“An app doth not a smart building make.” When it comes to sign of the times quotes, this one was stand-out in 2021. It’s still true. An app in isolation does not equate to a smart building. Yet, over the past six months, the world has gone wild for them.
Activity around tenant engagement platforms has rocketed following the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic – both in terms of adoption and investment – as occupiers and landlords race to employ every tool in their armoury to attract staff back to offices across the globe. Seamless entry to your building at the click of a button? Done. Heating and ventilation tailored to your personal preferences? No problem. A free coffee and pastry once a week? You’re welcome. Anything to lure people away from the comfort of their own homes.
It’s not really about complimentary croissants, though. The real currency here, and the one these engagement platforms will rely on when it comes to determining whether they ultimately fail or succeed, is data. And while an app may not a smart building make, mass adoption of an app linked to a smart building platform might. With the right technology in place, the more people you can encourage to sign up to your building app. This means the more insight you have into how they are using the space and, in turn, how your asset can be more efficiently managed. If a free hot drink can bring just a few extra users onboard, that’s well worth its weight in coffee beans.
Desirable data
None of this is brand new information. But at a time when workforce trends have never been in such a state of flux, this level of building intelligence has been upgraded from a nice-to-have to commercial real estate gold dust.
If there is anyone who understands the value of tenant app adoption, it’s Dan Drogman. Along with his team, the founder and chief executive of software platform Smart Spaces has been in and out of some of the world’s best-known buildings since 2010, helping landlords and occupiers connect to every operational part of their building from the HVAC systems to the lighting. The company’s technology is now integrated into almost 40m sq ft of real estate across the world, but Drogman knows that without sufficient tenant engagement, the value of the operating system plummets. “Adoption is the key to those really useful data sets,” he says. “You need to have adoption within your platform and this is the biggest challenge that occupier engagement apps will have to overcome.”
So how do you drive that adoption? With more than 8,000 people already signed up to Smart Spaces’ workplace app at AXA IM Alts’ 22 Bishopsgate, EC2 (covering 195,000 sq m) mere months after the building officially opened its doors, Drogman is the man to ask.
User experience
Smart Spaces is not an app first and foremost. It is a smart building platform – effectively providing a piece of software which links up a property’s operational system so that it is fully connected. The Smart Spaces workplace app is overlaid on top and while it does not a smart building make on its own, it comes with huge value potential if adoption levels are high enough.
“User experience is always the place you start,” Drogman says. “One of the main issues is onboarding, especially in big properties where you can have, say, 10,000 people accessing the building. We have worked very hard to make it easy for people to start. Take 22 Bishopsgate. If you are a tenant, you can download the building app, register with your corporate email address and then gain access and start using the app day-to-day.”
A focus on the onboarding hurdle, twinned with a carefully curated approach to the app user experience, is something Smart Spaces has emulated across buildings for big-name property clients including GPE at 160 Old Street and 16 Dufour’s Place, Brookfield at Manhattan West in New York, the University of Birmingham in Dubai and, of course, AXA IM Alts at 22 Bishopsgate. In every case study, successful adoption rates of the app have ultimately led to better use of the company’s integrated operating systems within those buildings, thanks to a plethora of data.
This information is invaluable as the debate around the future of work rages on. “If you get enough people using the app you can quickly start to see patterns emerging that can then forecast how busy the building might be in the future,” says Drogman.
“The more data we collect, the more accurate that becomes. If people know how much heat and light is required at certain times that has a massive impact on energy usage, but also on catering – how much food provision is likely to be required to reduce waste and cost based on occupancy trends data? This same information also means you can start planning your events around days and times you know will be busy, and you can start planning how to attract more people into the building on quiet days.”
The impact of this data has the power to go beyond smart buildings if enough well-integrated platforms are used in buildings across a city, or even the world. Just by analysing the data from the Smart Spaces-enabled buildings across London, Drogman says clear occupancy patterns have started to emerge post-pandemic. These patterns are different depending on location with a mid-week spike becoming the norm in the West End and a flatter, less dramatic peak in the City.
Overcoming resistance
Speaking of the pandemic, Drogman says it has been something of a turning point for the business. “Before Covid we were doing the rounds, going from asset managers to fund to property companies showcasing our tech, and people were asking why they would ever need this sort of technology.
