Episode 30 – Part 2 – What are the benefits of smart buildings for different stakeholders? with Dan Drogman, Smart Spaces

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally  

In part two with Dan from smart Spaces, we’re looking at both the benefits of smart buildings and the reasons why people are investing in and might go ahead with this type of thing. So I suppose one of the things that we discussed offline was the landlord occupy side. So shall we start there in terms of why? Why some of the different motivations behind why you might go down the smartspace. Through and the different impacts on them? Yeah, definitely.

Dan Drogman  16:53

So the landlord side depends on your product offerings, obviously, maybe a traditional office space or lease of, say, five to 10 years or a flex space, we’ll start off with the traditional leased space. So one, you making commitments to net zero. So you’re gonna have stringent reporting metrics around your energy and how much energy you consume, especially the EPC ratings. So you need to know exactly how your building is performing and correct behaviour before you deviate off your projections. And so you know, if you get a neighbor’s five star rating, if the tenant moves in and they consume too much energy, you’re going to find, you’re not going to meet that you’re going to drop down to a four star the next year, obviously, not very good for publicity. And it’s certainly not good for saving the planet. So we, we can track their energy usage, we can track it against occupancy. And we can provide that data to the landlord to make sure that they’re on track and then meeting their netzero objectives. We also provide things like smartphone access, because it’s far more convenient. I think post COVID. A lot of people lose plastic cards, obviously, plastics, not great for the planet anyway. And so that’s a really nice marketing piece for them. So they’re taking someone around the building, they can walk up to a door, they can open it with their phone using the Apple wallet, or the Google Wallet, or they can use a smartwatch, and so on. And it’s that convenience, it also means if they want to send a temporary card to someone, so they want to send a card to an agent that’s going to do a viewing that could do that for the cloud. You don’t need to post them a plastic card, they don’t need to go and collect a plastic card from reception. So you’ve got that side of it. But that also gives us the data. When did they do the viewing How many times did they go gives you a lot of data about that viewing and then also did the space get disabled when that person left so that so I think it’s very much about facilitating access with visitor access straight to seek journey, how quick you can get a lift up to a floor, I think it’s the amenities if you’ve got a cafe, obviously that needs to make a profit. Ideally, you want people to use it, you want to waste money investing in a fantastic amenity that no one uses same for the cycling, same for the lockers, changing rooms, all of that facility you’ve invested in, you want to make sure it gets used and I think the app for landlord is the perfect way to advertise and sell that I mean it’s the attractive it actually gets us so you’ve got some data for your next development. And so that’s the landlord pace I think then the flex operators looking to monetize a lot of this so meeting rooms they want to get you the easiest way you know one click purchase so you pay for your room 65 pound an hour that’s collected. Once that goes to the end of the hour, we know the person still use the room, we can bill for another hour. So you did a lot for the flex operator there. And that’s the I think that pretty much wraps up the main things we see that all problems we solve and the landlord, you then got the occupier and you know they want to lease space is actually going to get used. They want their employees back in the office. Ideally, you know, not all the time but certainly three days a week So they’re gonna want to advertise how great the offices, so actually, if the landlords put all these amenities in the building, and then the employer can advertise all these great amenities back to their staff, but also show when their colleagues are in also given the ability to put Deskbook metre on their lockers, you’ve, you’ve met in the middle. So you’re getting the making the building more productive, more attractive for the employee, the employer can track that and what days people using the office, and the landlord’s getting a building that’s actually getting used. And so you’ve got that holistic picture, and the two together are very powerful. And that is the future of offices, in my opinion.

