VTS’s Nick Romito and CBRE’s Emma Buckland On Tech for Property Managers

Property managers already have plenty to deal with daily, but tenant experience tasks are adding to their workload.

At least, that is what Nick Romito, co-founder and CEO of VTS, and Emma Buckland, global president of property management for CBRE, maintained in a conversation stemming from the release of VTS’s 2024 Global Landlords Report. The report found that 84 percent of landlords surveyed said their technology investments would increase in 2024, and 44 percent of them listed property management at the top of their tech priorities.

Having partnered in 2022 to tap into the potential of technology to serve as a feedback loop, CBRE (CBRE) and VTS are seeking to provide real-time data and insights for property managers who increasingly need to serve landlord and tenant needs alike.

Buckland and Romito spoke to PropTech Insider last week about their tech-driven approach to property management, the shift in what managers will be responsible for moving forward, and why the tenant experience has morphed into the “user experience.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: Let’s start with the VTS’s 2024 Global Landlords Report. How long have you been doing it, and what’s the top line from the report?

Nick Romito: We started doing the global report about five years ago. The reason we did it was we heard a disconnect between what landlords believed their buildings needed versus what the tenants were saying they needed. This was a way for us to start by hearing from the owners of these buildings about things that they’re focused on, whether it’s amenitization, technology needs, or even personnel, like the status of what their people actually do to manage these buildings. We then augmented that with a global workplace report, where we started asking the tenants what they thought, knowing the truth was going to be somewhere in the middle.

What we’re learning is that the way people occupy buildings has obviously changed. Hybrid work, while maybe becoming more slanted towards the office, will likely always be in existence. But, instead of maybe two days in the office, it’s going to be probably three or four as the norm, which does have an impact on office in a very positive way. I think what owners have also realized is to make that lean more towards three or four, or in some cases five days, the things that they have to offer to the occupier is more than what they can get at home. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to spend a billion dollars in capex, but what it does mean is that if you own multiple buildings, at least one of those buildings has to offer something that that person can’t do at home. The staff people like in Emma’s organization have to draft off that strategy and be the people power within the strategy. 

There’s no silver bullet to make this work. You need the buildings to be able to create the experience that’s necessary, the staff to offer that service, and the technology to bridge the two. So that’s where we’ve been working really closely with Emma.

So, Emma, how did you and CBRE become involved with VTS?

Emma Buckland: Our relationship is a bit broader than just the survey. CBRE made a publicly disclosed $100 million investment in VTS in 2022. We did that in part to support the business I’m responsible for, which is property management. We had our own proprietary tenant experience app that we had built ourselves. And we saw what VTS had done with the acquisition of both Rise and Lane. We were very impressed with the way they were thinking about the whole digital ecosystem in an asset. 

So taking their initial lease product and marketing, and then adding this product around the tenant experience in the physical building, that felt very intuitive and something we wanted to be a part of. So we made that investment with a commitment that  VTS would be our proprietary partner when we offer tenant experience in office buildings.

Beyond that, we’ve also worked together to build something that we call Host Core, which is basically the operating system of the buildings that we manage. It’s the digital component of the way our teams are approaching management on a day-to-day basis, and ultimately being able to go all the way up that technology stack to offer experiences to the tenants in those buildings, including supporting things like events, access, control, amenities, etc., using our other product Host Building.

Looking at this report, Emma, how do you use it practically with your property managers?

Buckland: Understanding what landlords and what tenants want in buildings is obviously the main work that we’re here to deliver. That includes understanding what those insights are in terms of the expectations from owners and from occupiers around the use of the asset, but also the way property managers interact with the physical building using digital tools to help deliver experience to tenants. All those things are really important for our teams to understand, because they do play a key role in shaping the experience of tenants on a day-to-day basis, which ultimately to our landlord clients is obviously incredibly important, especially when leases get renewed.

Romito: What I think is interesting about the CBRE relationship is that Emma represents a pretty material shift in what property management will be responsible for moving forward. Legacy property management is really building operations, compliance, and I would even put security a little bit in that purview. What’s happening now is that Emma is like a breath of fresh air for the category. She represents all of that plus. So this concept of tenant experience, which used to be a small, weird, separate category, is now part of the property manager’s purview, almost adding a hospitality element to a pretty big swath of the market that hasn’t historically had to think about it that way. But, if some very large percentage of buildings now are offering an amenity, whether it’s a physical amenity or a digital one, that’s now the property manager’s job to manage. 

