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Webinar on Demand: The Reshaping of Corporate Real Estate

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Webinar on Demand: The Reshaping of Corporate Real Estate

The impact of the pandemic on the corporate real estate sector is altering office demand, accelerating office trends, forcing digital transformation, and reshaping the workplace indefinitely.

Listen to lease administration expert Denise Hinkle, Principal with Scribcor Global Lease Administration, a best-in-class lease administration and lease abstraction service provider and Ryan Turner, CEO of RefineRE, the leader in corporate occupier RE benchmarking and analytics, discuss the top trends and factors corporate real estate executives need to consider when making strategic long- and short-term decisions about their RE portfolios.

We’ll discuss how to:

  • Move forward with alternative work arrangements in the wake of a rapidly-evolving office landscape
  • Build a sound strategy with defendable and accurate data to ensure an unbiased decision-making process
  • Integrate disparate business systems in order to create a cohesive tech stack that helps reduce low-ROI activity and drives strategic focus

Transcription

Michele Cobb: All right, people are still hopping on, but we’ll go ahead and get started today. Good morning. Welcome to our panel talk the reshaping of corporate real estate. My name is Michele Cobb, and I’m the CMO at RefineRE, and I will be your moderator today. As we progress through this talk, please feel free to send over questions in the chat. And at the end of our session today, we will answer the questions. Now, I’d like to introduce our two panelists. We have Denise Hinkle. She is principal at Scribcor Global. And we have Ryan Turner, and he’s the CEO of RefineRE. Denise, can you share a little bit about yourself?

Denise Hinkle: Sure. Hi. And thank you very much for tuning in to our discussion, our panel discussion this morning. As Michele had said, my name is Denise Hinkle. I’m a principal with Scribcor Global lease administration. Scribcor is an independent tenant-only, lessee-only focused lease administration company that has been operating since 1992. It was originally started as a property management a function of a property management and a brokerage company and in 1998, it was spun off independently to provide the best-in-class tenant lease only, lease administration. Our company is what we call software agnostic, which means that we implement, and we work in about a dozen different lease administration systems, including all of the major systems that you’re probably familiar with. And our experienced team of lease administrators is made up of people with great background, and huge experience in this space, including attorneys and accountants. Our lease administration services are really provided in four broad buckets. The first would be lease abstraction services, which is all about the data, which is where we’re going to be talking extensively about today. We also provide database management services to keep those databases up to date with non-lease type data that you might be tracking, rent processing services, and then compliance activities such as lease audit, we work in partnership with companies like RefineRE to support our clients expanding needs for real estate data, reports, insights, and benchmarks in tracking and administrating both their real estate and their equipment, lease portfolios. Thanks for having me today Michele.

Michele Cobb: Thanks for being here, Ryan.

Ryan Turner: Yeah, well, very, very quickly. Thank you very much for everybody that has joined us to talk about corporate real estate data. And the changes that we’re seeing across the globe in our unique little industry. RefineRE is really a group of corporate real estate data nerds. And I say that proudly, we’re focused on breaking down the silos of information that exists within the corporate real estate function, to help companies make data-driven decisions. And we’re doing this for some of the largest most complex occupiers in the world, we feel very fortunate to be able to bring our knowledge and technology to the corporate real estate function to help corporate real estate executives really be better at their jobs and deliver data-driven decision making for their organization. So thanks, again for being here. We’re excited to chat about this today.

Michele Cobb: Thank you, Ryan. Perfect. Well, thanks both of you for those intros so let’s just jump right in, shall we? We know that the pandemic has really put the gas on the evolution of corporate real estate, dealing with hybrid office scenarios, price volatility rising in some markets falling in others. Concessions being used really to entice occupiers Not to mention the ESG initiative that’s really been brought to the forefront given the new administration. Real Estate leaders are really finding themselves in a situation of having to make and execute strategic long-term and short-term decisions faster, and more accurately than ever, it seems to be the speed and accuracy are the name of the game today. I wanted to ask you guys, let’s just start here. What trends are you all seeing in the market right now? Denise, do you want to take a stab at that first? Opp, you’re on mute.

Denise Hinkle: I apologize for that. That is kind of how it goes with me. I would say that for our clients, we’re kind of seeing trends in a couple of different areas. I think the overall theme is that occupiers are really demanding more value and flexibility with their portfolios. And that could be everything from the data that they’re tracking, to just having the ability to do things like curbside pickup or changing their business model to accommodate changes in workplace and work from home, social distancing, and all of that. Those types of changes that are being made just strategically so they can continue to operate, those decisions are being made at warp speed. And really, they have to have a good data set behind it to know what’s allowable per their lease and how they can pivot with that. I think another theme that we’re seeing is that lease administration is really evolved from a back-office support role to really being a critical and crucial business function. It’s now supporting other activities within corporations, such as lease accounting, and financial reporting. And that lease data that’s being tracked on the real estate side has really become the source of truth for a lot of decision-making benchmarking and these other decisions that are having to be made very quickly. Another bucket is kind of the balance sheet of fact. We saw with public companies that had to adopt the recent lease accounting changes, that now that day two reflection for those companies that have already adopted, there’s more of a consideration of how those leases are going to be reflected in the company’s financial statements, and what that means for them as they’re going forward and executing additional transactions. Also, we’re seeing, a huge focus on increased real estate spent by landlords for items such as health and safety. There’s a question by the occupier side that says we have pressure to reduce or maintain our real estate costs. So, who’s responsible for those costs, there’s a discussion going on about the right thing to do, which is the landlord’s investing in sometimes capital expenditures to make sure that their tenants and the public is safe, versus really what’s allowed to be paid by the tenant the lease for that. So that’s led to an increase in lease audits, with really kind of the focus on those items that are affected by occupancies, such as government-imposed type changes, and gross-up calculations, and other occupancy-related items.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. Ryan, do you have thoughts around this?

