This article was written for our sponsor, JLL.
Coworking spaces, highly amenitized common rooms, open concept floor plans — gone are the days when offices were akin to sterile architecture, beige walls and isolated cubicles.
According to a recent study by Forbes, by the year 2025, three-quarters of workers in the United States will be millennials. As a new generation moves into the professional world, there’s been a growing need for the antiquated commercial real estate industry to enter a new age.
Using their technology and cutting-edge software, JLL is one of the pioneers in infusing some much-needed modernity into the industry.
The company’s comprehensive service offerings include anything from finding and leasing buildings, to managing properties and portfolios, to designing and transforming spaces. Primarily, JLL employs its data-based technology to predict trends and statistics months — and even years — in advance, bringing an insight to commercial real estate the industry has been in sore need of.
This insight helps their clients know exactly which buildings will be the best long-term investment for their businesses.
JLL employs its data-based technology to predict trends and statistics months — and even years — in advance, bringing an insight to commercial real estate the industry has been in sore need of. (Photo Courtesy of JLL)
“Data’s really become different over the last couple of years,” said Brian Landes, the director of research at JLL, where he and his team track upwards of 4,000 properties across multiple sectors. “When we’re working with a tenant, let’s say they’re new to Raleigh, and we know they are a software company. We can find out where the competition is, where the target workforce profile is based on, where they’re already working and where they live. We can triangulate things to find those locations and a building that actually works for them.”
Previously, the way firms assembled property portfolios for their clients was a bit of mystery — and often simply reactive based on immediate needs. At JLL, the cards are on the table.
“As we move into a much more data-centric world where data is key — not just for the commercial real estate industry, but also for industries across all sectors — these trends we find can be backed up with multiple sources of data and show how we’ve compiled it,” said Ashley Rogers, who leads JLL Raleigh’s research efforts.
When it comes to understanding the evolution of JLL’s technology, and technology in the commercial real estate sector in general, Rogers is the person to consult. She and her team work intimately with the data and software that JLL employs to predict real estate trends across all of their market.
“We’ve taken the nitty-gritty data, and created platforms and technologies that allow for commercial real estate to be far more digestible,” Rogers explained. “With Blackbird, which is JLL’s geographic information system — or GIS interface — we’re able to show, in real time, things like vacancy rates, live asking-rents, and up-to-date leasing information for any market that JLL tracks across the country, among other things.”
JLL’s Blackbird technology also aids businesses in nailing down the exact locations that will be most conducive to sourcing the talent they’re looking for. For example, if a client is specifically interested in targeting millennial talent, then Blackbird technology can visually display where pockets of millennials tend to live, as well as their commuting patterns and more.
Aside from tracking properties down and offering real-time data, JLL also invested around $100 million into their JLL Spark fund, which targets early-stage investments and helps leverage their technological needs. These developments are centered primarily on workplace efficiency and occupancy planning.
“If you have an open-seating workspace, your employees can walk in, look at a screen and be able to see which seats in the 30,000 square foot floor plan are open — they don’t have to wander around aimlessly to find a space that works,” said Rogers, explaining just one facet of JLL’s office planning technology.
She added, “We’re also utilizing white noise-canceling technologies. If the space becomes particularly loud from conversation, that white noise helps by increasing automatically. That way, it doesn’t feel like there’s one particular part of the office that’s incredibly loud.”
And the perks don’t end there. Need to schedule a conference call? Put a coffee order into the in-house cafe? Reserve a meeting room? Gone are the days of navigating multiple online programs and sending calendar invites — with this new technology, you can do it all seamlessly from the convenience of your cell phone.
This method of conducting commercial real estate business represents a huge, and relatively recent shift toward modernizing the antiquated industry.
“Ten years ago you would say, ‘Hey, I need 50,000 feet of space. Here are the 10 buildings across the market that work,'” Landes said. “Now, we can actually take a lot of the time out of that and say, ‘Well, based on your profile, you do this sort of work and you’re looking for this sort of person, these three buildings are the ones that actually make sense to look at. Let’s eliminate these other seven so we’re not wasting your time.'”
This article was written for our sponsor, JLL.
