Re.View Webinar sum-up: the most important takeaways from our guest, Antony Slumbers

On March 23rd, we hosted our second webinar of the Re.View series that aims to bring together real estate and tech specialists to discuss the hottest topics of the moment.?

Delia Visan, Head of Customer Success at Bright Spaces, sat down with globally recognised Real Estate and Proptech professional?Antony Slumbers. You can learn more about Antony on his blog, by following him on Twitter or you can join his course, on Spaces as a Service.

In this second episode of the live webinar series, we explored what #SpaceasaService means, how to build eco-systems in the workplace and how human and machine-driven features can boost offices in 2023. You can?watch the recording here?or read the main takeaways below.?

How would you describe the office market currently and where is it heading?

Antony Slumbers: The pandemic showed us that we could function and we could run our businesses pretty well without offices. So the industry is now adapting to this new reality.

Offices now need to demonstrate what they are for and why they are needed. Because most importantly and fundamentally, it is no longer the default setting that everyone goes to the office to work, which means the industry faces some really powerful forces of change.

Space as a service: why is it so important?

Antony Slumbers:?The pandemic has really led to actually, not an acceleration, but more like a revolution. Now, “space as service” has two meanings.

It's partly about how you procure space, more dynamically than via traditional long-term leases.

And then, it is all around how you create spaces that are laser-focused on the wants, needs and desires of people. It's fundamentally about a refocusing of the real estate industry around people. Because the aim of Spaces as a service is to help enable people to be happy and healthy.

To get a workforce that is as productive as they can possibly be, you actually need to pay a lot of attention to whether you are enabling them to be happy and healthy. Are you putting them in the right environments that enable them to be as productive as they can be? You cannot separate productivity from happiness and health and well-being.

People are not going to come back to the office unless it provides them with a great user experience. The office is now competing with anywhere else.

The idea is I'm not selling you space, I'm selling you a productive workforce, I'm sending you somewhere that is going to enable your people to be more productive than if you took that space or that space. So, yes, the price is important. But it's not as important as how well that space enables your people to be as productive as possible. The higher utilisation and satisfaction of the space is going to reduce churn and increase value.

Space as a service is about combining real estate, physical real estate with technology and then a big dose of humanity on top.

We are seeing new stakeholders’ group emerging in the office market. How can or should the industry address them?

Antony Slumbers: The customer of a landlord was actually not the people that took their space. The customer was actually the investor either funding their space or who they intended to sell it to, so a great deal of real estate wasn't built for users.

The critical point now is that instead of the investor being the customer, it's not even the occupier that signs the lease or the license. It's actually every single person who uses your real estate as your customer.

Because individuals and companies now, particularly the top companies, need the best talent. And the best talent nowadays has optionality. The best talent can move. Now you've got to put that talent in a good space.

The only way to maximise value, the only way to get high value from an investor is to have a building where people are happy, healthy and productive. Focusing on the wants, needs and desires of your customers' employees is the really critical mindset to approach real estate going forward.

Once you start talking to the end customer, the user, then you can really start to differentiate your space.

What are the most useful soon-to-be widely adopted technologies in the built world and what is their impact?

Antony Slumbers: The first thing I want to say about adopting technology in the built environment is that if you haven't got your data in order, then you're wasting your time with anything. What is good data? That completely depends on who you are, what you're trying to achieve and why you're trying to achieve it.

After that, the things to really concentrate on are things that are related to sustainability, health and wellbeing and productivity. If you want to make people productive, you have to put them in a sustainable building with good health and well-being. If you want to sell to an investor or you want to fund a building, you have to have high sustainability credentials because sustainability is very much a moving target.

Lots of devices (IoTs) enable you to monitor and control various aspects of your building - they help you monitor your energy consumption, your lighting, your temperature, your security. Widespread adoption of IoT will lead to smarter, more energy-efficient buildings. It will lead to improved occupier comfort and better facility management.

The second thing is everything around BIM - building information modelling and digital twins, which come in many various forms, some are 3D, some are 2D, but they come in different forms. In terms of a digital representation of a building's physical and functional characteristics they are incredibly useful. It's what enables architects, engineers, construction professionals to collaborate more effectively, which should lead to better design buildings, reduce construction costs and improve project management.

Having a digital twin enables you to do things almost for free before you actually have to go and spend a lot of money on them. You can test out lots of hypotheses on a digital twin.

Digital representation of a building's functional and physical characteristics is going to become, within five years, the norm. Any decent building will have a digital twin.

