The secret to being smart

Smart has become almost as over-used in real estate over the past few years as accelerant and unprecedented have during the Covid pandemic. But what does smart really mean and why do landlords need to make sure that their buildings are really delivering a smart solution for occupiers and their workforces? For William Newton, president and EMEA managing director at WiredScore, the need for smart buildings is abundantly clear: our personal lives are filled with smart technologies. “If you just look at the amount of technology and personalisation and ability to use data that we have in our personal lives, it’s remarkable,” he says. “There’s been a revolution in the last decade. Some of the things that we can do now would have only been conceived of as magic a really short period of time ago. But so little of that has bled into the office environment and into the way that most of us work. So we go from this sort of sparkling, magical personal life into a slightly mundane professional life.” He believes real estate has a key role to play in bringing some of those benefits we enjoy in our personal interactions with technology into our working lives.But, he says, that tech has got to be focused on the end user and its output, not the tech itself. More than chips In a bid to enable that, WiredScore, after a year of working with some 90 global companies, has come up with a collaborative definition of what really makes a building smart and launched a certification – SmartScore – to sit alongside it. “We’ve spent the last year trying to get to the rub of what smart means for the industry,” says Newton. “The difficulty is people talk about it at very different levels. Some people talk about the trends that are leading to smart, other people talk about the things that smart can deliver. Others talk about the technologies that you need to make a building smart. But none of them were really coming at it in a way that brought together what we thought to be the most important thing, which is to focus on the end users of the building and a focus on the outcomes.” WiredScore’s definition – which has been accepted by 44 global landlords across 25m sq ft of space in 70 buildings already – is that a smart building is one that delivers outstanding outcomes for all users, through digital technology, to exceed their evolving expectations. Newton explains: “Technology and smart shouldn’t be about the number of silicon chips you’ve got per square foot of building. It should be about outcomes that are actually delivered to the users who want them. For too long, this debate has been dominated by technologists who really want to focus on the inputs. But the inputs aren’t what matter in real estate – or really in anything in life – if the outcomes are delivered.” His and the SmartScore certification’s ambition is to have the whole industry orient itself around users and outcomes. For Sally Jones, head of strategy, digital and technology at British Land, one of the landlords already signed up to the certification, thinking about what smart actually does for the end users is essential for focusing the mind on delivering the right technologies across a portfolio. She says it is so easy to “go a bit wild” when it comes to technology and equip a building with a whole range of things that can be costly and end up not delivering the return on investment every business is after. According to WiredScore, almost all of us (79%) want to work in a technologically advanced, smart office, but less than half of us (47%) actually use the tech available to us at work on a daily basis. They are two stats that make it relatively easy to conclude that those buildings that might consider themselves smart for having all the tech available, are actually failing to deliver an improved experience to the end user – or, to borrow the WiredScore definition – are failing to deliver “outstanding outcomes for all users to exceed their evolving expectations”. Not such a smart investment, after all perhaps. “We look at smart in three ways,” says Jones. “The experience you give to people through being able to book things online, get into the building, see if the air quality is good, etc; then it’s about making the building really efficient, because sustainability is so important to people these days; and the last thing is that it’s is really important to understand how your buildings are being used, both as an occupier and as a landlord, so you can make the experience better for people.” How to earn the moniker Making the office experience better for people has never been more important. With the world’s biggest experiment in home working now almost complete, employees around the globe will need to be enticed back in to the office. If our experience at our employer’s office is less technologically enabling for us than our home offices, our drive to return there will be weaker – regardless of desire for human interaction. WiredScore found that a whopping 98% of office workers said that they would not be able to do their jobs with the same ease without tech. “It’s difficult to imagine in this incredibly technologically enabled world, that the built environment can just carry on as before and that you won’t want the same kind of technological innovation support that you get in your daily life,” says Jones. “In the post-pandemic world, where people have seen that there are other places they can work, for them to want to go into a building and be there, they’ll want it to bring the best of the technology they have elsewhere in their lives.” WiredScore highlights six functions a smart building should deliver to earn the moniker: 1) individual and collaborative productivity; 2) health and wellbeing; 3) community and services; 4) sustainability; 5) maintenance and optimisation; and 6) security. It says a smart building should create spaces enabling people to be at their most efficient and effective. Think automatic visitor check-in, desk-booking and occupancy detection. The building should also enable users to assess air quality and be able to adjust lighting and temperature levels, and should seek to create community among its users, providing them with access to external services as well as internal ones. Smart buildings by their very nature should improve a building’s sustainability credentials through the implementation of monitoring systems for energy and water usage and waste management, etc. Jones says British Land has managed to reduce its energy consumption by 55% by implementing simple metering technology throughout its portfolio. Data collection plays a huge role in enabling buildings to be smart. Without performance and use data, building managers would not be able to optimise the building and make sure it is properly maintained. But with data collection comes issues around privacy and the threat of hacking. Newton says real estate companies need to understand that they are not just real estate companies any more, they are data companies and have to have robust strategies around data sharing and governance. “It’s a new set of responsibilities and challenges for the property world,” says Newton. “But I think it is one the property world can rise to.” Newton believes the real estate world will rise to being smart too and is hoping that WiredScore can help the sector on its path to a digitally-connected, outcome-focused, intelligent future. To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette Photo © Shutterstock