Can technology bridge the service gap between buildings with amenity & space-as-a-service?
Gabrielle McMillan is the founding CEO of Equiem and has led the Equiem business and team from inception in 2011. In her previous role as Director and General Manager of Advance Marketing, Gabrielle oversaw significant business growth (9 x revenue), expansion into New Zealand and the UK and international operations, including 180 staff.
Equiem catalyses communities, using technology to turn commercial spaces into places & helps landlords unlock new value in their assets; assisting them to attract & retain tenants, while increasing revenue. Equiem aims to breathe new life into buildings through: deeper engagement with customers, a smart technology platform and a curated services experience.
In this podcast:
Gabrielle’s favourite building is the impressive Rialto Towers, Equiem’s first project. Her favourite emerging real-estate related technology is Bluepoint; a UK cloud-based, visitor management system for buildings and a potential solution for a pain point experienced by many occupiers and on-site teams.
Can technology bridge the service gap between buildings with amenity & space-as-a-service?
Gabrielle McMillan is the founding CEO of Equiem and has led the Equiem business and team from inception in 2011. In her previous role as Director and General Manager of Advance Marketing, Gabrielle oversaw significant business growth (9 x revenue), expansion into New Zealand and the UK and international operations, including 180 staff.
Equiem catalyses communities, using technology to turn commercial spaces into places & helps landlords unlock new value in their assets; assisting them to attract & retain tenants, while increasing revenue. Equiem aims to breathe new life into buildings through: deeper engagement with customers, a smart technology platform and a curated services experience.
In this podcast:
Gabrielle’s favourite building is the impressive Rialto Towers, Equiem’s first project. Her favourite emerging real-estate related technology is Bluepoint; a UK cloud-based, visitor management system for buildings and a potential solution for a pain point experienced by many occupiers and on-site teams.
The board has, and thank you for joining me for our latest episode of building our future podcasts where we meet the people shaping the built environments back, exploring spaces of service today, and they're very fortunate to be joined by Gavin Mcmillan. Equian gap has firsthand experience of helping landlords use technology to improve the service offering, not just in the UK, also in the US and that home in Australia. We were lucky enough to catch errors as possible. Whistle stop tour of the UK, her thoughts and what she's trying to achieve, where do UK stands versus elsewhere in the world. The movement towards service students and researchers listening now got transcripts of podcasts available online, but not perfect yet, but please do bear with me and had a bit through the website fully. The links to download and the web address is building a feature dot. My guest today is Gabrielle Mcmillan. The founding CEO of Acquia is lead via Korean business from inception in 2011 at Korean catalyzes communities using technology to turn commercial spaces and places, helps landlords unlock new value in their assets, assisting them to attract and retain tenants, well, increasing revenue at Korean names to breathe new life into buildings through deeper engagement with customers, smart technology platform, and a curated services experience. It's a gap. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for listening to a podcast now. Very familiar with the idea of spaces of service. We'll talk a little bit more about equian specific offering, but suffice to say, it's at the heart of the movement by way of background to get us started at Graham arrived in the UK, but a year ago. Can you tell us your impressions of how the idea of spaces of service was embraced back then and how that's changed subsequently versus
Speaker 2:what you'd seen at home at Creem? Established an office in the UK about 12 months ago, but, um, I was actually flying in and out of London and New York, uh, for the previous few years. London has been the global capital of, of flexible space, so, you know, in some ways companies like Charlie grains, the office group, um, I think we work as now your largest occupy here. I think we work, it takes more space in any occupier in London. So I mean I think you've kind of got to carve it up and go. London actually led in many ways flexible space, but when it comes to landlords offering flexible space, um, and I think it, you know, it's probably behind countries like Australia and by flexible space, what are you really talking about? A short term leases, coworking shorter term leases. Why is it behind places like Australia? What, what changed is it due to the, of how buildings are owned in Australia and Australia is a pretty unique market in Australia you've essentially got 80 percent of the premium grade office buildings controlled or owned essentially by 11 large rates. So I think one of the things about Australia and it really has been a leader in terms of tenant engagement, tenant amenity, flexible spice offerings. And I think that's because the landlords are so acutely aware of what each other are doing. There's really 11 of them and it's highly visible. And so when one leads