Date: Wednesday, February 29 at 12:00pm EST

Presenters: Matt Brogie, Owner of Mobility CIO  •  Tim Curran, CEO of Vela Systems  •  Lisa Panzenhazen, Medical Leasing & Property Manager of Kirco

Building Operations in Your Pocket

Must-have mobile strategies for modern real estate organizations

Mobility has become an essential component of efficient building operations. Real estate organizations that provide property managers and field personnel with mobile access to applications and wireless data are more productive, deliver better customer service, schedule more timely maintenance, and respond more nimbly to changes in their operating environment. Learn more.

In this free webinar for senior management and operations executives, our panelists will share how to utilize mobile technologies to:

• Alleviate key business pressures: reduce costs, maximize worker efficiency, and increase the longevity of capital assets
• Improve tenant service by proactively monitoring tenant needs and addressing them quickly through mobile technology
• Maximize Productivity

In the property management and building operations space, management is expected to be out there with tenants- not tied to their desk- answering questions and solving problems in real time.

-Matt Brogie, Owner of Mobility CIO

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

When occupancy is down,

So are you.

Feeling a little lonely in your building this Valentine’s Day? Not quite the tenant magnet you’d like to be? Experiencing unrequited love for your customers?

This Valentine’s Day, spend some time examining how to woo tenants into your building and build a deep and meaningful relationship with them. (Cue Tony Bennett music)

1. Look Online

Today’s tech-savvy tenants expect an online option to interact with building management. You should assume ALL your tenants are online, and that is where they like to do their research and get things done. According to Sirius Decisions, 70% of all B2B buying decisions are researched and made online before a company representative is ever involved. Tenant expectations have changed.   They expect property management to provide them with modern, online communication tools that mirror the way they do business- online and in real-time.

Additionally, you can and should control your online brand.  When prospective tenants search for your building online what do they see? Good reviews? Bad reviews? An out of date services listing?  CRE firms will help themselves  in the battle to attract tenants and keep them by embracing technology that enables them to find you, as well as following and controlling their brand online.  The brokerage side of the business has embraced this, and management should too – taking care to align information, messaging and tools between the two.

LinkedIn and Twitter are the eHarmony of property management. Tweets, status updates, and group discussions can position you as an industry expert and create another venue for tenants to reach you. Make a company LinkedIn page and encourage your employees to create a profile. Provide an internal process document that governs language to use on profiles so that they are consistent with the corporate page. Identify groups employees should belong to and the conversations they should monitor. Personal accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn create a more accessible and humanized image than a corporate profile alone.

Blogging is another way to attract and retain tenants.  While 40% of all companies utilize blogs, CRE has been much slower to adopt. Don’t count blogging out- it is a powerful tool to get in front of prospects, demonstrate your knowledge, build your brand, and give customers some lovin’.

2. Meet Their Expectations- Real-Time Access to Information and Service On-Demand

Don’t be a wallflower! Get yourself out there – be visible, transparent, and informative. We’ve already established that tenants are online, and that they expect to control access to information and make value judgments before ever picking up the phone to speak to you. Some of those value judgments are going to be related to how “tech savvy” you are as an organization and building/management team. Tenants also expect the option to interact with building management in real-time. The elements and tools you should have in place to help influence those judgments include:

• Corporate and Property websites: Your property website is the perfect place to make announcements, showcase building services and garner feedback
• Online Resource Scheduling: Enable your tenants to book conference rooms, elevators, and loading docks- freeing you from repetitive scheduling tasks and allowing you to focus on more valuable tenant interactions.
• Tenant Handbook: Bring your handbook and other building documents online. This will increase management visibility and improve occupant safety, service and communication.
• Visitor Access: Tenants in secure buildings expect to quickly and easily pre-authorize visitors for entry into the building and a have a real-time connection to the security guard check-in station in the lobby
• Online Work Order Management: Tenants want to be able to submit requests, access information and receive communications online (from a web browser or mobile device), quickly and easily. The availability of information and insight into progress ensures tenants feel better about the service they receive and professionalism of the property.
• Social Media presence: LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. (these provide an invaluable way to both personally interact with tenants, but also proactively take their pulse). Tools like dlvr.it and Hootsuite allow you to manage, sync and update your social media outlets.
• YouTube: Ever thought about showcasing videos of that fancy new lobby renovation? How about vacant space?

