HqO, a real estate software company focused on products that improve tenants’ experiences in buildings, has named a new leader covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Kunal Lala has joined HqO as senior managing director focused on the EMEA region and leading expansion across its markets. The company’s software and services help flexible office landlords to manage booking and memberships; lets them optimise their buildings’ performance to meet sustainability goals; and let tenants access amenities and services in their offices.
London-based Lala most recently served as head of sales and partnerships at proptech firm Spaceflow, but earlier in his career held roles elsewhere in the real estate industry, including investment banking.
“It’s been a fun journey – I started off in investment banking, moved into real estate construction for five years in India and then scaled a facilities and asset management business,” Lala told Estates Gazette. “I’ve constructed buildings, operated buildings and now I’m digitising buildings. When you’re in the journey, you might not figure it out, it’s when you look back you connect the dots.”
Through the cycle
HqO has used a string of acquisitions to build its European business, buying Office App, Symbiosy and Leesman, the latter viewed as a global leader in measuring employee workplace experience.
Chase Garbarino, chief executive of HqO, said Europe “represents tremendous growth potential” for the company, adding the real estate market in the region “is increasingly focused on creating workplaces that foster connection and creativity, recognising that today’s tenants expect more than simply spaces in which to work”.
The company has been pushing into the asset management space as well as its traditional tenant experience niche. That evolution appealed to Lala.
“It’s not about just investing in and then disposing of an asset,” he added. “It’s the operational journey in between where there are various stakeholders involved. It could be your transactions manager, your tenant manager, your property manager… There were issues they face in operating those assets at the same time as involving themselves with the tenant through the tenant life cycle. That’s the layer we’re moving into, consolidating the data.”
That consolidation is crucial, Lala said. “Right now it’s too siloed. If you ask an asset manager today to give you a report on five of their buildings in a portfolio they manage, it’s eight to 12 hours of work for them. They’ve got to sift through different Power BI tools and then connect the dots. What we’re trying to do is develop our own map and make them AI-ready and consolidate the data flow for them.”
Listen and learn
This is part of an ongoing education process in the real estate industry, Lala said.
“I think we’ve turned a corner when it comes to digital awareness in the real estate sector,” he said. “Over the last year or so we have seen a lot more traction and a good barometer of that is seeing the number of tenders and RFPs that come out. It does involve education on the levers [companies] can pull to increase tenant retention, keep them happy and increase their income in the process.”
He added: “For larger players in the US and the UK markets, they have been ahead of the curve. They have digital teams that lead these initiatives. But at the moment we’re in no-man’s land as to where the AI bot is going to drop. Everyone is slow on decision-making, but at the same time they know they need to drive this and they know they need digitisation to be the fulcrum that pushes asset journeys as well as tenant journeys forward.”
Image from HqO
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