All too often, smart building projects are gauged from the singular perspective of a cost savings measure for the property owner.
However, for commercial buildings or campuses that lease space to tenants, innovative technologies have shown to attract those who are willing to spend extra for these digital perks. This can increase net operating revenue by filling vacancies faster and the ability to charge higher rent rates.
Let’s look at 5 smart building technologies that are likely to sway prospective tenants into choosing your property in 2022 and beyond.
1. Indoor environment monitoring
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many desires to leverage technology that ensures tenants and occupants within commercial buildings are in a clean and environmentally safe indoor environment. The use of IoT sensors to measure air quality, levels of sanitation in bathrooms/communal spaces and occupant tabulations are common examples of ways to monitor indoor environments from an occupant health and wellbeing standpoint. Additionally, tenants want to be able to quickly view this information through a building-wide portal. The ability to easily provide this type of data to tenants through a shared portal is an easy win that will pay dividends in the form of tenant satisfaction.
2. Public and property safety
Thanks to significantly lower costs and improved functionality of surveillance cameras, door controllers and other physical safety smart building components, tenants are seeking ways that building owners can better protect their staff and property on their behalf. In many cases, tenants place the responsibility for protecting employees, partners, customers and properties squarely on property management teams. Thus, to bolster these areas without the need to significantly increase public safety officer head-count, technology can be leveraged to achieve the right balance of public and property safety that discerning tenants are now demanding.
3. Guest Wi-Fi services
It may come as a surprise to some, but many commercial buildings that rent space to tenants do not offer guest Wi-Fi services that tenants and their customers can leverage for a variety of business use-cases. A growing number of business owners and management teams would much rather offload these types of technology services to the property manager. Thus, an investment in a reliable and secure Wi-Fi network is an investment that will attract businesses seeking a service-provider approach to wireless internet access.
4. Automated service integrations
As the use of technology to facilitate the automation of business processes penetrates further into the small- and medium-sized business market, these are the types of tenants that will be seeking building automation services that can be integrated into their own digital systems and platforms. For example, many tenants that use shared meeting rooms and reservable spaces within a facility want the ability to reserve them within their email and calendar platforms such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Workspace. Additionally, informational alerts and notifications that are relevant to tenants can be integrated into various messaging and collaboration tools so that occupants can be alerted in real-time when emergencies or other public safety incidents occur. In both cases, integration with in-building systems and tenant technology platforms should be made available through standards-based application programming interfaces (API’s).
5. Sharing smart building sustainability data
When the numbers are crunched, it’s sometimes the case that in-building environmental and sustainability technology projects end up falling short from an ROI cost savings perspective. However, the desire for energy conservation is often a goal for tenants as well. The ability to collect and share energy-saving statistics from the various renewable energy sources (solar, geothermal, etc.), smart lighting/windows and energy-saving HVAC systems will attract those businesses that adhere to strict eco-friendly business operations practices.