That’s a huge shift in the market. I haven’t seen anyone do that as well as Emma has been doing it. It’s part of her DNA as to how she thinks about this and why she’s in this very big job. Part of what we’ve been tasked with is helping take the things that are in her head and making them come to life digitally.

Do you agree with that characterization of your work, Emma?

Buckland: Nick is a flatterer [laughing]. But I think the other piece of perspective is that Nick and I have a lot of conviction about the value of the relationship between leasing and management. So part of our thesis going into this transaction together was that we feel if there is a way to connect the operating data in the building to the commercial data being collected by a leasing team — representing the economics effectively in the asset — those two things together have actually more of a relationship.

Being able to equip teams with data about the behavior, the experiences, the satisfaction of the tenants in the building is really important, but it’s also the next point in helping our teams understand the different ways we can measure and demonstrate to our tenants the things we are doing for them in the building, and the way that we can digitally engage with them, whether that’s sharing information or providing services through the app. 

It is also important in that we can really create a great experience for everybody, from the person attending an event in the lobby all the way through to the office manager trying to book the loading dock because they’re getting a delivery or doing a move. Trying to take the operations and experiences pieces together and create that digital backbone for our property teams is fundamental. 

What we’ve also put alongside that is a training program for all our property team members across the country — more than 6,000 staff in the U.S. — to help them think about hospitality-led service in partnership with the technology itself. So, thinking about the way they interact and how they go about it, not just thinking about the tools that we’re giving them.

Emma, you started your current position in 2020 just as COVID appeared. How did that affect your work with property managers?

Buckland: Actually, I think COVID was a key moment for property management activities to be front and center. There was the physical work we took to make buildings safe, make tenants safe, and let landlords know the ways that we were appropriately managing the asset, trying to take care of all the different stakeholders and constituents. Suddenly, it didn’t matter whether you’re an occupier or a landlord. Everybody was focused on the same problems, and we as property managers were in a position to be able to help solve those problems and try to create confidence and clarity at a moment where there was not much of either in the wider world. 

Bringing to the surface some of the operational elements of what our teams did in COVID was one of the things that got us to thinking about the importance of the digital tools that we’re using. That’s because some of these pieces might seem quite nuts and bolts or not very glamorous, but, actually executed well, it really makes a difference to the service that our clients receive in the assets that we manage. I think COVID was a real enabler for us in that journey.

Can you prioritize what digital tools are most in demand and seem to be working for landlords and tenants?

Buckland: I think the digital core operations of the building — being able to communicate with them about things like work orders or building amenities in the asset, or emailing about different things that are going on. From an operational perspective, it might seem quite simple, but I actually think that it makes quite a lot of difference to the people managing inside tenant spaces in a building. I think that’s really fundamental.

Also, as we think about premium assets. We took on Brookfield Properties’ U.S. office portfolio at the beginning of this year. We are their strategic partner, managing more than 70 buildings for them, a number of which are beautiful, trophy, Class A assets. The amenity management is really important. How do we create events? How do we create community? How do we create connections with all of the different users of the building, whether that’s a visitor to the building or a tenant? That’s an important aspect of the way we increasingly think about trying to amenitize more trophy assets. 

There’s a role for technology across the spectrum in every building. I think the more we can try to put lots of functionality into one app for all users of the asset, the easier life becomes.

Nick, do you agree that COVID caused a pivot for property managers as well as tenants?

Romito: There’s two ways people change, right? One, over time things slowly change. And then there’s things that just force change. COVID was a change agent that forced property managers and leasing folks to jump into a massive, transformational shift in the landscape of real estate, certainly in the office world. It would be hard to find another way that changed the industry as much as COVID. It forced property managers and leasing folks to really work together in a way they had never worked together before. They were on different systems, talking a different language. 

So we said, “Leasing person, third party or internal property manager, you’re on the same team. Even if you don’t work at the same company, you’re on the same team with the same goal. You should be on the same form.”

Something that maybe goes over people’s heads are words like “the users” in a building. Pre-COVID, we never referred to a tenant as a user, because the only tenant that you really cared about was the tenant’s main contact, or the one decision-maker. Now every person in that building is important because they’re all getting access to an app for that building. It’s effectively a remote control for your work, so it opens up a lot of risk. If something doesn’t go well, everybody sees it, right? That’s my world, where when the sky falls, it really falls. Whether it’s your fault or not, it doesn’t matter. 

It’s interesting that you now hear things like, “What is the sentiment of the people in that building?” When you used to get a Kingsley survey, it would be like four people in the building filled it out. Now it’s 4,000 people in that building, so the pulse you’re getting is more accurate than it’s ever been before.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.