The next point is all around 3D printing and prefabrication. There is clearly so much benefit to being able to prefabricate a building in a clean factory using robotics and 3D printing, to building it directly on a construction site. People talk about prefabrication and think it’s cheap. I think of this as precision engineering. This is the Ferrari of buildings.

Then there's augmented reality and virtual reality. This is going to become increasingly important for designing, visualising and simulating built environments.

Then you have drones and robotics. Drones can be used for site inspections, for progress monitoring, for aerial mapping. Robotics can automate a huge range of construction tasks. So these technologies, particularly within construction, will improve efficiency, reduce labor costs and enhance safety on job sites.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are going to become more and more important throughout the real real estate world. If you can get to the situation of actually having usable AI and machine learning, good AI and machine learning enables you to predict, to have predictive analytics, to optimise space, to automate the built environment in a way that there's no way we can do it with humans.

We're going to see a lot more work done in terms of renewable energy and in storage. Now, batteries historically have been expensive and not large enough. But again, batteries are collapsing in cost. Anything to do with energy storage and renewable energy is going to become a really big thing in real estate. 40% of the carbon emissions of the planet come from the built environment.

Finally, in a similar way, smart materials and nanotechnologies. These technologies can lead to development of materials with improved properties. We're talking about things like self-healing, concrete or energy-efficient insulation or air-purifying surfaces. There's going to be a lot of new materials developed which are going to help us decarbonise the built environment because that's what we have to do over the next decade, decarbonise the built environment.

Can you expand a bit on how you see the immediate and future benefits of 3D digital twins?

Antony Slumbers: The fundamental point is that overall, this technology should help you with streamlining the leasing process, enhancing decision making and improving the tenants' experience.

If you look at what we can do now with digital twins and 3D modelling, we can do much better space planning and customisation of space so we can enable occupiers, potential occupiers to visualise how their furniture, their equipment and their other assets would fit into this theoretical space that is under construction. This should enable them to make better-informed decisions about spatial utilisation and design.

It also should enable them to do much faster decision-making.

By providing a comprehensive, immersive view of the space, 3D digital twins can help potential tenants assess if the property meets their needs quickly, which can speed up the decision-making process.

We should be able to cut out a lot of the processes that historically we've gone through in making a decision about where we're going to go.

Then of course, it's very helpful for enhanced marketing and communication. Property managers can use 3D digital twins to showcase their office spaces more effectively. They can provide a competitive edge in the market, which should lead to faster leasing and higher occupancy rates, because you can demonstrate what something is going to be before it is.

In the future, where it will really start to get interesting is where we will start to see integration of these models with IoT and smart building systems. Digital twins can be integrated with Iot devices to help us monitor and control various aspects of the building, such as energy consumption, air quality and security.

Build, measure, learn. In real estate, historically, we stop at build, we build something and then we don't monitor it and therefore we don't optimise it. But once you have a model connected to the real world, you're monitoring the real world, so you should be able to continually optimize it.

You should be able to standardise things and scale them up much better. Once you have a model of the reality of your physical world, that should be replicable and you should be able to scale it up much quicker.

What role do you think GPT will play in the real estate industry?

Antony Slumbers: AI is going to be very, very powerful for being able to understand our cities, and forecasting what's going to be busy, what's not going to be busy, what we should build, where and why and when.

Virtual tours and digital twins are going to get better and better because there's more and more AI. It's going to be able to make these virtual tours and realistic 3D visualisations stronger and stronger. Document analysis and management is an absolute bull's eye for these new language models.

You're going to see a great deal of use in property management and maintenance. Again, it's all about optimising, building operations, monitoring, controlling energy consumption, automating routine maintenance tasks.

You are going to see lots of chatbots used for customer service.

Then lastly, sentiment analysis. AI is really good at monitoring and analysing, online conversations and reviews and social media activity. There's so much material put out by people all across the Internet and social media challenges. And in some cases, it's really useful to be able to understand what's the sentiment towards our company out there? What are people saying about us? What words are they using?

The idea is the machines alone are not going to win. What is going to win is a human plus machine. We need to use humans to tune the machines to do what it is we want to do. Picasso had this famous saying. He said, computers are useless. They can only give you answers. It's humans that ask the questions.

How do you think that the office market will evolve in the next ten years?

Antony Slumbers: Offices are not the only place where work can get done. The workplaces that you require to do your jobs are really a network of spaces. We need to understand and define what it is that can be done better in an office and than anywhere else. Everything needs to become more personalised, more sophisticated, more attuned to individual need, team need and company need.