Ryan Turner: Sure, obviously, big, big trends, big shift in trends that we’re seeing, I think that the overall message that we continue to hear, if you think about hybrid work models, ESG factors, bringing an actual utilization of all of our spaces to just figure out which types of space we need and where we need them. For different types of work. All of this is just really leading to we’ve got so many more decisions to make than we used to, as corporate real estate executives. And I think that we used to have to focus on, okay, where’s the labor? Or where are our customers, and we want to be downtown, in the CBD, or out in the suburbs with access to parking. And those types of decisions are long gone, it’s now about, which types of workers live where and how long are they willing to commute? And are they willing to commute and all these other factors that go into making a decision about where we go, or where we don’t go anymore? How much space we actually need is a big, big, big quandary. I think that’s the billion-dollar question is what is the demand for space within our portfolio these days. So, we’re seeing a lot of trends that lead to both data gathering, in order to be able to accomplish those goals, as well as just, you know, I think the first movers are out there piloting some of these solutions, and trying to get to, will this work for us? Or will this not work for us? It’s getting really interesting to see all of the creative solutions that our industry is coming up with to help support their organizations.

Michele Cobb: Absolutely. And I might argue that these aren’t trends. These are just simply the new way and here to stay and things to constantly think about and work through. In order to execute on this new way of thinking about commercial real estate landscape. Let’s just start at the baseline. Companies need to understand the current state of their portfolios, so they know what their current statuses are, what pieces of information should they make sure they’re aware of? Denise, you want to take that first?

Denise Hinkle: Sure. So, I think at the very minimum at this point, everybody’s aware that there are the basics that need to be tracked for every portfolio, things like your critical dates, your basic premises information, your financial obligations, and any options that might be available on those leases. And really that basic data is allowing the occupier to pay your rents to account for your leases and to really monitor your rights and obligations. Aside from that, I think there’s another level of data that is being tracked to help corporate real estate executives make decisions. And that type of data is really unique for every situation. It can for a retailer, for example, might include things like co-tenancy provisions, signage provisions, prevent percentage rent, and other things that are unique to that particular industry. For office users, it might include building hours, or repairs and maintenance responsibilities, overtime at HVAC, the list of the opportunities of tracking this data is very, very long. But what should be tracked really should be what I call accurate, useful, and consistent across the portfolio. And then, in addition, I think companies also need to consider those other data sources that are internal to their organizations that might give a different flavor or really kind of build out the data that they’re being tracked. There are other sources internally, such as HR that might be tracking certain metrics, or facilities, or other functions within an organization that can really bring light and tell the story of the data and the company of what’s being tracked.

Michele Cobb: Great points, Ryan.

Ryan Turner: Yeah, I think just kind of going on the back of that, I think that the data collection, that maybe stopped at the facility level. Those days are over now we’re having to focus is corporate real estate executives on the business and the employees. And I’m sure that we’ve always had to bring it back to that. But ultimately, now we start there. And I think it’s questions like, what types of work do our employees do? When do they do it? How much does it cost for an employee to work remote versus work within our office space? How can we recruit and retain I think that’s also a huge component of this. So which information do we need to collect about our existing workforce, to make sure that everybody’s happy, and layer that into the real estate equation? So I think that’s a huge component of this. The other really big area of focus, like I mentioned before, that billion-dollar question of utilization. It used to be when we started RefineRE, four years ago, if we could get to an organization’s seats versus butts in seats, we were doing pretty good in terms of that level of information if we had actual desk count, within every location in their portfolio, and then the number of employees plus or minus 10%. at that facility, that felt pretty good, we’ve made some progress. But now we need much more granular information. And we’re seeing our customers layer in things like their slack data, how our employees interacting with one another, and getting to actual utilization of conference rooms, by using our conference room booking systems, utilization of our office space, based on either sensor data badge, swipe data, or Wi-Fi wireless access point data. So it’s getting, I think, almost to be an imperative to understand the utilization question so that we can start to think about which types of space we need, where we need them, and how our employees work. The last point I’ll mention is that total cost of occupancy is a very elusive number for some organizations because there’s information all over the place. And when we can understand that total cost of occupancy, we can now compare two alternatives realistically. So getting to that information from those multiple data sources, or sources of truth is really hard to do, especially at scale. But once we do it, we can compare a flexible space environment in a We Work or Regis to a traditional office space and actually be comparing apples to apples. I think those are really important data points to get to. And obviously, the accuracy of that is the magic. Making sure that information is good. So it’s not garbage in garbage out.

