How HqO’s REX Data Platform Helps Office Building Owners Retain Tenants

A recent virtual event hosted online by Commercial Observer Partner Insights and presented by HqO was titled, “Maximize ROI with Real Estate Experience Data: How to Boost Tenant Retention and Acquisition.” 

The discussion featured insights from Rob Entin, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Vornado Realty Trust; Lauren Kelch, Director of Client Experience at Hines; and Greg Gomer, Co-founder and CFO at HqO. Larry Getlen, Head Content Writer for Commercial Observer, moderated the panel.  

Much of the panel focused on HqO’s Real Estate Experience platform, known as REX, and how companies are using it to help attract tenants to their buildings. Both Hines and Vornado are users of the REX platform.  

The REX platform assesses the health and performance of a customer’s experience within a physical space while providing the necessary tools for operators to manage and optimize it to help them improve tenant satisfaction, reduce churn, promote ROI growth and attract high quality tenants. 

“When we started HqO, we were obsessed with how to build technology that helps drive engagement between the physical building and the people that go in and out every single day,” said Gomer, who then explained that REX collects and utilizes two types of data.

“There’s sentiment data, which is what tenants are saying about the building: how they feel about it, what do they like about the building, what do they dislike?” said Gomer.

About 2 years ago, HqO acquired Leesman, the world’s foremost expert on work styles, worker preferences, and workplace experience. Through Leesman, HqO has data from 1.7 million employees across hundreds of the most respected companies from more than 8,000 workplaces across the globe, which indicates what’s actually being used in the building. 

 “We have mobile applications where you can look at utilization engagement data and see how often people come in, if they’re utilizing ground floor retail or the gyms, etc. The real magic happens when you layer the sentiment data with the engagement data,” said Gomer. “You really get an understanding of the tenants’ likes, dislikes, and how they’re utilizing the space. The goal of this is to allow our customers to make smarter CapEx decisions around any one of their experience programs or amenities.”

Kelch shared a story about how Hines’ history of client-centric focus goes back to founder Gerald Hines, recalling a time he interrupted a meeting to focus on the quality of the office hardware because “he wanted to make sure the end user felt like the property was luxurious and safe and well made.”

“One of the things we really liked about HqO was their willingness to partner with us to make adjustments to data insights and how we’re gathering information,” said Kelch. “Things like the addition of titles within the app registration process really helped us inform our programming to make the spaces more magnetic.”

Entin then spoke about the advantages of HqO’s REX platform for enabling tenant access.

“For us, the REX platform is very deep, because with all of the amenities in the building, the platform is an orchestration layer that sits on top of all of the services and amenities you want the tenants to be able to access,” said Entin of Vornado’s on-going and highly-amenitized development in Manhattan’s Penn District. “Without that orchestration layer, you’ve got a bunch of disparate systems that tenants theoretically would log into in order to quantify their experience with the landlord. That really doesn’t play well in a highly-amenitized environment. So given our development plans, HqO is a great product. We’re very interested in the data, but for us, the real play is the tenant’s experience itself.”

Entin talked about how Vornado has integrated a slew of locations and amenity spaces into their REX platform.

“We’re integrating parking systems, conference centers, coworking reservations, turnstiles, restaurants,” said Entin. “We have a lot of amenities in the Penn District, and they’re growing. So more and more, the app is going to service a lot of different needs, and their ability to customize and work with us has been first class.”

The topic later turned to what sort of data companies can take from the REX platform, and how they can put it to use.

“One of the more impactful findings for us was related to who was attending events,” said Kelch. “We found that there was really low attendance from an executive level to any form of onsite programming, whereas amenity spaces had more attendance. So with those insights in mind, we pivoted our onsite programming to be centered around services and wellness, because those attributes have universal appeal. We were able to leverage that data to make more informed, but also more impactful decisions in our programming to increase their stickiness.”

In addition to the level of control HqO’s platform provides for building users, Entin emphasized the importance of REX data to confirm that capital is being correctly and wisely allocated in their buildings.  

“Our focus was on our extraordinary number of amenities, and the need to have the single-user experience to access them,” said Entin. “What I’ve also seen is that data helps quantify that which we observe – which amenities are working and which are not. The most important thing about what we do is that we deploy massive amounts of capital. Class A office buildings eat capital. So there’s nothing better than having the raw data to affirm what you’re observing, because it really does guide where you’re going to put your capital.”

Going deeper into how companies turn data into action, Gomer told of a customer that used the data to evaluate the value of their entire portfolio before taking decisive action.  

“An occupier customer ran our REX platform across their global portfolio of offices, around 180 offices,” said Gomer. “Once complete, you have a score from zero to 100 that’s an experience score – that’s your REX score. They found that the top 10% were continuing to perform, and the bottom 25% were not worth it. So once they had that, they decommissioned the bottom 25% of all of their offices, and poured that investment into the top 10%.”

The panelists agreed that while building data is a valuable tool that can assist in many areas, technology is evolving so rapidly that we’re just starting to scratch the surface about how data and technology will assist in optimizing buildings while fulfilling tenant needs and desires.

“We’re in a world where generative AI is the new buzzword, and we’re seeing examples in different spaces of how amazingly useful it can be,” said Entin. “It remains to be seen what roles data will ultimately play in property management. The journey will be interesting.”