The Importance of Having a Good PropTech Product with Prasan Kale and Tim Conway

Prasan Kale

https://www.linkedin.com/in/prasan-kale-07933b7

Prasan Kale is the Chief Executive Officer at Rise Software LLC. Rise Buildings believe people should be delighted by where they live and work, with seamless access, a captivating user experience, robust operations tools, and advanced capabilities, Rise Buildings native platform replaces all other property technology solutions. Their founding team is comprised of owners, developers, and property managers, with more than 300 properties globally, Rise Buildings has proven ability to deploy their product at any property, anywhere. Previously, he has worked with companies like Akara Partners, LLC, CMK Companies, Golub and Company, Teng and Associates, Heery International, Turner Construction, and The Drake Hotel. Prasan has done B.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Windsor.

Tim Conway

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-conway-7a9b88b/

Tim Conway is the Commercial Portfolio Manager for Golub & Company, overseeing operations in Golub’s commercial portfolio with a hands-on approach that produces maximum revenues, reduces operating costs and enhances the value of each asset. He was previously general manager for 680 N. Lake Shore drive, a 2.2 million square-foot, mixed-use property, since 2005. Golub & Company provides real estate services, the company specialises in commercial and multifamily real estate development, acquisitions, and management. Golub & Company also offers marketing and advisory services, in the United States and Central and Eastern Europe.

Resources mentioned

LMRE website www.lmre.co.uk

UKPA website www.ukpa.com

Rise Buildings www.risebuildings.com

Golub & Company www.golubandcompany.com

Insights From This Episode

• For us, it’s about connecting with them and furthering our brand and making that really emotional connection with them and using technology as a vehicle to accomplish that – Tim Conway
• We’re trying to bring our technology to literally every corner of the world – Prasan Kale
• It’s our ability to market our brand and to make the connection with our tenants, really in an emotional way to solve their problems and make their lives easier. And that makes them happy, and that makes them satisfied – Tim Conway
• You can’t have technology for the sake of technology alone – Prasan Kale
• An app for your building, or technology for your building has to be a total tech stack for your building – Prasan Kale

Episode Transcript

Louisa

Hi everyone and welcome to the Propcast, my name is Louisa Dickins, co-founder of LMRE and board director of the UKPA, and I shall be your weekly host. Each week for 30 minutes, we will be connecting the VC, PropTech startups and real estate professionals globally, and assist in bridging that famous communication gap we all love talking about. So, sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking with the CEO and co-founder of Rise Buildings Prasan Kale, and Tim Conway, the commercial Portfolio Manager for Golub and Company and we’ll be discussing whether PropTech is or isn’t really just about the tech, and I would like to welcome them both to the show.

Prasan

Thanks for having us.

Tim

It’s great to be on thanks.

Louisa

Now for those who are listening in today Prasan CEO and co-founder of Rise Buildings which is a property technology platform powering connections between people and buildings. Prasan’s extensive experience in the real estate industry working with and alongside owners, operators developers and asset managers, has given him a unique insight into creating operational efficiencies and occupant experiences in buildings.

And to give you a background to Prasan’s career, he has managed project and property operations of all commercial property assets from office, multifamily, retail, the list goes on, and has had the opportunity to perform in development roles on projects ranging from the iconic 90 storey Waterview Tower, a 60 story Elysium Hotel and private residences, to a 3600 unit master plan River Line development in the heart Chicago, to a 2700-acre master plan island development in the Caribbean. So a fairly varied experience of in real estate. Now Prasan is an avid technologist and innovator and has leveraged his electrical engineering background and real estate routes into a fast-growing property operations and occupant experience platform called Rise Buildings, which he’ll tell us plenty more about later. But a brief summary is it’s a mobile first technology solution for properties that streamlines the end user experience while driving operational efficiencies and creating value for all the stakeholders.