Matt Nally  20:37

I really, I really found that quite interesting. So I suppose one of my question was going to be what are the reasons people are investing in it? And ultimately, for a landlord, I’m guessing it’s people enjoying using their building, therefore less likely to churn and move on somewhere else? And then for an occupier, it’s the fact that the staff are engaged in the space and or teams are engaged in the space and therefore getting more out of them in terms of everyone’s more productive? Do you? Do you have a couple of case studies that you’re from both perspectives in terms of what some of the benefits someone derived from it, or how they went about something they saw, like, from a landlord perspective, this or that, either no bike space wasn’t being used and what they did to improve that engagement? Have you got a couple of case studies on that? Yes,

Dan Drogman 

certainly. So you’ve got 20, Bishopsgate, we have 18,000 users, there was 1.4 million square feet. So one of the things we solved really early on was, you know, that was a lot of people to go to the security office, to have their photograph taken to give them their details and get a plastic access card. And then they’d have to go up to their office or their employer to get another access card for their, their tenant space. And so yeah, but straightaway, we digitise that we put a specification in place that would allow us to provide a credential that would work on both the landlord and the tenant doors, the occupiers doors. And so they the way they actually move into 20, Bishopsgate is they download the 20 Bishopstone app, they register their corporate email, they prove they have access to their email, there’s a multi factor element there. And then the credential sends them straight away. But the most powerful thing with the app at that point, it then showcases to that end user, right, you’ve got your party you can get in, you can book your visitors in. So if you want to show off your new office to your friend, you can add them to the athlete or send them a QR code that will facilitate their access, you can look at all of the amenities. So you can see the market, you can actually pre order your coffee, you can pre order your lunch, you’ve got loyalty in there. So if you scan your QR code in the app, you’ll get your temp coffee free. You also get pushed offers as and when they released and you can subscribe through preference. So if you’re not interested in that, you can switch that off, but actually quite like the gym, you can switch that on and you’ll get the offers for the gym, you can see and access the gym. From there, you can access the ACP, which is the active commuter Park. And we’re actually working on a quite a nice feature, you said what was the things that we are doing sort of a phase one, once we’ve got the data is actually showing just like a car park, where the availability is within the active community. So there’s 101,700 Bike spaces, and there’s a pink zone, a blue zone, we can show you how many spaces are arranged. We can give you some details about each of those. And so you know what type of racks are in there, is it suitable for electric bike, you know, for a road bike and so on. What facilities are there so pumps, you know, servicing equipment, we can show you that village variability but also once you’re quite clear, we can show you where it’s when you come back, you haven’t even got remember you’re in the blue zone, it will show you where your bike is located. So that does a couple of things for the occupier. It’s fantastic because they’ve they’re getting really easy usage of these facilities. But for the landlord is tracking how many spaces they’ve got, they need to plan to put more bike racks in, they need less bike racks. We’ve got that data for new developments in the future so their moms with much better data. And also we’re doing the same for the lockers as well. So you know, someone leaves a gym kit in there, it’s festering after two weeks, we can send a push notification for them to go and clear it out. But that means that you’re not losing lockers because like the key lockers, you have no intelligence, you could find that something. There’s 100 people that haven’t been better locker in three months. The only way you’re going to know whether they have is to go round and unlock this manually, which is a huge time consuming thing to do and also using the technology to track this in the background. Or optimise it so So certainly I think that’s a good case study on how we’ve helped a landlord

Matt Nally

I hadn’t even thought about the the what you call it the locker side of things because you’re right I’ve been I’ve been incidents plenty of times and it looks like the same paddock may have been there for quite a while but you’ve got no way of knowing. But I also related to the weather department Car thing. I forgot

Dan Drogman

that I generally thought my car been stolen once like I was. I was a young lad. You know, I think I literally was 17 at the time, went to Lakeside shopping centre on a Friday, you know was in round more interested in what I was buying that day. And then just at the end of the day when I went to the car park, I thought I paid no attention to where I was parked. And I remember walking through car park after car park. I don’t know if I hoped my car had been stolen, because it wasn’t the greatest car and I thought maybe it’d be worth more than what it was. How much I paid for it fast. But yeah, eventually we come across it and yeah, but that’s funny. They only do that once and then net forever on. I’m like BlueZone floor for making. Think about it. Actually, it’s funny you say it because it just thinks of another case study and our app is one that’s really funny. Are you telling me Have you ever experienced this? You know, when you go to a building, and you click the floor on the lift panel outside the lift and it goes out to lift? See? Have you ever forgotten what to lift? It’s told you to go to?