the other is rapidly follow. And I think that's one of the reasons why Australia is being ahead of the curve. The other thing is, in Australia you tend to have the rates tend to have an integrated owner operator, owner, manager model. So a lot of them are very hands on. Whereas in London, um, you know, you have, you have a lot more landlords are actually investors and the management is done separately. So I think that's another driver as well. I think the closer that the landlord can get to the tenant, to the occupier, the faster you're going to see innovation move when you arrived here, who is going to be the easiest targets to engage with and people that kind have really got the idea and bought in equines first client here with actually lendlease who we'd been working with globally. And I mean lend lease. Again, I think that's a landlord who is very closely connected with occupiers because of the amount of new builds and development that lend lease do and again, I think that's where you say a lot of innovation is with with new development. We engaged with them with Lindley said their development added Stratford International Court in London, which is obviously a pretty amazing space. Now's probably a good time just to explain a little bit about what equity is and what you're trying to achieve. Our offering is essentially an integrated end to end tenant engagement platform or customer experience platform. There's three aspects to it. I mean at the heart of what a cream does. We're a technology company, so we have these kind of robust, flexible digital tenant engagement platform. The reality is that being able to engage with customers, being able to create experiences for customers is much more than just the tick and so the other two aspects to our offering, our, what we call engagement, which is essentially content experiences, curated events and activations and programming to really bring a building to life. And we also offer community managers which are kind of like a, you know, think of that next generation concierge. So the community manager role is actually there to engage the building occupants and connect that community. And so when you actually wrap the whole thing together, you know, the aim of what we're doing is to make that particular building a better place to work. Whether that's through the introduction of convenient services, improving the amenity. Sometimes it's actually just connecting what's already there. Um, you know, the funny thing is we're all down in a over 57 million square feet globally here in New York and Australia. And one of the things that we see over and over and over again is that tenants or customers in a building or off often just actually unaware of what's available to them in that particular building. So you know, a lot of what[inaudible] can do when the platform is rolled out, he's actually just connect and integrate all the services that are already available in that asset. Is it really a platform to connect property owners with customers rather than with the tenants 100 percent and these whole, you know, we're seeing a big trend at the moment, you know, when the end of a shift in vernacular, a massive shift in vernacular, away from tenant and towards customer. I think if you look at the say the traditional kind of landlord tenant paradigm, you typically have one contact point in each tenancy that is the landlord contact. And what equines platform does quite simply is actually connect with 100 percent of the customers in that building. So you're talking about the staff of the tenant, you know, when you reflect on the way that property management is always has always operated with this kind of one contact per tenancy. It's actually an incredibly flawed model because if you look at an average, a million square foot building, you know you might have 40,000 customers that are coming to that workplace every single day that are consuming that building, all of them or the customer of the landlord, but the landlord traditionally has only had contact with maybe 20, 30 people in that asset. When you say your average million square foot building and then maybe not so much in London, is that you will target that they're kind of the bigger, the better the service works better with these bigger buildings? Or is this kind of work on on any scale? It can definitely work on any scale, you know, any. In fact, we have the platform rolled out in not only office buildings, large and small, but also retail, shopping malls, residential towers. We actually, it underpins some coworking operators in Australia and we have it rolled out at a university. So I would say anywhere that you've got a community that you want to connect and you want to offer services and perhaps capture data on on that community, that's where you can roll out the platform in terms of equity firms go to market strategy here in the US and certainly originally in Australia, yes, I would say we would typically be talking to the large portfolio landlords and the most forward thinking ones because they're typically the ones that have the most to gain by offering these sort of improved amenity and service to their occupants and really connecting with their customers. You're in say a crowded space but quite a popular space in terms of in terms of tag, how do you differentiate yourself from the competition? It's interesting because seven years ago when I started, it really wasn't