So Prasan thank you for joining us, and time to give you introduction to Tim who is also going to be joining us, who is one of Rise Buildings clients. Tim is a commercial Portfolio Manager for Golub and Company and oversees the operations for the commercial department with a hands-on approach that produces maximum values, reduces operating costs and enhances the value of each asset. Now Tim, like Prasan has a solid amount of experience in real estate with over 25 years and is responsible for over 4 million square feet of office and retail space in Chicago, and a few other areas. Now, with this portfolio, he supports the development of PropTech initiatives, at Golub by serving on the planning committee. Since its founding 60 years ago, Golub and its affiliates have owned, leased or managed more than 50 million square feet of commercial mixed use and multifamily real estate. So once again, thank you both for joining us on the show. And why don’t we start the questions, Prasan talk us through your journey from real estate to building an established tech company which we know as Rise Buildings.

Prasan

Thanks again for having me Lu, this is great. I love what you do, longtime listener first time caller. The journey really began in the world of real estate and Tim knows this really well, I had the pleasure of working with him many moons ago at Golub and Company. And really, as I was building these buildings and had a chance to participate in overseeing the portfolio that Golub had at the time, I really learned all of the ins and outs of what goes on in real estate and a few other positions I held throughout my career in real estate. And frankly I kept running into the same challenge, which was I was trying to make things as Tim is today, make things in my properties way more efficient, way more painless than they were in the in the world of real estate for all of time.

And I kept running into the same two hurdles, which are one as I tried to make things more efficient, I was forced into buying multiple fragmented solutions that didn’t play well together in the building. So you take all the things that go on in a building like visitor management and booking a room, and paying your rent, and putting in a service ticket and there’s about 45 different things that go on in a building, when you do them in a fragmented, kind of disassociated manner, they’re inefficient, not efficient. And then second thing that was going on is because there were so many software and hardware and different websites and apps and this and that, that people were told to use to do each and every one of these things, there was zero engagement in these buildings. So the two things that I was trying to do in real estate were actually backfiring if I tried to do them with kind of disjointed solutions, so I literally one fine day jumped out of a perfectly good career in real estate and decided to do something about it and launched Rise Buildings.

Louisa

And then tell us a little bit more about your product. I gave a very, very basic introduction to it, and then Tim, I’d love for you to step in and tell us how you came across that product. But Prasan if you go first?

Prasan

Sure, yes the way we approached the problem was, again there are too many different fragmented solutions and they cost a whole bunch of money when you when you stick them all together, the way we approached the problem was, let’s build a total technology stack for real estate. So if you look at the world of real estate, at least in my view of it falls into kind of three major pillars. The first is access. And while Rise is not an access control company, we don’t run the pipes and wires that do the right thing that unlock the door, we deeply integrate to those systems so that we can in fact, unlock the door. So look at Rise as an access enablement company, not a control company. The second major pillar is operations, everything that goes on inside the building, the daily activities of staff, everything from an incident report, all the way to service ticket triage, to preventive maintenance, visitor management and reservations, like booked conference room, take a payment for something. And there’s a long list of everything that goes on inside of real estate day in and day out that not just staff members, but occupants need to get done. The property manager needs to see at an overview and triage level. So really taking the daily activities and making them fully automated, not hey, book an amenity, and when you press that button, it tells you which number to call. Well, that’s not, that’s not technology, that’s just a website. That’s basic, what it should really be is booked that amenities, pick your hours pay for it, and the door unlocks for you, because you booked that amenity and only for you, right? That’s how it should be. So that’s the second kind of operations pillar.

And as a result of those two very deep gateway features, we drive a tremendous amount of engagement in the in the tenant experience arena. So people actually use the platform, every single day, we’ll see 30% 40% of a building population, open the app and do something in it for more than 10 seconds, which means that engagement a time every single day. So now you can start delivering great value to the building like engaging content, the building itself can promote their brand via our branded platform, and really start to get the occupants to connect with each other creating this connective tissue of community in your buildings. That’s the third pillar. And then there’s a fourth pillar that’s really the advanced layer of analytics and data that stems from all of this throughput of the first three pillars. Our platform allows you to look at things like space utilisation, using our patented beacon platform over time or in real time, I can do things like facilitate contact tracing very relevant to the world that we live we live in today, and so on and so forth. So there’s a whole fourth kind of advanced layer of AI and analytics that’s built on top of all of the great data that comes from the platform.