3. Master Communication

Communication is a two-way channel. A communication system includes both tools and philosophy. You need a way for tenants to communicate their issues, including a Tenant Service Request Work Order System. You also need a way to share building information, emergency notifications, and new initiatives or changes.

Here is how you should align your tenant communications with distinct systems and tools:

• Emergencies: Broadcast messaging, Emergency Messaging Systems
• Non-Emergency Events: Tenant Portals (property websites, tenant handbook, online building documents)
• Green Initiatives, Personnel Information, etc.: Blogs, Social Media
• Building Amenities, Instructions, Vacant Space: Video! YouTube

Email is not enough. A phone call two hours after a service request has been made is not enough.

4. Stay Connected – The Honeymoon Isn’t Over

Give your tenants a reason to renew their vows leases.

Proactively Monitor Tenant Satisfaction. Schedule, document and capture all visits and calls with the tenant contact on site and the lease renewal decision maker. All this information should be stored in a single location – a Property and Tenant management system allows for this capability. It is only valuable if it is easily retrieved and web-based.

Do smaller surveys. The annual Kingsley survey is fine, but you should utilize regular surveys to ask your tenants questions regarding service or decisions you are contemplating. Base decisions on data!

Provide outlets for feedback. People prefer to share information in a variety of ways and it’s important to try to accommodate them. Beyond phone calls and emails, think about things like community forums accessible through your corporate or building website, as well as live help or chat links from your website.

Feeling the love? Read more about Using Technology to Maximize Occupancy.

In our last survey, only 22% of respondents reported occupancy levels above 90%. Odds are, most property managers and owners could use a lesson on the components of tenant retention and attraction. In the age of echo-boomers, digital natives and social media mavens, the strategic application of technology is a key component to maintaining and raising occupancy levels.

While the primary factors of location and price are significant, they are not as easy to control as service and technology. For most CRE firms and properties, there are some essential technological tools that will aid their ability to  retain and attract tenants.

Following our recent spot as a panelist in Realcomm’s recent webinar Tenants, Tenants, Tenants – Using Technology to Maximize Occupancy, we decided to share a summary of recommendations for using web-based tools to fill a building. With the time-sensitive professional in mind, we compiled the webinar’s highlights into an Executive Summary!

Executive Summary (1:34)

Using Technology to Maximize Occupancy

As one of Realcomm’s panelists, Building Engines’ Scott Sidman summarizes his recommendations for using technology to maximize occupancy:

For your Tenant Retention Efforts:

1. Automate as many of your day-to-day operational practices as you can through web-based tools.

2. Apply a strategic objective to their use. One possible goal: tenant retention through responsive service.

3. Set clear targets and use your tools to measure performance against those targets.

4. Make that information easily accessible organization-wide and transparent to your tenants. The culture of service and accountability will pay tremendous dividends.

5. Use communications and data collection tools like Surveys and CRM applications to aid in meeting preparation and data driven decisions based on real tenant need.

For your Tenant Attraction Efforts:

1. Develop a social media and content strategy. Align brokerage and management through managed use of LinkedIn and blogging.

2. Re-think your website, or build one. It is an external and internal sales tool. Make it interactive, engaging and consistent with clear messaging.

3. Create new positions (e.g. content manager or social media strategist) or distribute tasks. This will require an acceptance of change management.

4. Foster a top-down organizational commitment to leveraging technology effectively.

5. Start with objectives, create the strategy and measure everything you can.

For more tenant retention see the steps in our Tenant Retention Strategy!

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.

The only good Earthquake is the brownie kind served at Dairy Queen. The only preparation it takes to handle one of those is a spoon and an appetite. Real earthquakes, however, like the 5.8 magnitude one that shook Virginia on Tuesday, require advance planning.

Every property owner and manager should identify potential hazards ahead of time and ensure that there’s an emergency preparedness plan in place. In accordance with Local Law 26, building teams are required to prepare Emergency Action Plans (EAPs) detailing procedures for staff and tenants in various emergency situations.

Before you get rattled, you need to know your building’s potential points of risk, what to provide emergency responders in advance, and how to communicate with tenants. Here is a checklist of general items to include in your emergency pre-plan:

Does the plan consider all natural or man-made disasters that could disrupt your workplace? Does it consider internal sources?