“There was definitely a lot of resistance. Then the pandemic hit and after the initial panic that set in for everyone, we started to get request after request after request.
“It went from us always being the ones out showing our wares to the phone ringing off the hook and e-mails coming in every day. The resistance just melted away. We are a 10-year-old company and we have doubled in size over the space of the past year.”
Necessity will have played a large part in this sea-change. A software system that not only gives you minute-by-minute information on the performance of your asset but can track and predict occupancy trends is suddenly worth the expenditure. But what about some of the other major barriers beyond cost? Privacy and security, for example, have always played a huge role in some of the questions raised around integrated operations systems.
“People are no less conscious about cybersecurity and privacy,” says Drogman. “If anything, the growth of ‘big data’ has heightened nerves. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, provided people are putting the right measures in place to protect themselves and their assets. The majority of buildings are already connected to the internet, including access control and building management systems, but are not secured or monitored effectively.
“Deploying a smart building software platform allows building managers to oversee, manage and limit access to these devices. Platforms can give greater visibility to the digital health and cyber security of properties and give owners the tools to put the necessary protections in place.
“Smart Spaces, as well as giving owners and building managers the tools to control access to their assets’ devices and systems, works alongside cybersecurity software companies and offers regular tests to assess our clients’ cyber health. If anything, smart building platforms are now the guardians of a building’s digital health.”
Room to flex
The trick for the real estate sector will be to find the confidence to embrace the tech rather than fear it. While Drogman and his team are primed to do a bit of hand-holding for those businesses for which these sorts of systems are unfamiliar, he says that working with open-minded clients on buildings where the culture is compatible with innovation makes life much easier.
Working with GPE signalled a big leap forward for Smart Spaces for this reason, he says. Working with a traditional real estate company with a genuine drive to embrace change not only bolstered Drogman’s confidence in the industry’s ability to adapt – it also gave him and his team the opportunity to integrate their software into a number of properties in London that helped to raise their profile and give their technology room to flex its muscles.
“We found that back when we first started and won smaller buildings in the early stages and our system was maybe a bit over-engineered. Starting to work on some bigger buildings allowed us to integrate more and more.”
And you don’t get much bigger than 22 Bishopsgate. “The biggest challenge we had there was that when we won that contract we were still a pretty small business,” says Drogman. “We had to really convince them we could deliver, but we had some fantastic buildings under our belt that we were able to take to the team to prove what we could do and that was what got us the gig.
“It was very complex with so much to coordinate. Our system has to talk to a lot of other systems within a building; the access control, the BMS, the light control systems, the energy meters, the sensors, the Wi-Fi network.
“There are a lot of parties to deal with and, like anything in life, it is the human aspect that is the most challenging. But the culture at that building made it so much easier. As clients they are really into technology, they were willing to try new things.
“That is the secret to our success today. Without these partnerships and without the foresight some of our clients have, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We are a bit of a magnet for clients who want to push boundaries. These days I would say that 90% of our client base fall into that category.”
Is this figure indicative of a changing mindset across the sector? “Yes, there is a big change in approach,” says Drogman before pointing out that this is, in part, being integrated into schemes right from the word go by architects. He adds that often, and especially in the past, architects express concern over the aesthetic of a building packed full of the technology and sensors required to be connected. “There has always been a conversation around what it will actually look like,” he says.
“But now we have evidence and examples where we can say ‘this is what it will look like, this is how we can bake everything into the fabric of the building, this is how these elements will be hidden’. Now we are seeing these same architects come to us with their own ideas, things like projecting data onto your mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning, like what is available in the café that day or the air quality in the building. It’s great to see boundaries being pushed. Covid has changed the way people think and I do feel that it can be used as a reason to change. There used to be a lot of scepticism around what we do, and that is dissolving at a rapid pace post-Covid.”
As that scepticism falls by the wayside, the hope is that a new-found understanding of the value of connected buildings will also shine a light on the importance of tenant engagement. One thing’s for sure, it will be much easier to predict how the workforce might choose to use offices in the future with access to as much data as possible.
So, while the fact remains that an app doth not a smart building make, the right app connected to the right platform could certainly be the key to a smarter real estate sector.
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