a crowded space at all. I mean we. We actually joke. I remember when we first heard the word Fintech and in our office, which was probably only a team of 30 or so at the time, and we're now close to 250 staff globally. But we actually joked that, oh, we should invent the word proptech. It literally didn't exist. Now I'm not saying we invented it, Manju far from it, but um, when soon afterwards we started to hear the term proptech tech and now obviously in America it's referred to a cra, cra tech. I mean there really has been an explosion in this space of both technology, but other service as well, which is exciting in terms of how we would differentiate ourselves. One of the, one of the differentiators for equally amazing fact that experience. I mean we've been at this for seven years. The other thing is I think there are a lot of new tech oriented tech oriented organizations jumping into the space which is to be expected because I, the real estate industry's massive bay. It's well overdue for, for change. This huge opportunity also. There's a lot of capital flowing into this space. Where I would say aquarium differentiates on. A second point is, is that we are really deeply landlord oriented. We, we're really as much of real estate companies. We are a tech company and I think certainly when we go in and I and I meet with landlords who were considering how they can engage with customers on, you know, how they can improve yield on space and what they'll say to us is look, equity seems to really deeply understand real estate. So I think experience capability, the fact that we really started and were born out of real estate and a final thing probably is an integrated approach. I mean I think we're the only provider globally that actually offers not only the technology but actually engagement programming experiences, you know, we bring a partnership network to bear. We've got this kind of incredible content bank that we've built up over the last seven years of this programming around how to actually engage with the community and drive results. So you mentioned Roi. How can you measure the success of the program or the platform? Each landlord is slightly different. Each acid is slightly different in terms of what they're trying to achieve. You know, when we talk about Roi, I refer to it on a, on a scale or a spectrum. So on one end you've got kind of the one percenters and that's as simple as streamlining communication. I mean, when you can actually connect every single person in your building to the one platform and start to communicate with them directly, that's a game changer in and of itself and it's a very basic thing, but the reality is the bar has been so low in real estate for so long that that's actually a starting point. And so being able to get messages out to people, being able to communicate, whether that's around operational changes, firewood and training, um, you know, the car park's going to be closed on the weekend. These are basic, basic, basic things. But if you can let everyone know what's going on, satisfaction increases, complaints decreased. So that, that's the starting point, right? Then moving up the scale from there to something, to a couple things that I would say more than 10 percent is right. It's, we're moving up on our spectrum. That's when I'd start to think about data capture and how you can really better understanding of tenants. So again, if you've got everyone in your building connected to a platform, suddenly that unlocks this opportunity to actually really deeply understand who is in your building, what services they want, what they're interested in, what their preferences are and start to use that. You can't rebuild the building, but you can kind of have this layer of soft services and amenity that can be experimental, that can be agile, that can really be built around that community. And so, you know, that's kind of in the middle start to really understand your tenants, use that, service them better. So as you're moving up the chain, you can then deliver services and you know, a lot of landlords are I think struggling with how to deliver amenity and I think there are a lot of options, a lot of ways in which humanity can be delivered that don't necessarily involve taking out a whole little floor and turning it into physical amenity space. You know, a platform like[inaudible] actually allows you to deliver a lot of amenity and almost a cloud based way, if that makes sense. So you can do food delivery, you can roll out a wellness program, you can run yoga classes at lunchtime, you can bring in lunch and learns and kind of have this, this amazing amenity that doesn't take up any floor space. Right then as we keep going up, then I'd say to landlords, what space in your building or what facilities and your building can you monetize so you start to actually get some increases in yield around spaces that are underutilized, vacant space, boardrooms, meeting rooms, lockers, bike racks, all of these things that you can actually start charging for or monetizing because suddenly with a platform you can actually transact directly with users and then obviously at the end of the spectrum, really what we're trying to achieve is an increase in satisfaction and increasing retention and helping landlords attract the right tenants to their building and keep them there and ultimately an increasing in value. The actual value of the asset itself.
