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The return on investment of tenant engagement
Corporate Real Estate Journal,
12
(1),
38-56
(2022)
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for corporate real estate (CRE) to rethink some long-held assumptions on how to avert higher vacancy rates and create value by investing in more attractive spaces. The key to good CRE performance is the ability to attract high-quality tenants, charge premium lease rent fees and avoid lease revisions or cancellations. Since the pandemic, the rules of lease retention have faced significant challenges. In an unexpected turnabout, the lessee is much more powerful in the transaction than in the past. The era where building owners, leasing agents and property managers could view leasing of spaces to corporate tenants as a commodity is over. The occupant’s experience is more central to the attractiveness of CRE in this era. Upgrading the mindset and tools for how to optimise the occupant experience requires different approaches for corporate tenants than historically. What tenants expect of the property manager, leasing agent and building owner have all increased significantly. This paper explores the foundations of these raised expectations, why they are unlikely to revert to pre-2020 levels, and provides models and tools to use in rapid improvement of results.
Keywords: healthy buildings; safety; better workplaces; employee retention; ROI
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Phyllis Horner PhD, WELL AP, operates at the intersection of place and space and their effect on productivity. An applied workplace psychologist and expert in creating measurable bottom-line value by providing workplaces that are healthy, both physically and psychologically, she has led development of new assessments and methods to measure occupant comfort and peak work environments. Phyllis has experience creating work environments that work for occupants, conducting occupant comfort studies and engagement surveys and working with building owners, business executives and top talent. She started her career at Ford Motor Company as a workplace planning psychologist, and since has consulted widely, guided strategy and written books on the future of work, productivity in the modern era, and careers for high-talent individuals. She has also created and consulted on adaptive change and its relationship to personal values. Her passion is ensuring that all people have ideal working conditions that make them most productive, and helping businesses meet those needs so that they can attract and retain talent, get results and win in the marketplace. She works with her partner in life, Manfred Zapka, and together they represent both the physical and psychological sides of health, productivity and well-being at work. Their company, Great Places and Spaces LLC, is based in Las Vegas and Honolulu, and frequently partners with other entities including architects and associations to bring large-scale services to the market.
Manfred Zapka PhD, PE, has dedicated his professional career to help create healthy and sustainable built environments, both inside buildings and in external infrastructure. The fact is that people are spending 90 per cent of their time indoors and making the building more than a shelter, but a key factor to support the well-being of occupants through good environments. He is a certified green and healthy building professional with LEED and WELL credentials and is a Council-certified Indoor Environmental Consultant (CIEC). He is an adjunct professor for architecture and an engineering consultant. He has been working on energy conservation and sustainable designs for more than 25 years and ten years ago he started to focus on healthy buildings. Besides being an expert in innovative building environmental and information technologies, he is working on deriving tangible value for building owners and corporate tenants. In Great Places and Spaces he works on the improvement and assessment of the physical space environment and provides solutions which can increase return on investment (ROI) of improvement efforts. He believes superior performance of healthy, safe and productive environments can best be achieved through optimising the combination of building technology, Internet of Things (IoT)-based information and controls, as well as occupant experience. Through his extensive international work experience he is comfortable to work in a multicultural project environment.
