How Property Managers Can Utilize Technology to Optimize Their Rentals
energy; it’s all the uses in the building. Are they using parking? When do they use the parking? When are the package deliveries coming in? All of these elements of how people use the building can be used to make the building more efficient — to provide a higher level of service but also manage the cost as well. The multi-family and commercial real estate industries are both becoming more customer centric. How do you believe property managers can meet the ever-changing needs of these customers and prospective tenants?
In an expansive interview, Steve Weikal, CRE Tech Lead at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, explains how technology is changing the housing market for the better. With the current housing affordability crisis and rent prices increasing due to the pandemic, what new models are actively helping to improve the situation? There are some interesting approaches to this. On the rental side, there have been new solutions. For example, how can we rethink the security deposit and how can we rethink the last month of rent? If you’re trying to rent an apartment in New York City, when you add the first month and the last month and the security deposit, that can get to be a very high number. So,
can we rethink something like security deposit? And can we do that by writing an insurance product? Would I, as a tenant, be willing to pay a few dollars a month for insurance coverage that makes my landlord more comfortable with that security deposit, and I don’t have to pay it out of pocket? What major trends have you noticed in tenants’ lease preferences? We have proven through the last 18 months that the workforce can be much more mobile and still be productive.
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Because of this newfound flexibility, tenants are less likely to agree to a 12-month lease. This downward pressure is happening in commercial offices, retail, and all of the asset classes. As a result, owners are getting more flexible on month-to-month leases. What technologies would you recommend that property managers invest in for the next year? Over the long-term, the quickest return on investment has been with companies that have used technology to solve energy efficiency issues. We’re
no longer at the point of just smart thermostats, but also integrated platforms to help better manage either the purchase side of energy or the provision side. I think there will continue to be breakthroughs in this area. You can pretty quickly see the return and the savings. The other area that property owners and operators have been increasingly looking at is better ways of understanding the user. If you can understand how your occupants are using energy, you can be more efficient and effective on providing that energy. But it’s not just
There are a couple of ways, now that operators have a much better sense of how the buildings are being used. One is to tap into the existing building management systems in ways that provide data that is useful. The legacy providers, the existing systems in buildings, are starting to get better at analyzing the data and providing information that’s useful. You can observe how many people are coming through, how many people need access, and at which times of the day. Then you can tie that in with your staffing, for example, or the building elevators. There are also what we refer to as user engagement apps, or tenant experience apps, that are a form of crowdsourcing. If all the tenants in the building have that building app, and they use it to order lunch or to get access or to report a light bulb outage, you now have a bunch of data that’s coming from the users. You can sense what they’re looking for and accommodate it. n