At our Q2 Verified Members Meet Up we had the privilege of sitting down with our long term client Adrian Dack from SHW to chat PropTech and our Verified Markeplace.
Adrian gave us honest and direct responses to the questions, here is a summary of the conversation we had.
TT: Do we need to change the narrative of what’s in the market about PropTech?
AD: PropTech has been around for years, and it is mostly the language that technology companies use that isn’t helpful for property management companies, i.e. building optimisation, what does this mean?
The industry is still full of jargon and tech acronyms not relating to theoutcomes we face and putting it simply for us. There hasn’t traditionally beenanywhere we can turn to for advice and assistance and an independentperspective on this to assist.
Lots of surveyors understand what they need and want from technology, but it’s difficult to make decisions when everyone company is telling you their solution is the ‘best solution’. Without the technical knowledge internally, our teams are sometimes in fear of adopting technology, just in case it doesn’t work and our reputation with our clients and the tenants is put at risk.
TT: Why do you use Verified?
Adrian joked that SHW uses Verified as a gate keeper of sorts, in orderto prevent a large amount of time wasted and spent on listening to pitchesrather than doing the day job.
AD: The Verified Marketplace provides SHW access to free RFI reports,that have already carried out the heavy lifting and de-risked part of our procurementprocess significantly. With the location and size of assets under-management bySHW, we found many of the PropTech solutions are simply not viable for our buildingsand using the Verified reports with the indicative costings has meant that my teamdon’t waste time listening to sales pitches.
TT: What is your biggest challenge e.g. landlord pressure, tech pressure, tenant/occupier pressure, sustainability?
AD: Landlord pressure and tenants’ expectations are our biggest challenges. Increasing both are asking the management teams for actionable insights via data from their buildings. However, the data we have access to is not always accurate, and so this created additional work for the team to manually sense checking this before reporting this.
Occupiers are increasingly asking for information about their space utilisation as they navigate ‘right sizing’ their office space, and scrutiny of the service charge has only increased over time. With increased pressure on sustainability for the internal businesses there is also the need for accurate monitoring energy consumption/utilities. All of which we know can and should be automated with the right technology partners.
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