Offices are going to become more sophisticated, more personalised. They're going to become more and more like software where you continually monitor how well is this building performing, how well is it being used and how well is it providing what the occupiers need.

You're going to need to be able to use one space and reformat it all the time. So I think you're going to find a lot of fitouts are going to become looser and looser and more flexible.

My point is you need the technology, but it's no good unless you start with what it is that the customer needs and then you work back to the technology that enables them. Offices are going to become much better. I think people are going to take a lot less space. But I think actually people are going to pay more for their space because they're going to want better space. And whether they lease it for a month or ten years, frankly, is not going to matter. Because if you can get product market fit between what your customers need and what you're offering, then people are going to stay.

What is one thing that office landlords and agents should do in order to thrive in the next 10 to 15 years?

Antony Slumbers: Start with the customer. There's a very famous video on YouTube, with Steve Jobs, and the point is we have to start with the customer and work back to the technology. We have to understand how we can make our customers' lives better. How we can make them love our products and then work out what technologies do we need to deliver this. And I think this is absolutely the future of real estate.

We spend 90% of our time as people inside real estate of some format. So it's not like demand for real estate is going away. But what kind of real estate? What do we want to do in it? How do we want it to help us?

A lot of the benefits of a workplace comes from the culture and the operation of that company. Now, as real estate people, we can't make a bad company good. But we can make a good company, better. You, in our space, can be as good as you are capable of being. It really is a rethinking of what the purpose of real estate is. If we can create spaces and places that people love, you're going to have a great business.

The long-term goal, right now, is educating all of these market stakeholders like landlords, tenants and so on, on the change of dynamics and on the priority to focus on the productivity and well-being of the employees. How do you foresee the role of real estate companies and what would be essential to innovate?

Antony Slumbers: I think real estate companies are going to get much closer to their customers. There's a fundamental problem historically in real estate of unaligned incentives. We have to find business models that are predicated on the idea of making a bigger pie. And then we need to align our incentives to create a better product. If you think about it, I'm not selling you square feet, I'm selling you a productive workforce.

Real estate companies are going to become different. They're going to become service companies, not product companies. And they're going to need people with different skills and they're going to need different technologies and they're going to need to think in different ways.

We are seeing a huge cycle in the built world. Three years for design and planning, three years for the construction and leasing side and 20 years of releasing and operating. But in the last three years, we saw a big crisis every six months. How can the built world adapt faster?

Antony Slumbers: A number of things have to happen. People operating in the built environment Need to really accept reality and understand how things have changed. And become absolutely aware of what the reality is on the ground.

Paying Huge attention to what customers needs are and trying to think through. What will they be in two years, five years, ten years? Because your building is going to be finished there. You're building for volatility, so you've got to build flexible.

Focus on flexibility and adopting all the technologies that enable you to be more flexible, more agile and allow you to do things quicker.

Then you need to look at what skills do we need that we don't have at the moment? And a lot of this stuff to do with understanding the customer is going to need skills that traditionally a real estate company doesn't have. So either you've got to bring them in or you've got to find someone, someone to someone to work with.

Things are changing really fast and unless you're curious then you're missing things. And yeah, it's not not.

Talking about some customer communities that are not accustomed to being addressed directly - what would be a marketing action you think would help them get to those communities?

Antony Slumbers: Real estate companies need to think about storytelling a lot more because a lot of their customers don't want to deal with them and historically, have never dealt with them very much and are not interested in dealing with them. So a company has got to develop a story that makes customers think they'll have a word with them. This isn't sales. This is branding and marketing to position yourself. It's a long-term game that needs to be led from the top, the C-suite.

Are the innovation departments in the real estate adopters or guardians or blockers today?

Antony Slumbers: They absolutely can be blockers. But the short answer, the short answer to this is a lot depends on the CEO and the board. Are they being given psychological safety and permission to challenge the way we do things? The CEO needs to set the framework of what you're trying to innovate, the purpose of your innovation.

You can have an innovation department, but that innovation department should be talking to everybody. The CEO has to set the tone of the company. We are a learning, constantly evolving company. And that's what we do. We evolve. They need to give psychological safety so people can suggest things that might seem outlandish and then the CEO needs to give air cover to the innovation team. That doesn't stop anyone blocking it.

Innovation is absolutely a mindset.

Listen to Delia and Antony’s live conversation?here?and stay tuned for the next webinar!?