Matt Nally

Yeah, well, yeah, I don’t know. So I mean, yeah, yeah.

Dan Drogman

Yeah. Let’s have a conversation with someone mid conversation. You press it, and then the lift comes up. I was yesterday was I see? Yeah, definitely. It’s definitely into the app. So when you Badgett it will tell you the lift, and so you can see AB and it stays on that to the lift arrive? So you seriously, yeah, you can’t forget. And then the sort of nudges we want to do in the background that you don’t really realise we’re doing but we are making your life easier.

Matt Nally

And that’s, I suppose it comes back to that design part you mentioned earlier. And that’s a tricky one to get right. It’s very easy to get wrong, I think in terms of user journey, and how you then make that information useful. But that’s a whole other topic I think.

Dan Drogman

We offer is that, that consultancy, and again, I’ve said it a few times they’ve been set straight to seek journey. And it’s a straight to seek for a visitor straight to seek for an employee or contractor, a staff member or like an operations person. And so, yeah, we’ll play that for and go, What are the touch points? What, what doors are going to go through? What turnstiles what lifts? What technology is in play? How do we make that as streamlined as possible? And then you start to realise, oh, actually, I haven’t got the right technology for my list to be able to tell the person which lift to go to I haven’t got the right reader technology to support a QR code and the smartwatch. And so we would advise and say, Well, this is the best way to do it.

Matt Nally

That’s brings me on to the question. I was going to ask a touch later, actually, which is where do people go wrong with smart buildings as in? I imagine some people might invest in it out to a point and then they realise they’re not getting great return on investment. So they sort of pause or move away from that. But typically, I imagine that’s because they’re not implemented in the right way. So they’re typical things, you see where people go wrong, and does whether it’s the wrong readers or only investing in certain areas that mean, this doesn’t give enough benefit. That things like that. You see, there’s

Dan Drogman

so much that wrong is quite sad, really. And it’s improving all the time. I think the first thing what you see, I think we sort of started with this question today. But it’s we think we can define smart really well. But what I explained to you is what I think a smart villain to be. Not everyone will agree, but that’s what I believe. And I think we’ve found the majority of people that we work with believe that to which point across 75 million square feet globally. But I think that’s the first problem, you get a lot of times wasted on trying to find what smart is. And that can be hours and hours in consultancy, it can then lead to the wrong technologies being purchased. Because you’ve defined a certain strategy. And I think also people abuse it. I think there’s companies out there that they know the client doesn’t understand smart Well, we define smart we say this is the outcomes you’ll get. And we’ll put accreditation in place that smart score, and we’ll say we’ll get you a smart score platinum gold, and they know exactly what they’re buying up front, we’re committed to that. And you know that we’re eliminating risk for them, when you keep it open ended with what is smart. And then you can go to a main contractor and they made the decision on behalf that can sometimes lead to them buying a load of unnecessary equipment. I think the worst trend we’ve seen recently is adding in secondary BMS is to get data out to the cloud. So the landlord is paying for a BMS, which is tough to get working efficiently in any building, then buying another middleware BMS, which will take data out of the base build BMS, and then putting that into the cloud. And I think that is just crazy. You’ve now got a blame game between BMS vendor one BMS vendor two, you’ve got beta translation. And so I think, yeah, that’s, that’s a mistake we’ve seen made a lot. And then yeah, the other one is, the readers, you know, the people will put the wrong readers that aren’t even mobile capable. And that’s even when we’ve got it in the specification. We have a specification It says, Put mobile capable readers. And then they don’t put mobile comfortable readers in. And there’s a real sad thing in DNB contracts and contraction in the UK where, you know, it’s not been picked up early enough, because they didn’t have an MSI involved or someone overseeing it will, we would typically oversee it. But if we come late to the game, so we come post PC wasn’t there for that. And we go and scan and we say, Well, look, you’ve said that you’ve asked for mobile here and it’s in your contract, you haven’t got mobile here. Now, the building is built, there’s 300 readers. Sometimes the even the landlord goes off, you know, to go back and pull the fabric off the wall and put this reader in and you know, the time and I need to get this least they give up, they go out Joe, what I know, nice to have, but then they’ve missed that opportunity. And then come back to the probably the last problem is all about user behaviour. If you’re not strong enough, if you don’t believe in it enough, like what the beauty of our clients is, they totally believe in the technology we’re deploying. So they’ll have a culture change within their business, to use it, improve it, and make it worthwhile, if you just think oh, right, okay, we haven’t got the readers will deploy the app anyway. And then the app is managed by someone who hasn’t got any kind of skills around this. They don’t, you know, typically they’ve got a job spec, they signed up to five, six years ago, all of a sudden, you’ve asked them to manage an app, and they’re like, well, that’s not my job spec. And they’re like, well, we’ll get paid extra for this. And then they don’t put any good content on there. They don’t even upload the meeting rooms, they don’t upload any of the facilities, it’s just there. And it’s just, oh, it’s got a nice brand on it, and it might have some directions. So local cafe, you could get off Google Maps, it’s gonna fall, you’re not gonna get any data out of it, because no one’s gonna use it. So yeah, you need the culture, you to know what you want. You need the right hardware. So yeah, totally, it’s good question.