Speaker 3:One of the challenges I would assume key must be where do you start when we talk about smart buildings, smart cities, there's a huge array of things one could offer on a tech platform, booking your own desk, whatever, checking the traffic on the way into, on your commute extension that you can do that. Do you have to have conversations where you're like, yeah, we could do that, but actually it's just going to dilute what we're really trying to do or what does that. I
Speaker 2:mean, I think any product company, this is something that you really, really, really struggled with and I think focus is important. Working out what you, you know, what's going to be core to the platform and what's not and so we would say anything to do with customer interface, anything to do with experience. How can we improve that experience? How can we facilitate a seamless experience? How can we drive convenience? All of those things belong in our platform. You know, there's a whole bunch of things that sit outside of that and that's where we would integrate and partner to deliver a kind of end to end integrated experience and I think we've probably already spent, I don't know, somewhere in the vicinity of$20,000,000 on product development and we're spending$5 million plus a year on ongoing product development, but you still never ever have enough time or money to build all the things. The way we do it. We work really closely with all of our key customers. We're, we're privileged in a way that we work with so many of the leading global landlords that we can really partner with them, work out what's going to drive results for them, what's going to drive for their customers. We've got something like 9,800 companies globally connected to the platform. So again, that kind of the data that we already have also drives a lot of the decisions we make around what gets done in our roadmap that's going to be useful and what gets left or never done with that experience and these bases points. So you must have some pretty interesting insight as to what's worked and what hasn't been. Has there been anything that's surprised you in terms of obviously is a great idea and then no one's used it constantly. And that's the thing we talked to landlords all the time about how different it is. The process of building a community is almost polar opposite to the process of building a building. You know, I mean the construction process, the planning process around construction is so precise and you know, in most cases you'll have a tenant pre committed before, you know, before the shovel hits the dirt, building a community is, um, is very different. You really have to be prepared to be a lot more experimental, be prepared to fail and be prepared to try things and change them. One of the things we've realized is just how different each community is. You know, we will be rolling out things that will work really well in one building and they just completely filing in the next, you know, we do so many different events, pop ups and activations and experiences, but there really is no guarantee of of what's going to work, you know, we roll out suit feedings as a classic, so seasonal suit fittings, hugely convenient offering. We might have a tailor in one building and there's 100 suits sold, completely booked out, same thing next week in another building. No suit, salt. So you know, communities are unpredictable. One of the things I've heard is that one of the most difficult things to, to get the engagement in his interaction between customers within the office, so hosting, networking events and stuff like that can be quite hard work, which I think is going to make sense to me. So if you, if you can't bring people together in that kind of obvious physical way, like who you make friends, how do you kind of subtly create that sense of community in this day and age when people are so busy and so time poor? It's probably more about convenience than anything else, you know, one of interesting fun fact for you, the top five users of our platform globally from a company perspective or all law firms, you know, again, it comes back to different buildings at different communities are different. So in one building, in fact, one of the, um, one of the landlords that we've rolled out with in Australia, we launched two buildings with them one day after the other. It's Colin's place and birthplace in Melbourne. So they both launched with fantastic results. So seven, 800 people registered on day one, kind of 30, 40 percent of the building. Um, online. The usage over the first week is similar in both buildings, so on a, on, on paper, the buildings are very similar, right? And they're both premium grade office. Then one of the things we always do once we've launched his role into what we call a data capture exercise. So the first thing we want to do is actually find out who is in that building and what do they want and we use that information to then work out what the program will look like over the following 12 months. So the fascinating thing about these two buildings is that they came back with completely different results. So in one of the buildings which happen to have a lot of law firms in it, they were saying we want coffee delivery to desk, laundry service, can you fill my prescription, you know, what else can you do for me? How can you make my life easier? I don't want to queue up and I don't want to have to pay with cash, you know, I just want to click a button and have it done. And in the other building when we said to them, what do you like about the service so far and what would you like to see more of was all about events, community networking. So I think that, you know, again, it really boils down to getting to know who's in your building and what they want. There is absolutely zero point facilitating a bunch of networking events if that's not actually what people want, you know, people are busy, let them go home, give them the convenient services at work and then let them go home to their families rather than kind of be hanging around. You know, in the Office for networking drinks do starts with a kind of standard package and you have a kind of onboarding process where the first couple of months you're constantly tweaking and working out what that dynamic is. Yeah. It's very much like that. I mean we can now, you know, with the