Building Analytics Software: The Secret Behind CRE Success
Due to constantly developing tenant and office building needs, the adoption of proptech and technology partnerships has become a necessity in a world divided by hybrid work models. It not only helps landlords bring new life to the tenant experience but also reinforces a competitive advantage in a shifting market through access to advanced building analytics software.
With over 8,000 proptech companies and 92% of commercial real estate (CRE) executives planning to maintain or increase their spending on tenant experience this year, it’s clear that proptech and office space software are already revolutionizing CRE as we know it. Previously seen as a convenience, digital functionalities that address concerns in the key focus areas of safety, communication, and engagement not only support a modern workforce but also generate future value and differentiate your assets.
What is Building Analytics Software?
What is building analytics, and how can it help property teams succeed? Well, according to Macdonald Miller, building analytics software is a solution that has the capability to unify numerous stand-alone automation systems. When integrated with a work order management system the building analytics software can seamlessly identify, prioritize, assign accountability and track the resolution to an operating deficiency.
Not surprisingly, building analytics often equals business analytics. BuildingLogIX explains this concept well: “Building analytics software can help companies leverage their current infrastructure to produce a better performing environment. The data that this building management software provides gives your company insight on how critical systems are performing and allows you to make adjustments accordingly [to ensure the success of your infrastructure].”
Why You Need a Modern Analytics Platform
In order for the office sector to survive, there needs to be a keen focus on attracting and retaining tenants, while creating unique workplace experiences that out-perform the home office. With CRE’s transition to a more consumer-first model, we know that data-driven decision making — through the usage of a modern analytics platform — will be enhanced through what property owners can’t see about their buildings. What do tenants really want, and how do they really use a given space?
These insights not only ensure a safer return to work, but also serve as a differentiator in an otherwise uncertain, highly competitive market. If you’re actively collecting data from multiple sources about the needs of your tenants and their employees, you’ll be able to keep pace with the market and adapt to significant disruptors in your industry — even if that disruptor happens to be a global pandemic — while simultaneously making your workplace more attractive to its communities.
So, how exactly can you collect these insights?
Property owners now need access to multiple granular data points across their buildings to bring themselves closer to their end-users than ever before. Imagine having a robust tool that can enhance your building’s data platform architecture and analyze multiple human behaviors throughout any asset, then help determine what the data can tell owners and tenants about employee needs. Imagine also being able to compare those insights to other similar and nearby buildings, helping inform decisions that previously had to be made with little or no data. While these capabilities may only sound like something from the future, through the HqOS Digital Grid™ they are now entirely possible.
This type of engagement establishes what we refer to as a virtuous feedback loop. Having such significant intelligence on the end-user of your product helps create a better user experience, which in turn increases customer engagement and continues to provide you with more useful data. Real-time feedback ensures the longevity of office buildings by giving market leaders the informed, competitive edge they need to make turnkey decisions and guarantee tenant satisfaction.
“The more you know about how people use your asset, the more you’re going to be able to change the experience of the asset to continue to collect more data. If you get out to a lead in becoming data-driven on the user experience, the office is going to compound on itself.”
— Chase Garbarino, Co-founder and CEO at HqO
The practice of data collection through a building analytics platform has become a necessity for landlords to determine if their assets are prepared to adapt to the changes among the present-day workforce. Those who aren’t currently adopting this mindset, and who don’t upgrade their existing data analytics architecture, are bound to fall short of modern standards.
Choosing the Right Business Analytics Tools for Your Portfolio
When it comes to determining how to build a big data platform strategy for your office, you’ll first need to determine how to start collecting more meaningful data about your assets. At HqO, we understand that any business analytics master needs access to all the commercial real estate insights through the right technology partners who can place this valuable information directly into their hands.
Before we dive into the right technology you need, let’s talk about the mindset you need. For CRE owners to find the metrics that best meet their goals, we suggest that they start looking for correlations between four key metric categories in order to increase their portfolio’s net operating income (NOI): outcomes, outputs, activities, and resources.
It starts with tuning in to the problems you want to solve most for your portfolio, and defining your desired outcomes. Once we define these outcomes, we can then use them to inform which metrics you need to look at — such as the measurables you can leverage immediately (outputs), the strategies you enact to achieve your goals (activities), and your inputs (resources) — and what other data you need to collect. Since not all metrics and data are equal, and some are better predictors of desired outcomes than others, the data you gather should help answer questions to take action today, while still getting you closer to your larger goals.
For example, if you’re an office landlord and you want to increase the retention rate — and thus building occupancy, which increases the likelihood of retention — in your building, you will have to take several steps. You will need to know how people physically and digitally engage with your building, how they feel about it, and how that changes over time. You may discover — perhaps through a tenant-focused survey — that amenities draw people into your building. Tenants want to be able to take advantage of your spaces, as well as the conveniences of using your gym, mobile food services, parking, etc. More importantly, they want clear and consistent communication around your building’s offerings, so that even those who work from home in hybrid work models can feel informed about their workplace options.
To achieve this, you need access to granular data to make more informed decisions around your building’s amenities. You may look at digital engagement (or clicks) with content/information on your amenities, tenants’ satisfaction with those amenities, mobile access data to those amenities, equipment sensor data associated with those amenities, class or service bookings, and so on. The more activations your building features have, the more data points you can combine to paint a more holistic picture of which amenities see the most traffic, which ones need improvement, and more — showing you how your building is actually being used.
Since digital transformation is fairly new to CRE, finding meaningful metrics about your building can be few and far between — and even more difficult to organize. Luckily, we figured out how to build a big data platform for all of an office’s needs, including equipment analytics, space analytics, and building occupant behavior analytics. Our HqOS™ end-to-end operating system provides CRE owners with a leap in the right direction. The three layers of HqOS — which include our Tenant Experience Platform, Marketplace, and the Digital Grid™ — work seamlessly together to produce multiple data activations and compound positive results for any portfolio.
This combination of a universal remote for your assets, a marketplace where you can find and manage pre-vetted systems and amenity providers, and tools that can capture and structure all data on how people use your buildings helps property teams in several ways. Such technology manages all customer-facing technology tools within a building, while empowering teams to activate real connections between people and their properties through digital-to-physical experiences, data-driven decision making, and the fast implementation of innovative asset strategies.
The Digital Grid alone serves as a robust analytics offering, collecting meaningful tenant behavior, amenities, technologies, and building data all in a single location. By centralizing and structuring data within our CRE-specific data model, it helps owners and operators uncover insights, take action to differentiate their assets, and make intelligent decisions across their portfolio. It can also help benchmark your building’s performance against others to accelerate best-in-class experiences for any tenant.
Now that you know how invaluable building analytics software is, it’s time to try it out for your own portfolio. The combination of data collection, benchmarking, and end-to-end solutions will ensure that landlords can efficiently organize their building data while comparing it to a growing industry database of CRE insights that will help them maintain a modern stance on the workplace experience. Learn more about HqOS™ and schedule a free demo today.
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HqOS — the tenant experience operating system for commercial office buildings — enhances physical spaces with digital experiences, accelerates the implementation of innovative asset strategies, and enables data-driven decision making
- Create rich digital experiences for the people who occupy your buildings with the Tenant Experience Platform
- Find and manage apps in one place with the Marketplace
- Capture & structure all data on how people use your buildings with the Digital Grid™
- Deploy your tenant experience strategy with Headquarters