Matt Nally

I can completely relate to that. Actually, I think it’s very crudely, I think you’ve got three camps with technology, you’ve got what you said, really bought into it. And in terms of engaged with it, want to make sure they get the best out of it, understand that you’ve got the opposite the other extreme, which is not interested at all fair enough. And then you get this, I suppose, the camp in the middle, which is what we’ve just spoken about, where and is definitely more nuanced than this, but where they sign up to it, but it’s half hearted. And if you’re half hearted, you’re not gonna get the benefit. It’s you might as well be in camp No. And not right, you’ve got you’ve got to engage in it. And I always compare it to buying a car, like if you buy a car, great, it can get you really quickly from A to B, but if you don’t engage with the guy don’t know how to drive it, it’s just gonna sit on the driveway, and you’re still quicker walking. Yeah. Whereas the car can get you massive benefits, if you engage, learn to drive it, take it out. I

Dan Drogman

totally agree. And I think it’s that lack of commitment, I think what we see that problem surface the most is POCs proof of concept. Because the car’s not paid fully for it, you’ve not been paid fully for it. So you don’t always put your 100% effort, and they certainly don’t put theirs. And then they review make it a success. So we’re not fans of POCs we don’t think they work. We’ve got other ways of delivering our software and letting you test our software or interview our other clients and see it in action. And I think we’re quite fortunate now. It’s certainly 5 million square feet, we can demonstrate that. So we do less POCs we ever have. But you know, one back five years ago, we’ve done a hell of a lot POCs. And they didn’t know what because they just didn’t have the commitment. You need to be financially committed, you need to be committed as culturally. And you’ve got the same targets and objectives. And so, yeah, totally agree. And so, you know, I think probably not there yet. But you know, give us another year or two, we might start turning stuff down based on the cultural fit. So we don’t feel you’re ready to embrace this. We haven’t done that today. But I’m quite fortunate actually, when people asked what type of clients we have, they are well, they were early adopters. And so they’re really passionate about tech. So we don’t suffer with that. But certainly I could see I was tearing things down in the future. Yeah, we didn’t have that fit with a client.

Matt Nally

Yeah, and I think actually that then that’s important for you as a business and for the customer because then once they then come back into being in a different headspace then then they’ll start to derive the benefits and you both win from that. Yeah, but it’s ya know, it’s a thing you see a lot I think with with tickets, you wanting the silver bullet just to work on its own without having to put the effort in behind it. And of course, nothing works like that.

