an owner and investor’s perspective on the Metrics That Matter, sign up for a free webinar!

Date: Tuesday, October 25th, 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST

Register Now!

According to Hubspot, 20% of US consumers access a social networking site via mobile phone. Not only your prospective clients, but also engineers, property management staff, and vendors perform their jobs while on-the-go.

Often referred to as “traditional” or “old school”, even Commercial Real Estate is going mobile. It’s changing the way we do business. For better or worse, information is readily available wherever you are (save maybe a few dead zones in Siberia). How should you harness this information?

Patrick Braswell, Principal at Scotland Wright Associates, specializes in tenant representation… and he often does it from his phone or iPad. Here he explains his use of mobile technologies to stay informed, interesting to prospects, and connected to tenants and contacts.

Watch the Impact of Mobile!

Find this interesting? See this infographic on The Mobile Workforce!

People are busy, and not only their lifestyle, but their workstyle reflects that. A client, tenant, prospect, colleague are “on” so long as their phone is. Today, that is how you should expect to reach them.

Mobile’s multiple communication channels, burgeoning App marketplaces, usability, and well… mobility are why property professionals are increasingly turning to mobile devices for work, marketing, networking, tenant relations, and news. People want to complete tasks with a few clicks wherever they may be. See how Building Engines makes that possible with its mobile application.

Illustrating the trends of a mobile workstyle, here’s an infographic from Gist:

View more..

To learn about how a property management professional should use mobile technologies, watch The Impact of Mobile.

The CRE workforce is increasingly accepting this concept: work is an action, not a place. “Work” is now often joined with terms like “on-the-go” and “in the field.” The rise of mobile and other technologies is changing the image of professional space.

Time spent face to face is as important as ever, but the physical office is facing an increasingly productive and prominent virtual office. In The Mobile Workforce, Coy Davidson states that this professional mobility is “allowing companies to shrink their office footprint.” This is not to say that the physical office is being phased out (certainly not the corporate office campus Coy Davidson writes). According to Gist, 40% of workers say they still need to be in the office to be productive.

Companies are integrating mobile technology into the workplace. Gist’s infographic cites that 32% of employees around the world rely on more than one mobile device during the typical workday. Mobile workers are using smartphones predominantly for social media for work, information management, web conferencing, note-taking, and office suites.

Virtual work, telecommuting and teleconferencing, and virtual teaming technologies are becoming a reality for companies in CRE. They’re going mobile.

In the last post, I outlined the uses and benefits of LinkedIn and blogging for  property owners and managers. Excellent professional tools, but I think you can handle more. It’s time to face the media. Here’s how to make it go from so-so, to social.

Four social platforms that best-in-class property management professionals rely on (and advice on their implementation):

With over 200 million users, Twitter is an incredible tool to gather real-time information and news. It is a combination of personal and professional messaging, so you can often see the more human side of your peers, prospects, and clients. You have 140 characters to get out your message (a URL shortening device such as bitly is highly recommended), so brief is chief.

How to use:

Follow your clients and prospects that are on Twitter. You can set up lists that follow only the people or companies in them. This allows you to quickly filter Twitter activity by these lists, which may be tenants, CEOs, or whatever you fancy. Thus you can easily monitor a group of tenants and respond to their issues or complaints, boosting customer satisfaction levels. You may want to use a personal page rather than company page to build more personal relationships.

Use Hootsuite to monitor different search terms and manage your Twitter activity with other social media communications.

Voice your opinion, share company news, demonstrate your relevance.

YouTube is the second most searched website in the world. It beats out every search engine other than Google. Humans are visual creatures, so appeal to their senses.

How to use:

With as little as a flip cam, Smartphone, or iPad, you can create interactive content and make it easy to access. Upload videos of vacant spaces and properties you want to market… for free! Create a customized YouTube channel that links to your website.

If you haven’t heard of Google+, you apparently only use the internet to access this blog. With features often compared to Facebook and predicted to overtake it, Google+ allows users to create “circles,” another way to create networks for sharing.

How to use:

Google Plus is not yet available to businesses, so you must make a private account (this however can still be leveraged by businesses). Use circles to distinguish friends, business associates, industry thought leaders, tenants, and any other group you choose. The message and feed filtering makes segmented communication easier than on Facebook or Twitter.

Sparks combines RSS Feeds, Google Alerts, Google News and other tools to keep you up to date on industry-related news.

Gist allows you to correlate all of your contacts and see what those contacts are doing on their social media sites. It keeps records of your e-mail correspondence with clients, as well.

