In early 2019, coming off of JLL Spark’s investment in HqO, I spent most of my weeks traveling the country and getting to know a number of impressive JLL executives. This was a large undertaking — JLL has 75 offices in the United States, and after months of what now feels like a blur of planes, trains, and hotels, I stopped counting the number of new cities and offices I visited.
Looking back at the rapid pace of this process and the lessons learned while on the road, there is one person, a Director out of JLL’s Los Angeles office, that distinctly and clearly stands out from that frenzied timeline.
Something of a leasing legend in the Los Angeles area, his résumé includes board seats, deep relationships, and being the first broker to use Twitter to find clients, but what he was best known for was being able to take underperforming assets and turn them around.
He’d take on a property that hadn’t signed a new tenant in years and within months have the building’s occupancy at target rates and the asset performing as planned. This was fascinating to me, and after spending some time with him in LA, during a roof-deck cocktail hour overlooking downtown LA, I finally got comfortable enough to ask him: “How do you do it? How do you turn these struggling buildings around?”
He paused and smiled — this was not the first time he’d been asked this question — then looked back at me and said: “I say the three words that my clients don’t want to hear, but need to hear:
“Lower your rent.”
This comment is a powerful example of one of the three key problems we see commercial office owners struggling with today: differentiation.
(Learn about the other two: Attraction & Fragmentation in our HqOS Demo Video)
If a prospective customer cannot tell the difference between your product and your competitor’s product, you have no choice but to compete on price, and the winner will always be the cheaper option.
One of our goals at HqO — and with our commercial office operating system, HqOS — is to help owners create differentiated office experiences that justify higher rents and make it so our clients don’t need to consider the phrase, “lower your rent.”
However, with 92% of CRE execs planning to spend the same or more on tenant experience in 2020, differentiating is hard. Being data-driven in programming and personalizing on-site experiences for specific tenants and tenant employees can help owners increase value, and HqO’s “Audiences” product is designed to deliver tailored experiences to do just that.
Why Did We Create Audiences?
Just as every commercial office asset is unique in some way, so too are the companies and the people that work in those assets. Tenant companies often represent many industries, and with five generations in the workforce at the same time for the first time in history, it can be challenging for asset managers and property teams to create workplace experiences that appeal to everybody.
This workforce complexity combined with a general lack of data on how tenants use their office buildings has become a challenge for asset managers and property teams looking to create meaningful connections with their tenants. To address this challenge, HqO’s “Audiences” product allows property teams to create groups of users based on their unique characteristics and deliver personalized communication, content, and experiences to those groups.
HqO’s Audiences product allows our customers to control what content users, companies, or buildings are allowed to see within the Tenant App. By specifying which audiences can see certain in-app events, posts, or deals, property teams can create personalized workplace experiences that promote stronger tenant connections.
Key Capabilities:
Group tenants into distinct audiences by key attributes including:
- Building
- Company
- Individual Users or Persona
Create personalized app experiences
- Control who can see informational Posts
- Invite specific tenants to private Events
- Offer exclusive Deals to key tenants
Deploy content and experiences portfolio-wide
- Promote corporate initiatives to all buildings
- Ensure unified brand experiences across all assets
At HqO, we believe in the power of connection and the value these connections create for our customers — commercial office owners. Our Audiences product is a critical leap toward making the connection between tenants and the buildings they work in everyday feel personal, and that may be more important now than ever before.