Does the plan consider the impact of these external and internal emergencies on the workplace’s operations and is the response tailored to the workplace?

Does the plan contain a list of key personnel, as well as contact information for local emergency responders, agencies, and contractors?

Does the plan contain a list of names, titles, departments, and telephone numbers for individuals to contact or an explanation of duties and responsibilities under the plan?

Does the plan address how rescue operations will be performed?

Does the plan address how medical assistance will be provided?

Does the plan identify how and where personal information on employees can be obtained in an emergency?

For better or worse, you cannot control the seismic activity of earth’s crust. But you can control how prepared your team is to deal with it and the level of its impact on your operations. In any emergency, preparation and communication are key. During Tuesday’s earthquake, Building Engines clients were using our system to file incident reports, sort through COIs, and notify tenants through BEI.

View this one-minute video on how Building Engines customers rely on Building Engines to manage tenant communications while on the go.

Watch Now!

We were very pleased this week to announce our new partnership with eSight Energy! eSight Energy is the creator of eSight, the world’s most sophisticated and comprehensive energy management suite. Utilizing 100% web-enabled technology, eSight offers an extensive range of techniques for analyzing energy usage and targeting sites for significant energy and cost savings.

This partnership will provide Building Engine’s real estate management customers with the ability to measure, track, and act on energy related information. The integrated system will monitor energy usage, provide alerts and work flow tools, allowing users to make fuel-saving adjustments, reduce areas of energy waste and reduce overall consumption.

This effort was driven by our customer’s feedback that energy management is a current and long-term priority for them. Additionally, they saw direct value in an integrated offering that utilized their employee’s daily usage of the Building Engines operation platform and data collection, workflow and communications capabilities.  We are pleased to be working with such a great partner and taking the first steps toward helping our clients in this area of their business.

Learn More about making energy data actionable – Proactive Energy Management: Making Data Actionable

More for reasons of necessity (working remotely, and working with a number of start-ups for a spell) than intent, I haven’t used Microsoft Outllook for over four years.  I did used Outlook  via an Exchange server and that was truly one of the most painful experiences I have ever had- Slow. Difficult. Stumbling, bumbling searches – Microsoft at its most painful.  I have been using web based e-mail, mostly Gmail, for several years and have adapted to its way of managing email communication; it is light, fast, offering powerful search and adequate formatting capabilities.

Recently, I set up Microsoft Outlook on my laptop and have been reminded about what makes it good and not so good.  It feels firm and solid – the app sits on your computer, formats are clean and complete and attachments attach instantly.  On the other hand, search is limited, managing contacts is painful and, to stay organized, you have to put emails in folders, which I stopped doing years ago.  You cannot synch your calendar with another Outlook user unless you are on a common Microsoft Exchange server.  But the fact is, Outlook is the email platform that most folks in business use: it is the standard, having the weight of most business users behind it.

Once a technology, particularly a communication technology, is adopted by a market, the power of the network effect makes it very difficult to displace, even when superior offerings become available.  Now that Facebook has over 500 MM users, it is highly unlikely that another software provider will come up with a more compelling social media platform that gets traction (witness MySpace’s recent struggles).  The engines we use to power our cars have not changed fundamentally in over 100 years: their installed base, support infrastructure and cultural expertise will make it difficult and expensive to shift the market to other propulsion systems (e.g. electric motors).

Most new technologies – like Building Engines – do best when they can adapt/integrate into existing systems (like Outlook).  Change for an organization in this case is evolutionary, not disruptive.  This mode of change is much easier on organizations, which have to struggle with radical changes in their business environments (witness the financial collapse and recession in the last two years) and typically do not want to self -inflict large amounts of stress voluntarily.  Building Engines has been designed to support this kind of easy, evolutionary change through easy integration into existing tools and processes.

When it was first released in 1997, 13 years ago, Microsoft Outlook was leading edge, very advanced and offered a huge improvement in email communication.  Now it is a little long in the tooth, but we will likely be using it for a while.

What embodies risk within your real estate portfolio?  Is it the damage that could be caused by water, mold, wind, rain, or aging?   Is it a slip, a trip, or a fall?   Is it a prolonged elevator entrapment; a disgruntled tenant employee who acts out; a media blitz on your building, or a public demonstration?  Is it the failure to have valid insurance protection in place through your tenants and vendors?   Risk transforms to damage and costly repairs or claims.  Litigation is costly, both from an insurance and time perspective.