experience that we've built up over the last seven years, there are aspects that are predictable. There are some trends that we can pull out that will give us some guidance and I guess what we've learned is you know how to launch an asset and get really great uptake in a fairly quick period of time. But then exactly as you've described it from that point onwards. Then we do the data capture and then it is, it's very experimental and the community manager plays a big role in that. We're able to capture a lot of data from the platform itself. So over the last 18 months you were talking about product investment and working out where, where do we invest and what to do next. That data and analytics is, uh, you know, has been an area of investment in the platform that we've really doubled down on in the last 18 months. So there's something like my cto was telling me that we now can collect roughly 18 million data points from, from a building. And so that in itself gives us some really good clues as to what people are interested in. We know what they're reading, we know what they're buying, we know what their habits are. Seventy percent of users on the platform will actually complete their profile so they will indicate what their skills are, what their interests are and, and more often than not, they'll want their profile to be public on the platform so that other people can search for them. So. And then you start to go, hang on a minute, we've got a lot of cyclists in this building or you know, we've actually got a lot of. We've got a lot of mums and that really guides. They're not only the event programming but the sort of services that that will work and will be most useful to the tenants. You're also getting a lot of really interesting data coming back from that and not so of use, not just to the two banana loads or property owners, but also presumably to the tenants. It's all service purely ether for property owners or do you use it for tenants in multi tenanted buildings as well? Yeah, absolutely. We tend to engage with landlords, but we do have a couple of tenants that we work with directly who were who single occupier tenants. And the premise is exactly the same. I mean, to be honest, it's the expectation of the tenant that's really driving the need for the landlord to do this in the first place. So what tenants are trying to do is create amazing workplaces so that they can attract and retain quality staff. Right? Everybody wants to create an atmosphere and a culture and a workplace that allows people to be at their best, you know, to enjoy coming to work, but also to produce their best work. And so that, that's really driving a lot of what we do is, is 10 and expectations and tenant demands. And it's really for us, again, because we were really born out of that real estate scenario, is how do we help landlords bridge that gap and how do we help landlords meet that demand? Because otherwise what we're seeing is with the advent of increased demand for flexible space, shorter leases, more of the responsibility for kind of providing this amazing workplace and providing all this service and these kinds of hospitality type experience is falling on the landlord. That's where I think we're seeing this new breed of landlord, uh, you know, we work in and the many, many groups that have fast following them, notel industrious. Our platform really is about helping landlords bridge that gap so that they can offer these service themselves and meet the meet. The kind of, the demands of the tenants. Brings us back to where we started, which is the concepts of space as a service when we talk about service as amenity and as an actual service, what does that really mean from, from your perspective? Spaces or service is very much about a turnkey experience. Right? And I think the reason why we've arrived here with such A. I mean customers are voting with their feet. There's no arguing that that space as a service and this kind of new short term offering there comes with this kind of out of a box real estate solution is definitely here to stay. Tenants are realizing that the long and arduous task of finding their own space, negotiating with the landlord and fitting it out, it's something that they really don't need to do anymore. And so then they're now expecting to kind of walk into these readymade spaces now, whether that's certainly it's about pre fitted space or flexible and modular space. It's about shorter term leases, but it's actually about then what are the other aspects of the real estate experience that now need to be part of that? Now? Maybe it's beer on tap. Um, it's coffee, it's definitely internet. Um, so you know, it, it's about then how far does it go, you know, are we going to say reception? I'm an it help desk actually get outsourced and aggregated for the building. Uh, certainly even on our platform, you know, aggregating things like catering and office supplies is already a reality. I think we're saying probably the beginning of a trend which is possibly going to be much bigger than what people are even predicting at the moment.
Speaker 3:Danger that landlords for use technology sometimes as a, as a crutch says, oh, okay, you've got to provide a service, will tell you what I've got. This got us up.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I think that with the industry moving as rapidly as it is at the moment, it's actually really, really difficult for landlords. There is so much choice. There is so much noise. There are so many companies claiming to do all of these things and it's not just technology, but I think technology provides a very difficult challenge for landlords because you know, not only is there a plethora of choice, but landlords typically don't have the capability even within their organizations to be able to effectively assess the options and buy a technology solution. You know, the irony is that for a lot of the landlords, they don't have big internal it teams to even be able to assess these options. And I think there's a lot of fear, doubt, uncertainty. Everyone knows technology's gonna move really rapidly. So if you're in the early stages of development, how do you actually select technology now or the right technology partner, knowing how fast it's going to move either how can you even predict what's going to happen in the next three to five years.
