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.

I was intrigued to read an article in the New York Times the other day about how law firms are beginning to offshore some of their clerical processes to India in order to drive down costs.  They are doing this largely because their large corporate clients are insisting on cost reductions, not because they are particularly forward thinking.  Why pay for a New York based associate to copy edit a document at $250 per hour when it can be done for 1/5th of that rate by a double graduate in India?

Now, large corporate law firms are pretty darn conservative and not organizations that adapt to change easily, so the fact that this is happening is an indication about how much sectors of our economy are likely to change over the next 5 – 10 years.  We have all gotten used to hearing about manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas; those of us in the technology space know that the same is happening with jobs in our space, but this is an indication that other sectors, previously thought to be immune from the trend, will be affected.

This got me to thinking about property operations.  On the one hand, folks in this sector all provide services that are site dependent, like a hair stylist or plumber – until we figure out teleportation, you are going to have to pay a real live plumber to come and fix your dripping faucet: no way to offshore that service – so it should be largely unaffected by off shoring.  On the other hand, some of the property and asset management teams that I work with spend a lot of time on fairly low level clerical activities: copying, faxing, moving information from one silo to another.  These activities can (and will be) off shored.  Given the relentless downward pressure that owners put on asset and property management fees, this change may be forced on the property operations sector by its customers, as it is in the law profession.

There is a bright spot in all this: property operators that figure out how to streamline clerical processes and focus on providing their clients with higher value services will prosper.  Some of this value-add comes through using technology, like Building Engines‘ web based operations platform, to improve customer service, increase data liquidity and reduce operating costs.  I have run into a few that have made this a differentiator and who tell me that their clients are beginning to see it as a significant benefit.

We are all suffering from symptoms of information overload. The daily onslaught of more and more data means that some of it will inevitably fall through the cracks. You may file away 25 e-mails one day, and overlook ten other important ones. You may communicate important preventive maintenance data within one building and neglect the rest of the portfolio.  Let’s face it, there is only so much time in the day.  Every day we make hard decisions on which people, activities, and processes receive a piece of that “time” pie.

Because of this, the ways in which modern real estate processes interact are increasingly complex. Facilities and Operations Teams, business systems, and data must work seamlessly together in order to deliver on the promises of optimal productivity, improved occupant service and satisfaction, and quicker decision-making time frames.  A good workflow must allow for that information to seamlessly pass between people, systems and…brace yourself you’re not going to like this one…portfolios.

More importantly, a good workflow allows you to “automate the mundane.” A phrase we like to use a lot here at Building Engines – and not just because our operations and maintenance management system allows you to do it, but because we really believe it, is that people in the real estate operations business are always in overdrive and always putting out fires.  Once you get your workflow and processes in order, you’ll be amazed how much extra time is freed up for more valuable activities.

Building Engines will be hosting a Webinar in early August where we will tackle best practices for handling large teams, workflows that “automate the mundane,” and other valuable insights for increasing productivity and managing data across your organization.

Now, add that to your follow-up cue.

Every 4 years the soccer world turns its focus to the world cup.  32 countries and their respective players practice and train for years simply for the chance to compete in this prestigious event.  While there are certainly favorites and teams that are expected to win, it seems nonetheless that every year there are upsets and the teams we expect to win don’t always oblige.

For example, in this year’s contest, the French team headed to South Africa with high hopes and was expected to fare well.  They had plenty of talent on the roster and many of the players had been there before and had the experience and skills to wager a successful campaign.  But as the first round comes to a close, France has been eliminated and will be heading home.  So what went wrong?

The team dynamics and overall attitude of the team played a major role in their failure.  They didn’t work well together, allowed  the egos of the players to get the best of them, and they did not put the team’s interests first.  The negative attitude of certain players and members of the staff poisoned the group as a whole and rendered them ineffective.  In the end, all the experience and skill in the world couldn’t fix the egos and bad team dynamics.

In business too, building the right team dynamic is extremely critical.  Do the members of your staff respect each other and work well together?  The most talented or skilled employees are not necessarily a good fit if they bring down team productivity and morale.  When evaluating a candidate for a position it is so critical to think about how they will interact and work with other members of your team.  Finding that perfect fit is far more important than finding the most talented person and taking this approach when building your company or team will prove to be invaluable and almost certainly translate to success.