Louisa

And Tim, tell us how you were first introduced to Rise Buildings?

Tim

Sure. I mean I’ve known Prasan for some for 15 years now and we’re friends who obviously work together at Golub and Company and frankly, we have talked about this challenge for many, many years and in trying to as Prasan said, defragment solutions for all of our tenants inside our buildings. So as he left Golub and Company and started to pursue founding Rise buildings, we kept in touch. And so as he launched Rise, I became very interested in it, and it’s proven to be everything that that he’s planned it out to be.

Louisa

And is there a particular part of the product, Prasan split it into four parts, of which is used a bit more by your business or where you see more value?

Tim

Sure I think he touched on it, and it’s really integration. It’s integrating all of the different facets, and I’m not sure if Prasan likes this term or not but I like it, it’s a remote control for your building. And I think and it’s a pretty sexy one on your smartphone that can do all of these different things that you need to do when you’re a tenant in one of our buildings. And for me is kind of a lost leader, this technology that gives the tenant what they need. For me, it’s more our ability to market our brand and to make the connection with our tenants really in an emotional way to solve their problems and make their lives easier. And that makes them happy, and that makes them satisfied. And it draws all those feelings that we want them to feel when they’re inside one of our buildings.

Louisa

And Prasan I’ve heard you speak about the functional capabilities of your product, and how that’s really table stakes for a successful PropTech company. What do you exactly mean by that? Surely that would probably tie in quite nicely in what Tim just said.

Prasan

Yes, I think to be fair, there’s a lot of noise just globally in the PropTech space, right? There’s a lot of stuff coming out, which is great by the way, because the industry is still fledgling, when you think about it, we didn’t have apps for buildings 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago. And I think it’s great that there’s a lot of content and you guys do such a fantastic job of filtering through some of that noise for the industry. But there’s a ton of noise in the sense that there’s a there’s a boatload of companies out there saying, ‘hey, you need an app for your building, here’s an app for your building, look, we solved your problem of technology, here’s some technology’, you can’t have technology for the sake of technology alone, right? You can’t give somebody an app that says, look, here’s an app for your building, now if you want to pre credential a visitor, you can know which number to call or send an email to so and so to free credential and a visitor right, or book a conference room, like I mentioned earlier, or pay your rent and it just pops open a website that is yet another login that’s disjointed.

So an app for your building and this this phrase of tenant experience that gets thrown out there, can’t just be a collection of all of these other systems in one place. But rather, an app for your building or technology for your building has to be a total tech stack for your building. So outside of the things that folks like us don’t know how to do, which is accounting, we don’t know how to count the beans, which there’s some great systems that do those things. And then there’s great systems that do the actual pipes and wiring and the buzzing things that make access control happen. So outside of those two fundamental systems in buildings, and there’s a couple others like building automation systems and elevator systems, and so on and so forth, outside of those core fundamental building systems all of the inside of what goes on in a building the operational capabilities, the engagement, the access enablement if you will, visitor management, has to be fully automated and actually has to have software and hardware to make it happen, right. So it can never in a million years for us at least be ‘hey, press a button to book a conference room’ And it tells you to call this number to do so, it has to be a complete booking engine that lets you go through the motions of going, ‘hey, I want it on this date, I want it for this time, it’s available only for a maximum of x hours, okay I get that I owe $100 to actually book it, I can pay for it upon booking, oh by the way, I need it configured in a classroom style with these three add on amenities and bring please bring down the projector that we need for this meeting’. And it’s all done native to our platform, there is not a third-party solution.