Speaker 3:The other problem with that, and I speak from my person experience as a landlord, but it's. It's overlap between the technologies that you're using. So everyone rightly say, starts off with a specific solution to solve and then starts growing into doing wider and wider staff. And you suddenly find that you've got a lot of crossover between the, the solutions that you're using.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think the noise adds to this sense of confusion and you mentioned earlier, you know, a landlord using it as a crutch. Um, I don't think deliberately but I, but I think um, you know, it's very easy to get confused and it's very easy to kind of go, oh, I heard such and such was doing facial recognition so I need to have facial recognition, you know, because I don't want to be left behind. And so there's this kind of mad rush, but there is a little bit of box ticking and there's a little bit of lip service in a way. Um, you know, there's only a handful of landlords I think that I have a really deep, authentic understanding of what they're trying to achieve and how to go about it. But, you know, we're seeing a lot more kind of thoughtful, careful thinking around that at the moment.
Speaker 3:Roy was probably the wrong term to use, but it comes back to just having, having a problem to solve and not just doing things because
Speaker 2:yeah, it's about why um, and uh, we do ask that question a lot and sometimes you do walk it, you know, it's funny and you mentioned that is a competitive space. I can almost predict which one, which other technology providers someone might've met with by the questions they asked me in a meeting. So you know, we do spend a lot of time kind of walking our customers through that and saying well why, what are you trying to achieve and how's that going to work? And have you spoken to your occupants bat that and trying to really refocus on the customer first and foremost and to your point, but what's actually gonna add value.
Speaker 3:So, so I've worked in a lot of multi tens of buildings where you base, he never speaks people on the other floors as services like equity. I'm kind of an increase in that in the use. And you get 10 minutes interacting with one another more often or customers I should say. Do you think you'll see more clustering effects, say more real estate firms getting together and working in the same buildings, etc. Or do you think that that kind of diversity of people working together is good?
Speaker 2:That is a really interesting question and one that I haven't honestly given a lot of thought to. I mean fast fOod chains have been doing it for years, haven't they? They all cluster. Maybe real estate firms and it firms will cluster, but I think there's something personally I think there's something interesting in the diversity and what I would say is regardless of the type of companies, I think there's huge advantages to be unlocked by driving a more connected workspace. And you said before you'd heard it, it was hard to get people to engage in community and networking events. I think it comes down to that eat or what's in it for them. So the events that will work the best are the ones that are of benefit to the user or the organization. So you know, how do you actually connect end jesus together for mutual benefit, but how do you actually connect the businesses together? And how can businesses work together? Um, we see a lot of that actually with, with the retailers, you know, most of the buildings that we, um, that we have the[inaudible] platform rolled out on. We'll have some combination of retail tenants as well as companies. Um, and so one of our favorite things to do with our programming is actually drive a stronger connection between the retail services and the retail tenants and the customers in the building, but also to use the retail tenants and marry them up with each other and do kind of these interesting cross promotional opportunities tip to boost their business.
Speaker 3:That leads me onto another point, which is, if you've in the more mixed use and we alluded to earlier on, in some ways the bigger the better. Why does this have to end up buildings? Could you use[inaudible] to bring together a town center for example?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Um, from a technology point of view, um, you know, we could, you can roll it out any which way you like. It's pretty flexible and modular. So where we're positioned, our whole mission is to help landlords connect better with their customers. And so where we were, we typically doing in most of our work is with, you know, large portfolio landlords and I think where they can actually connect not just one building community, but actually create a connected network of all of their buildings. One of the landlords we work with in Australia is they're actually the largest owner of office in Australia, a group called Texas and they've got the platform rolled out across more than 40 buildings now nationally. And um, they've got 37,000 customers actively using the platform. And so what they're really doing is they're starting to think of their customer is, is the end user as opposed to the tenant. And they've been able to launch and deliver a whole bunch of services like childspace conferencing and event space. What I think is interesting is as a landlord, they starting to think about themselves as a beta c business as opposed to a b to b business. It's a very different mindset. You've got to move from being what is effectively a real estate provided mindset to an experience, provide a mindset. It's a different capability, it's a different approach, but there's a huge amount of value there to be unlocked and if landlords can start thinking about themselves more like hotel providers