Do not wait to react.  Be proactive and follow these ten simple best practice points for risk reduction and preparedness.

1.      Assemble a Response Team:  Make sure that you have ownership and management representation on that team.  It should include some risk and liability expertise and remember to think outside of the building – e.g. the Government is a critical part of your team, as are fire, police and the local Department of Health.

2.      Outline Key Risks in Advance:   Remember that threat levels are unique to each building.  Think through what might happen to your building before it happens.  Get experts involved to help you see what you cannot.  Look at historic data to help your recognize likely events and insure your greatest areas of risk.

3.      Create A Response Plan: Write it down and publish it to those that should know. Match your risk to your response team.  Train backup employees to perform emergency tasks.  Create a business continuity plan – Make sure you tenants have a continuity plan.  Determine offsite crisis meeting places.  Test your plan to reveal and accommodate changes

4.      Run simulations:  Make sure that all employees-as well as executives-are involved in the exercises.   Practice crisis communication (employees, customers and the outside world).  Invest in an alternate means of communication.  Form partnerships with local emergency response groups.  Evaluate your performance – Continuity exercises should reveal weaknesses.

5.      Focus on Responsiveness:  Most claims result from failed responsiveness.  Put the right assets in place so that you can respond quickly.   Redundancy is key to reliability and response.  Immediate response enables real time advice, real time reaction and injury or damage mitigation.

6.      Capture all Relevant Data:  Data and information is your best defense.  Only with data can you make informed decisions.  Train you teams to identify incidents and record them.  Keep Data up-to-date and available.  Make it accessible from anywhere so that you can retrieve it quickly when needed.

7.      Leverage Technology:  Responsiveness relies on information and speed.   Redundant systems prevent data gathering and communications failure.  Establish preset response protocols for every situation.  Build your Response Team and your Response Plan into the technology.  Keep contact information up to date.  Go mobile while leveraging multiple communications points.

8.      Train Your Team and Analyze Your Response: Three rules of Team Preparedness = Practice, Practice, Practice.  Do a post mortem analysis of every incident.  Look for trends and opportunities.  Adjust your Response Team and Plan to fit the building risk profile.

9.      Involve Local Teams and Authorities: Police, Fire, DHS and DHLS are key partners in any response.  Relationships are critical to responsiveness.  Imagine calling your local Fire Department and the Chief knows who you are. Know your neighbors so that they know you.  Have regular meetings with Response Teams in adjacent buildings.

10.  Keep it current: Take your partners, colleagues and neighbors to lunch once a year. Review your plan annually. Practice regularly.  Never stop testing or improving your plans, practices and procedures and the technologies that support them.

The Green Movement in Real Estate is growing darker.  All new certification schemes, like all new growth, have that light green tinge when they begin that denotes suppleness. While it makes them amendable to change, it provides little armor when the going gets tough.  As a result, many rating systems mature to a darker shade.

The USGBC’s LEED rating system is by far the most recognized and most used green building rating system in the world and the UK’s Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) is frequently used in Europe.   As standards like LEED and BREEAM mature, that light hue darkens to a more serious and robust one – characteristic of maturity and staying power.  According to Pike Research, that day has come.

Pike projects that by 2020, 53 billion square feet of space worldwide will hold some type of green building certification, up from 6 billion this year, and 73 percent of green-certified building space is in a commercial building – a number expected to grow to 80 percent by 2020.   The majority of green certifications will be held by existing buildings instead of new construction, the report says.  One American Row in Hartford, CT recently obtained Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Existing Buildings Silver status, making it one of the few LEED-EB certified buildings also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The bigger question is how a building maintains LEED certification status once it has achieved it.   Without a comprehensive scheme for posting and managing LEED related tasks – the lifeblood required to sustain any certification level – that LEED or Green status will fade to brown and join the detritus of other failed programs.  Technology – operations management systems that post and sustain LEED related tasks throughout the year are integral to maintaining LEED status.  Keeping it Green and maintaining affordability requires energy and organization as well as robust data collection, communications and reporting.  Think of these systems as the arterial system for your LEED targeted building management practice.

Without one, your LEED status will die on the vine.