Dan Drogman

I think the other thing is like, if you build it they will come you know, it’s not doesn’t have to you can’t just be right with me and you decided today to start a totally different business. It’d be an E commerce business and be selling coffee is that the best coffee we’ve managed to track down really nice packaging Design, nice packaging, put a really nice website out there. People want to shop to that website. And so it’s the same of the app for the building, if you don’t get behind it, put it in front of the client and show them how it works, why you should use it and talk about the benefits and embrace it, you won’t get adoption. If you build it, they will come doesn’t exist. And I would agree with that.

Matt Nally

I think one of the slightly off on the different tangent here, but under this aspect is we talked about hardware briefly. But I can think back to a building I went around, it was a big apartment building in London in the least I think this was 10 years ago. But I remember going into at that point. And they had all these docks on the wall, you know, put your phone in, and the slightly different obviously smart buildings, but you put your phone and you could then control everything in the room. But immediately it was already the wrong sort of Doc the wrong charging. And they’re only just releasing it is is that a problem in terms of smart buildings in terms of cost of implementing and then updating? Or actually is it? Has it been set up? In a way we’re actually it’s quite easy to use what you’ve got an interchange it at the right points.

Dan Drogman

Yeah, nice. It’s something we really have to think about. So when we’re designing a smart building, and we’re looking at the hardware that’s going to make up the backbone of the building, is choosing the right hardware. And it’s a decision we had to make a long time ago in our business where we decided what language to programme our system in. Because there were some really cool funky languages, it materialised at the time. And they looked really interesting. They were definitely the trendy things to programming. But you have to think about the longevity of that. And like if you develop your platform on a code base that then dies later on programming language that gets deprecated, we would be in a lot of trouble and won’t be able to get any talent, we have to maintain our platform. And so we looked at proven languages that had existed for before our business existed, but continued to be improved, were distributed globally, had lots of documentation and training. And so we had access to talent. And I think that the hard way, we have to think about this hardware and its longevity. And so things like little adapters was certainly trying to avoid, you know, open language protocols where anyone can interface with, which have mass adoption, big communities were all fought. And so that that’s the problem with the proprietary languages. Because one, they’re opaque. A lot. Typically, they require a licence fee to get access to. And then the vendor or manufacturer of that provider can just deprecate delete, finish innovating in that space, and then you’ve lost that adapter. And it’s sort of the virtual equivalent of the iPhone Jack, obviously, moving to USB C already, you know, so that sort of happened already, where you’re gonna find someone’s going to show up, can’t connect to the dock. So you have to think that through. And that’s that translates into BMS controllers, lighting controllers, hate vac systems, and then the smartphone itself and what is available in the smartphone to interface with the building. So yeah, big, big consideration. So far, so good. Actually, we’ve got compatibility across our whole portfolio. I think if you had to boil it down to one thing is open protocol.

Matt Nally

Interesting. Well, I in my head, I was thinking about your flush down nickname from the start. And that stuck with you in terms of things going obsolete? Yeah. So it does. Yeah, the coding side. That’s really fascinating. I imagine that’s a massive, massive challenge. Anything else you think that’s worth discussing on this segment, I suppose about benefits and reasons. Yeah, I think the

Dan Drogman

you know, it’s anyone who’s got a surveying background or looking to go into property surveying, they should embrace technology that if they can find the time, I think if you come in as a really tech savvy surveyor, with like, you know, can leverage chat GPT to help write proposals, to do any calculations on drawings, you’re going to be up to 30 to 50%, more productive than your peers. So I think it’s really worth you taking the time to embrace it, don’t be scared of it, don’t think it’s gonna take your job. It’s not for the meantime. But it’s certainly going to, you’re going to help you and give you the edge. And the advantage might even mean you do a six hour day, not an eight hour day. So I think that’d be my recommendation to the audience.