Another great example that in our platform is visitor management. Although we’re not the access control company, we are the visitor management software suite, if you will, for the building. And then it’s not just software, there’s a check in kiosk and a digital intercom exterior or interior that facilitate touchless frictionless access for credentialed visitors. So you don’t have to go talk to a staff member, a good example that is Tim and Golub have this at 300 South Wacker, one of their buildings. And the amount of time that now a visitor has to spend with a staff member or wait in line to talk to a staff member that can be called upstairs and say so and so is here should we let them through that just disappears, it goes away. So now you’ve got a great experience for your tenants because it’s easy to credential visitors. You’ve created efficiency for your staff where they don’t actually have to talk to as many people and then for the visitors that come to the building, they’re walking away from that building going, ‘Wow, that buildings pretty tech forward. I mean, that was easy. In other buildings, I have to wait at the reception desk to be led upstairs.’

Tim

To jump in really fast, in this scenario where the guard is taking the credential from the guest or the visitor in the old way, they’d say, ‘may I see your ID’ and then they’d have to take a photocopy of it and then print a badge and do these different things. Where now that they had this seamless entry process, they can make this emotional connection between so we can script and brand our security staff to smile at them and let them know how welcome and how happy they are that they’re welcome in the building and what beautiful day it is out there. Those few seconds that that are spent between the visitor and my guard could be spent making a photocopy or could be spent making connection, and a real friendly one. So again, that’s it’s kind of like we want this seamless technology to get lost, and not have anyone think about it so that we can engage with our customer.

Louisa

I feel that so many people, maybe some PropTech companies might not truly appreciate all the moving parts that come with connecting a building and making it seamless, or they come into maybe a bit too late. One of those moving parts is to realise that doesn’t work for the client, because you want it to all be on one sort of platform. And this leads us quite well into another question I’d love to ask. I’ve also heard you say that only part of what makes a PropTech company successful is technology. Can you elaborate on that?

Prasan

Sure. Around the office we throw out there, ‘Look, we’re pretty great at technology, we’ve built a technology stack that is second to none, hardware, software, we’re problem solvers, we’re tinkerers, we’re engineers, were the guys in the garage’. But actually, what makes Rise really succeed at what we do is that we’re experts at change management. So we focus heavily on how to get that technology to be actuated into the property. It’s less about the fact that we’ve built all this great tech, it’s more about the fact that how do we help our clients and listen to them along the way? How do we help them succeed in deploying and implementing this technology in the building?

Louisa

And Tim, I’d love to hear your feedback/ How do you think they succeed in doing it? Obviously you use Rise Buildings as one of the technologies, what would you say makes a successful PropTech company?

Tim

I’m not Prasan and I’m not an entrepreneur, but I can say that in my experience with Rise the business, aside from this technology that they’re successful at, I’ve seen them manage their growth really well, their customer services is on par with any company that’s had a long lineage of successful customer service. They respond quickly, they’ve integrated into their company clearly the departments that they need to service us as a as a classic company or vendor. So, they’re managing their growth pretty well, it’s obvious

Louisa

Prasan I was catching up with EQ Office Micky Ward, who was singing your praises as well, and your ability to adapt your product and respond quickly. The feedback I get from landlords in a big demand is that the technology doesn’t respond quick enough in it, how have you managed to customise your product and develop it so quickly to a wide range of clients? Is it? What’s your secret sauce for that and delivering to them on time, where I’m sure a lot of these clients are pretty difficult?

Prasan

Yes, it’s a great question. And we love Micky and love how her forward thinking, yet pragmatic mind works in deploying really good tech into her buildings. But to answer the question, I think it all starts with how you build the platform on day one, it starts on day one, right? From day one we always envisioned Rise to be a total tech stack for any building, multifamily, condo, rental, co living, co working commercial side, traditional commercial, enterprise commercial, Senior Living, student housing doesn’t matter. If it’s a building that has four walls and a roof and people that work or live there, with staff that maintain and manage the building and managers that oversee that building, our platform works in it. And that’s not to say that we’re a custom solution or anything, we built a product. It’s not like we have to go code your app for you every time. But the way we built it from day one was that we built all of the different scenarios that could result in a building.

