There has been a seismic transformation in the real estate experience economy - space has moved from a commodity, to a service and now to an experience. No longer can real estate be simply looked at as a cost center. As organizations are looking to draw their people back into the office, they need to have buildings and offices that get their employees excited to leave the comfort of their homes, commute, and get back into the office - they need the promise of a better experience.
What is a Real Estate Experience Strategy?
A comprehensive plan designed to optimize the end-user experience of real estate spaces, programming, and amenities, a real estate experience strategy helps landlords and tenants connect real estate to people. Making it less about the structures, the walls and windows, the floors and halls - a real estate experience strategy focuses on the people within them and provides an actionable roadmap to improve the experience of your property.
7 Steps to Success
Building a real estate experience strategy may look a little different for every landlord, but here is an outline of the critical steps you will need to consider as you embark on this journey:
1. Define Your Objectives
Clearly outline your objectives and make sure to align them with the most up-to-date trends in real estate and tenant experience. These should include improving tenant satisfaction, increasing tenant retention and engagement, increasing new tenant acquisition, and differentiating your property in the market.
PRO TIP
Check out the newly released CRE Trends & the RTO Outlook. Sneak peek - the National Association of Realtors recently reported that the US office vacancy rate hit a record high of 13.1%.
2. Evaluate Your Current Strategy
Research shows that a better real estate experience can lead to 23% greater profitability and 18% higher productivity. Before you dive too far into your strategy development, complete HqO's Real Estate Experience Readiness Assessment to review your current strategy and explore recommendations for elevating it.
3. Get to Know Your Tenants
Quantify the workstyles, preferences, and overall satisfaction of your space end-users by distributing HqO's REX Assessment.
The REX Assessment is a new product from the HqO Intelligence suite - the ultimate real estate analytics and insights engine that provides the industry standard for assessing and benchmarking building performance. Intelligence leverages the proven methodology established by Leesman, an HqO company and the industry's most trusted workplace experience data source and benchmarking framework. With insights from 1.3+ million employees and 8,000+ workplaces, Intelligence provides leading sentiment and engagement analytics across the activities and features that matter most to end-users of space.
Data collected from this 10-minute survey will allow you to identify and understand the needs, preferences, and especially the pain points of your tenants and their employees.
4. Assess Your Workplace Performance
Using your REX Assessment results, HqO will generate your property's REX Score. The REX Score, is the quality measure of end-user experience within a physical space, reflecting employees’ workstyles, preferences, and overall satisfaction. The higher the Score, the more positive the real estate experience, which directly correlates to how likely a property is to achieve high occupancy, attract and retain tenants, and generate revenue.
Want to explore how to score your property? Speak to an expert today →
5. Use Actionable Data to Build Your Real Estate Experience Blueprint
Further leveraging the data and insights from your REX Score, build a detailed roadmap of your tenants' complete asset journey from the initial property search, to the post-lease transaction phase, all the way through to the day-to-day use and interaction with spaces and amenities. Integrate opportunities to optimize the touchpoints that are superdrivers of performance and identify the necessary investments to ensure the best experience possible.
6. Invest in Technology
Utilize technology to deliver your real estate experience strategy and enhance your tenants' experiences. Did you know? 96% of property teams looked to maintain or expand their spending on workplace experience software this past year.
PRO TIP
HqO's Experience Manager (XM) can help! Our XM product centralizes building communication, programming, and technologies into one custom-branded mobile and web application.
7. Listen, Learn & Improve Continuously
Track KPIs that align with your objectives. This should include your REX Score, conversion rates, and repeat business metrics that deliver on your objectives.
Once these metrics are identified and tracked, use your Intelligence data to amend and improve experiences as needed - your goal should always be to increase your REX Score. After all, we know that a higher REX Score equates to better tenant and employee satisfaction and productivity which are essential to achieving your people and business goals.
Be sure to also regularly review and update your strategy based on customer feedback, market changes, and emerging trends. A real estate experience strategy should be dynamic and adaptable.
Considering these steps during your real estate experience strategy development will help you create an actionable plan that not only attracts new tenants, but supports the engagement, satisfaction, and retention of the tenants you already have.