How Landlords Can Create a Campus-Like Experience Across Portfolios
By Nick Romito August 5, 2024 4:00 pm
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Tenants move through their offices in ways they never have before, and landlords are working to ensure that this fluidity is maintained throughout office building portfolios. With flexibility a core aspect of the workplace experience, landlords need to incorporate innovative solutions into their strategies that meet new tenant demands, chiefly creating a campus-like office environment that is easily accessible, interconnected, and adheres to different work postures and configurations.
By embracing the shift to a more campus-like workplace experience, landlords have a unique opportunity to capitalize on the evolving nature of work, allowing them to redefine the traditional office environment into dynamic, adaptable spaces that foster productivity and innovation.
In the contemporary work landscape, flexibility is the key. According to VTS’s 2024 global workplace report, 62 percent of companies are executing a hybrid work strategy and 59 percent say their talent is consistently navigating an expanded workplace. Tenants no longer wish to be confined to a single work location. Instead, they desire the freedom to work where they want without disrupting their workflow. To meet these evolving needs, landlords must provide the type of space a tenant requires and offer space where a tenant actually needs it.
This is where technology plays a crucial role. Innovative platforms and tools enable seamless transitions between different workspaces, ensuring tenants can maintain productivity and connectivity regardless of location within a portfolio. This technological integration creates a flexible work environment that caters to the diverse needs of the modern workforce.
Along the same lines, to meet the demand of their tenants in today’s office market, landlords must have the mindset of leasing a tenant 5,000 square feet but giving them access to 5 million. This is achieved by tenant-centric technology platforms to give them access to multiple buildings and spaces seamlessly. These platforms also provide valuable, data-driven insights, such as occupancy levels and amenity bookings that can be leveraged to curate tailored offerings.
Armed with these insights, landlords are better equipped to curate their tenants’ spaces and open up amenities across their entire portfolio to cater to every type of work posture for tenants’ employees. Moreover, using data aggregated from an entire portfolio to make informed decisions across multiple assets can save landlords time and money. Tenants are presented with a wide range of options to essentially customize their workplace experience and seamlessly move through a landlord’s portfolio of spaces, regardless of the time or location. This fluidity for tenants is a key marketing point for landlords, as it can help maintain high renewal rates.
Tenant experience platforms also enable the traditional office to properly compete with flex operators, who have continued to perform strongly post-pandemic. Just as flex spaces allow for various work postures, office ecosystems with campuses of buildings seamlessly accessible through tenant-experience technology can now do the same.
This adaption meets tenants’ current mentality on return to work and the modern office, as a network of interconnected workspaces means the office can now be built anywhere and everywhere. It also addresses the growing trend of asset obsolescence in every industry sector as we continue to blur the lines of where we live and work.
Creating a portfolio-wide campus for tenants is the next stage of evolution for today’s offices and will play an essential role in revitalizing office culture globally. For example, Paramount Group (a VTS client) exemplifies a landlord implementing campus-level marketing across its portfolio. In New York, Paramount has created an environment where tenants enjoy seamless access to multiple properties, giving them the flexibility to choose their preferred workspace.
Landlords must continue considering innovative strategies to help them remain competitive in the evolving socio-economic landscape within and outside of real estate. Given their immense value to tenants and landlords, I expect to see more adoption of tenant experience platforms and the subsequent expansion of campus-like work experiences.
Nick Romito is founder and CEO of leasing and asset management platform VTS.