How to use:

Search a prospect or client to find their online presence, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc. These are all different venues to make connections that can be more effective than traditional means of reaching out. You get the gist.

Customers increasingly turn to social platforms before corporate websites and traditional sources when looking for information. What does a quick Google search say about your company? The results might surprise you.

If you are in the US, odds are that one of the last six minutes you’ve spent online was spent on social media. And you might have been hard at work! Best-in-class property owners and managers use social media as an essential component to managing their online brand, building tenant loyalty, and attracting new clients.

Social media is more than a means of oversharing the minutiae of your life and stalking people. It has become a powerful tool for professionals in the real estate industry. Here’s how property managers and building owners are using two popular social platforms to reinforce their brand and stand out amongst the competition:

Blogging

Blogging is used for marketing purposes by almost 40% of US companies. Whether you use Wordpress, Tumblr, Squarespace, Posterous, Blogger, or any other blogging platform, blogging is a great way to create a steady stream of content and increase traffic to your website.

How to use:

Establish yourself as a perceived expert. The more you write, the more knowledgeable you will become about the issues and status of your industry. You should aim to post blog entries a few times a week or a few times month, depending on your resources.

Struggling to come up with content? You should think about some of the kinds of issues that tenants run into and the topics that your peers are concerned with. Browsing discussions and questions on LinkedIn can give you a good idea. You also can reformulate other content you have, be it from the transcript of a podcast or your take on an article. Honest to Blog, just have fun and get the creative juices flowing.

LinkedIn is the most popular place for professionals to network on the internet. The majority of individuals use Linkedin as a way to find jobs, post jobs, maintain professional contacts, and discuss professional issues. Property owners and managers can use it for more.

How to use:

First off, here’s how not to use it: don’t connect with anyone and everyone just to increase “contacts,” this will only cloud your LinkedIn experience.

Linkedin can be an effective prospecting tool. Change the people search to company search, and find the companies you want to get behind. You will be able to see how you’re connected to a company, whether you have a first-degree connection to that company (meaning you are connected to somebody in that company), or whether you have a second-degree connection. Reach out to these connections via LinkedIn message, e-mail, or phone and  request an introduction.

Additionally, set up groups within LinkedIn. This may be a group for your tenants to talk with each other and see what’s going on within the building. Make announcements within that group to send an e-mail to its members. Open up forums of discussion, and give a voice to your tenants. Join commercial real estate representation groups and interact with your peers.

Bloging and LinkedIn are two of the most prominent social platforms used by CRE professionals. In an industry as competitive as Real Estate, social media can help reinforce your brand and give you a competitive edge.

Learn more about how to harness the power of social media in Property Management in our upcoming Webinar, Casting a Wider Network. Tuesday, September 7th at 12pm, Patrick Braswell will discuss using social media to strenthen your online brand, reinforce tenant relationships, and reach prospects!

Are you still using excel spreadsheets to manage operations? Are you running breakdown maintenance instead of proactive maintenance?   When was the last time you took a good, hard look at service response times?  These are just some of the indicators that your operations have started to grow roots. And left unattended, these roots will spread wider,  deeper and eventually crack the foundation of your business!

The real estate industry isn’t changing- it’s already changed. Whether you’re an owner, operator, manager or investor, the hold time for assets has increased significantly.  Everyone is looking for ways to improve the bottom line and have a better story to tell potential investors and clients. If you are still running operations the way you did yesterday, last month, or the year before, you are already at a competitive disadvantage.

Owners and operators today must be agile. They must analyze, understand and ensure the performance if their individual assets. This means  re-engineering business processes regularly, adopting new technologies that improve efficiency and aligning roles, staff and disparate systems within their buildings.

Just remember, there is a cost to doing nothing.

Ownership is what makes people care about outcomes.  If you own your car, you care whether or not it gets scratched, remains clean inside, retains its value, etc.  If you own your house, you care about its long term condition, the impact changes on your street will alter its general appearance, and how town policies and school systems might impact its resale value.  People care about leased cars and rented homes – but not because they truly care – but because they have a legal obligation to care.  Ownership creates a situation in which people are driven to truly care and work hard for the desired outcome because it is theirs, and no one else’s.

In the working environment, the best strategy for success is to engender ownership in the tasks that people do.  Telling someone they should do a good job because “they’re lucky to have a job” or “because I said so” won’t motivate them nearly as much as telling them that “it’s  your baby….make it or break it.”  Do not underestimate the power of ownership to motivate people.  If they own it, they will truly care about the outcome AND be happier doing the task at hand.