or even airline providers and really start to think about their brand, what they want that brand to stand for, what experience they want to providing their buildings, and if they can connect with their customers to that experience via some kind of technology, they're creating a lot more value than just the bricks and mortar. Real estate brand, I'm sure will be of increasing importance only. It clearly favors scale as a real estate already favor scale, but that will accentuate it. Older thought, so what? WhaT's next? Where are you going, both in terms of geography but also product roadmap, world domination, but tick. I mean in the last 12 months we've expanded both to the us and the uk. We've just rolled out our first couple of properties in Ireland, which is really exciting, so small market, but really progressive and we're getting fantastic results. They're next to a regions for us, our Canada and Singapore, you know, and then we'll be looking at the rest of europe, I guess using london and the uk as a gateway in terms of product roadmap. We're doubling down on mobile. We launched a native app for apple and android, uh, in the last 12 months and there's some really exciting functionality that's about to come online around that app, which I don't want to give too much away, but it's a bit of a watch this space, but the, you know, the native app functionality opens up a lot of possibilities, let's just say in terms of what we can do with experiences in buildings and how we can personalize them and curate them and really take that to the next level. So doubling down on mobile data. So we continue to, to build out that data warehouse that I mentioned earlier. We're building in a lot of, a lot of analytics for landlords and property managers so that, and it's all depersonalized obviously. Um, you know, anonymous data that they can start to mine. Some of the smarter landlords are already looking at how they actually push are the data sources into, into our platform or pulled out and up into their own secure data cloud if they've got that so they can start to actually bring their data together and look at, yeah, look at usage, crm, lacing and put that together with a tenant engagement and customer experience platform data. And then the third piece for us is it still going to be all about experiences. We do a lot of events and services, so we're spending a lot of time at the moment thinking deeply about how we make those even easier to consume so that, you know, when there's a, when the flu shots are in your building, you just press one button, you know, getting your laundry done, seamless rsv, paying to yoga class, seamless, you know. So just how do we continue to make those things easier for the end user and if people even want. So find out what that big, the big secret, what avail is or just learn more about and how to sign up was a where's the best place to go? Keep your on our website, get[inaudible] dot com. We have a blog. Um, and uh, we, we tend to make pretty regular announcements on there. Thank you job. Consider the big questions. The real, the real test is now, which is what is your favorite building? I'm actually going to say an australian building if that's okay. There are a lot of buildings here in london that I love my favorite building of all time. We'd have to be real tow towers in melbourne and that is because it was the inception of[inaudible]. So it was our very first roll out was where, where it all began. And uh, so that's a pretty special, pretty special building. And over the last seven years we've been privileged to kind of be on a journey with that building. It was 25 years old when a korean, when[inaudible] started. It's been through a significant kind of$200, million dollar aud redevelopment, new retail, new towel. And you lobby. This is massive buildings. This is a million square foot mixed use building primarily office. It's home to about 60 different companies and about 18 retail tenants. And the next question, and you can't say either way, it's your favorites, technological innovation in, in real estates, I should be saying something cool like ai and blockchain and dropping lots of techie buzzwords. I think, you know, we're all about solving user pain points. So, um, for me the space that I'm watching pretty closely at the moment is around visitor management and access control. Um, I think it's a real friction point, particularly visitor management. Um, and that's just a complete nightmare. Um, so there are a few companies doing some interesting things in that space. One I met yesterday actually a group by the name of bluepoint who are uk, a startup doing some pretty interesting things in the visitor management space. Thank you very much. We look forward to following[inaudible] progress and under. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Profound change that technology is having on the way to real estate is you
Speaker 1:gathering the men's having had poor districts. It's clear that the industry is very to have a collection of highly smart, collaborative people driving this, that fluid, as we've heard, building user experiences it, certificate the amendments, and embracing these technologies now gives you the opportunity to help shape the products early stage. So if you're wondering if this is something you should be thinking about, fuel buildings like no longer now it's time to embrace change. That's it for this time, but do join me next time when gemma, john will be explaining how anthropology and help developers design buildings that users want and how changing mentalities leading to changing forms, adult environments as ever do. Feel free to get in touch. I'm on twitter, my handle at building underscore o or you can email me. You provide a website which is building our future.net.