And I’ll give you a simple example of that. In some buildings, the property management team wants a service request that a cubicle might have put in to be approved by their main contact with the tenant level, before it makes its way to the management team at the building. Other buildings say ‘Nope, I want to see that right away, I want to see that service request from Joe Cubicle directly, and then I can triage it and fix the leaky valve’ or whatever. That is not a customisation on our platform, that’s a configuration. So we’ve built a significant amount of, it’s like 45 to the power of 4, workflows in our platform, and tiny little configurations as on and off buttons if you will, or boxes that get checked, that quickly can adapt the platform to that property’s specific needs. So building these properties and operating them in my past life, I know that no two properties work the same. They have their own little bit of DNA, they all have their own nuances. So we built those nuances in early days into the platform.

And then second part of that is that you have to listen to your client, you have to listen, and you have to deeply listen. You have to understand, you don’t just answer their literal question as in, ‘Hey, can you do this?’ and it’s not like ‘Yes I can, here I did it’, press the button and off it goes. You have to ask the deeper question of why you want it to do that. And when they tell you and when they get into it, and when you can be an expert in the room as it relates to your technology, when our team can help the client see the pragmatic path from point A to B, which is something that they’re trying to solve for, then we can quickly either through our workflows or the fact that we have a very agile platform and a brilliant tech team that’s 30 something people deep, we can respond very quickly. So when Micky says we snap to it and respond to it, it looks that way to all of our clients, because of the way the platform has been architected from day one. And that’s courtesy of Sid my co-founder and overall brilliant human being, but then we very intently listen, and we intently listen all the time.

Louisa

And talking about your clients, what changes have you seen and what they’re looking for pre and post COVID? What changes have you seen? And then Tim, I’d love to hear about a little bit more about what will you be looking for as well?

Prasan

Yes, pre COVID let’s just go way back, right, let’s go 12 plus months back if anyone can remember that time! Pre COVID there are a lot of things on the platform that were used for convenience. I’ll give you a simple example, in the platform you could, as a resident or a tenant, you press a button and see how busy the fitness room was, it would tell you how it generally looks, there’s a lot of people in there, there’s a few people in there. And that would maybe inform your decision on whether you went down and ran on the treadmill. For me, it’s always been that I don’t end up going down and running on the treadmill whether it’s busy or not busy, the answer is always no, unfortunately, which is sad! But that was a convenience driven thing that was in our platform, then COVID hit, then the industry scrambled on how to use technology and leverage it to still create safety and still reopen amenities and things like, so quickly that convenience feature from our standpoint was adapted to as an example, the ability to check literally COVID capacity in a certain area or room.

And then not just check it, but also within the app ability to reserve a slot in that area. So if you open up the what’s called dry sense, it’s a feature in the platform, open that up and you saw that the gym is light, and there’s room, there is an COVID capacity there that you can that you can attend and go to the go to the treadmill. Then you can book yourself a slot to go run on that treadmill within the app itself. And only when you had a book slot, can you within the app swipe to unlock lock the door to the gym at the moment that you’re in front of that door. And that technology, that automation of access layered on with the fact that we have to operate that gym a little differently now, it’s not just like making a reservation. And it’s not just open for everybody, only people that have a slot should have access so that the industry can only have 10 people in that gym, that that was kind of COVID phase one, right. COVID hit industry scrambled technology was deployed, that stuff that was used for convenience purposes a year prior became applicable from a safety purpose in the kind of phase one if you will of COVID.

As we’re nearing the end, hopefully and as this vaccine rolls out, and as the world starts to normalise again into the truly the new the new normal, I think what we’re finding and hearing from our clients and deploying in terms of technology is that the world has learned a few things from our experience within COVID. Things won’t go back 100% to the way they were, they’ll go back mostly is the feedback that I’m getting. But some percentage of it will need to change with the times I’ll give you an example of that. Tenants are rethinking how much space they need in a building. So if they had 40,000 square feet before, and they had an option to pick up another 20,000 square feet, they’ve put those options on pause or declined them. Or even worse, said, I’m coming up on the ability to give up 10,000 square feet out of my 40,000 and here you go landlord, you can have the 10,000 square feet back, I’m no longer paying rent for it.

Well, that creates obviously a problem for the commercial office industry. How do you get creative? How do you solve that problem? How do you look at the tea leaves and go okay, well, what’s going on here? And then how do you do it easier with technology. So those 10,000 square feet that that tenant gave back, that doesn’t mean that 10,000 square feet equivalent of their employees just stopped working there, they’re just now working remotely or working in a distributed manner. Those 10,000 square feet that they had at your building is in need of redistribution across your entire portfolio. So find a way to make that employee which might be connected to the building already through a technology such as Rise, find a way for that employee of that tenant to book their desk or their conference room or their meeting space, in one of your other buildings in the portfolio that’s closer to home or in a distributed manner. And these kinds of thoughts that the industry is going through the ability to flexibly book office space on demand, or I think what technology is going to look like at least a portion thereof into this next phase of COVID and beyond.

Louisa

It is dangerous talking about, isn’t it? Tim from a client’s perspective, what sort of changes have you seen, or maybe what your business is looking for?

Tim

Sure I think it’d be remiss to say that it’s, it’s not just simply pre or post COVID, not in this country anyway but even worldwide. We experienced really a revolution that showed itself with civil unrest in 2020, that I think has changed the way we will operate properties as well. So they kind of in a weird way are going to work together as it relates to security and safety. And I think that a product like Rise really helps us operate our properties more safely and more securely. So, I think that that post COVID or post 2020 scenario will be benefited by the use of a product like Rise, because we can really analyse the data and see who is in a building, how many people are in a building, all of the great features that that would provide us in terms of an emergency if we had to evacuate the property. And really, I think the kind of sexy use of beacons that Rise uses, we can get pretty granular and find out where these people are. So if you only have a few people left in the scenario of an evacuation, and you have five people left in the building. Ideally, you can know exactly where they are, and they’re in this suite over there and we can send help to them or find out why they haven’t left. So beyond access control, which I think Rise does a really good job at even though as Prasan has told us they’re not an access control company, they do great at that. But and beyond limiting capacities when certain phases of maybe a pandemic happen to eliminate 25% or 50% in a fitness center, all of those things can happen. But I think from a security and safety perspective, this this seamless technology of knowing who’s in the building, where they are, and helping in a crisis is really going to post 2020 to help how our buildings operate really well.

Louisa

Yes, fingers crossed we will be back in those offices soon and get this vaccine to everyone. Now, just to round this podcast off, Prasan we spoke about the idea of PropTech being truly borderless, can you delve into this a little bit more?

Prasan

Yes, the idea of PropTech being borderless really it starts with the block-by-block borders. Why can’t a building in the suburban part of Chicago for example, use the same great technology that is in a downtown Class A asset? Why should PropTech companies only be targeting class A really shiny, high rises downtown, as opposed to really bringing this property technology concept to everybody of every single housing class and commercial office class in the country? Why can’t they have the same ease and convenience and benefit of use of connecting to their communities and connecting to the building everywhere? And then what we just talked about, let’s say just Chicago, but expand that to anywhere in the world. Why can’t good technology, much like the folks that like WhatsApp did was good technology, there was one very unique feature, they brought it literally across the world. And they did it almost overnight it felt like, or Facebook or any of these guys that have built massive buildings or rather companies that really do bring technology good and bad sometimes to the user at any place in the world, right? Why can’t that exist for PropTech, and one of the limitations has been that the PropTech industry itself, the companies that have built products within have kind of tried to focus their eye on ‘I got to go after the shiny building, because that’s probably the client that’s going to be willing to pay me what I’m charging for’.

And we didn’t look at the world that way, we looked at our platform as more ubiquitous and applicable to everybody in the world, buildings and people if you will. And so we set it up that way so that we could deploy anywhere in the world, we literally two weeks ago or three weeks ago went live in Lagos, Nigeria. We never expected to go live in Nigeria but here we are, we went live with our friends at Churchgate, great developer there, went live and won the World Trade Center complexes that they’re building there. And we did it all remotely, all during COVID. And we did it by using for the extent that it needed it, local partners, we have a network of partners that if we do need something installed or we do need something field managed, it can be done. But we’re trying to bring our technology to literally every corner of the world. And what we’ve proven such as in the deployment that we just had in Nigeria, that we actually can do it remotely, safely, securely, using great technologies like web conferencing, to do all the training and implementation and onboarding. And where and if needed, using local partners to do any of the in the field stuff.

And that allows our tech to literally go live anywhere in the world, localise to any language, being able to adapt to the needs and requirements and even some of the workflows and kind of configurations earlier, there are nuances to how properties run in Lagos, Nigeria, compared to Chicago, USA right, properties run differently. And so our platform was able to adapt to their use cases and their workflows, which is really fun to see and kind of rewarding to see for me as a founder that we really truly can go live anywhere in the world and in any class of building and we can do so safely and we can do so during COVID in lockdown. So for me the fulfilling need there is to get this great technology into the hands of everybody across the world.

Louisa

Yeah, I think that’s fascinating. I try to explain that to say my parents, they wouldn’t understand how technology could be implemented into buildings from the other side of the world and to be honest, I find that hard to believe, I find it insane how you can do that. So let’s see what happens over the next few years in terms of technology. Now, we’re coming to the end of the show, please can you share the best way for our listeners to connect with you? And if you have any parting bit of information you’d like to leave the audience with?

Prasan

Sure, yes the passing bit is for clients and folks in the real estate space that are listening really. I know it’s daunting, right? ‘Oh my God, am I going to make this move of doing technology in our buildings, am I going to come to the kind of tech forward generation that that is going to be your tenants if they aren’t already, and let them use great technology to operate buildings a little bit more efficiently?’ There’s a lot of kind of that pessimism, but there’s optimism actually. But there’s also a kind of fear of the unknown, and I get it. And to that, I would say to our clients and just generally to the industry, try it. Don’t go portfolio wide tomorrow, try it on a building, see if you measure the data and see if people got happier, see if there’s a better satisfaction survey that came out a year after you did this technology, or six months after.

See what it did for your staff, see what it did for your management, see if it became easier to manage that building, and take the leap of faith. Use this time to plan and really take a take a try at bringing buildings which look, by the way 90% of the US commercial building stock is still running off of clipboards, paper and pens, believe it or not, there’s still a large chunk of buildings that do visitor management on a piece of paper. Try it and I think you’ll see that there are there’s some really nice fruits at the end of that. You can find out more about Rise Buildings of course on our website www.risebuildings.com Certainly on LinkedIn, feel free to follow me and connect with me on LinkedIn, I always love yapping about all things property technology, so feel free to drop me a line and say hello.

Louisa

Awesome, thank you for that. And Tim, what’s the best way for the audience to connect with you?

Tim

Yes, I would agree LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me. And the only thing that I would add that Prasan said in closing is our end user, our customers or tenants could really care less about technology most of them. They care about whether or not their problems are solved and done so efficiently. For us, it’s about connecting with them and furthering our brand and making that really emotional connection with them and using technology as a vehicle to accomplish that.

Louisa

So awesome. Thank you both so much for joining us on the podcast today. And I’m looking forward to catching up with you both after the show.

Prasan

Thanks, Lu. It was great to be here.

Tim

Yeah, a pleasure. Thanks, Lu.

Louisa

Thank you for joining us this week on the Propcast and a big thanks to our special guests. Make sure you visit our website www.lmre.co.uk where you can subscribe to our show. Or you’ll find us on iTunes and Spotify were all good content is found, while you’re at it if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate if you could rate and review us on iTunes or if you could simply spread the word. Be sure to tune in next Tuesday, and I’ll catch you later.