Michele Cobb: Exactly. I was going to stress the accuracy. Yeah, it seems like a no-brainer, but like, it’s super important. The other thing that I love about this is that pulling all the data sources into one supervisory layer. So, you can see from soup to nuts, exactly what you’re dealing with. Across the board. I think it’s also imperative to be able to make the right decisions quick. Okay, moving on to the next question. You guys have been in this corporate real estate space and helping companies for a really long time when they’re collecting the data. What do most companies find challenging in the data collection process?

Denise Hinkle: Well, I’m going to say that, piggybacking on Ryan’s comments is that data accuracy is probably the most challenging area. When you’re trying to track data, I think there are a couple of different types of data, you can track that is coming from sensors and other sources that might not need interpretation. And there is portfolio data, which always creates complexity when you’re trying to get portfolio data out of a portfolio of leases or own properties, primarily because those leases have 1000s of data points. And the documents are, let’s be honest, they’re drafted by attorneys, those people that are administering those documents are not attorneys. So I think there is an interpretation level that people tend to struggle with, or companies tend to struggle with because they don’t necessarily understand that the placement of a comma might alter the complete meaning of a lease covenant, which could change a decision that you’re going to make when you aggregate, what data from that portfolio with other sources. Back earlier in my career, I was involved with a project for a large pension company in New York, and they had missed an option on their lease for Midtown class A space that cost them somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 million to correct, the client wound up having to buy out the lease agreement of somebody that had already negotiated a lease to replace them. Because they didn’t want to move in this highly built-out space. And really, that penalty brought to light that they had data accuracy issues, and they had hired the company I was working for to go in and re abstract all those leases. And we came across several different occasions where there were errors in their data that could have cost them significantly given the right set of circumstances. I think to another degree, there are also some challenges with lease administration systems because when companies are choosing lease administration systems, you don’t know what you don’t know, during the procurement process. And I think now that they’re implemented, and they’re using these systems, you always have a case of woulda coulda, shoulda, I would have done this, I should have done that I could have done something differently. And in some cases, these companies are either pivoting to different systems, or they are adding data, supplementing changing procedures, doing what they need to do to make their system of choice better than what is better than it is today to deliver a higher level of data and a higher level of information for the users. And then I think there’s also some challenges with data usability. I think in some cases, implementations that were done a couple of years ago, were driven by maybe a single group that had a very narrow purpose. And now they’re seeing that this system has the ability to be used by a broader audience. And they find themselves going back to supplement those systems in that data to make it used by a wider audience and make it better for a wider audience. So they’re revisiting both the system, the data, and the processes and procedure to focus on the best use of that system. And that investment with a higher focus on the level of internal control, because now all of this data is finding its way to their balance sheet in their financial reports.

Michele Cobb: All, good. Ryan, your thoughts?

Ryan Turner: Yeah. So, the question, going back to is what is most challenging in the data collection process. And this is something that our data foundations, team lives and breathes with our customers. And we’re digging into general ledger’s, and employing all this information into one place, but I think where the biggest challenge is, there’s no standard way to do this. There’s no defined right way to bring information together for the corporate real estate function. And that’s something that hit me over the head, like a ton of bricks when we purchased bench core and enrolled bench core into our platform last year, is they had created that standard, way of collecting at least the foundational pieces of information so that we could use it as we compare apples to apples across multiple portfolios around the globe, but it gave us the industry-standard data model to build off of every company is going to have other pieces that they need to bring in. But we started with a standard baseline. And I think it’s really important because it allows us to define terms like total cost of occupancy. And we have to go in and define customer data like what is a seat? What do we really calculate as a square foot, rentable versus usable, etc, etc? So, I think that that’s really a key component of this is giving a standard quality to the information that we’re collecting. The other thing, big challenge, I think that always comes up and is I think a big impediment to even getting started is we hear companies say, well, but we’ve got this type of asset. And it’s really different. And it’s unique to us because our business and we hear from every single customer, it’s not wrong, there are different and there’s just a lot of edge cases that need to be identified. So we go through and spend a lot of time doing that, bringing those to the forefront and coming up with a process to make sure that we are getting back to apples to apples, for example, if you amortize an extra 20 bucks of TI into a deal, that face rates going to be artificially high, how do we back that out and make it so it’s comparable compared to the rest of our portfolio or to our best in class peers? So I think that’s the hardest part is getting through and creating that standard for how we’re collecting this. omebody has pointed out that Oscar does provide an industry-standard data model. What we found is that it’s very, very complex and that it’s not really built for the occupier. And so we focused on building the industry-standard data model for the corporate occupier not just globally for landlords, etc, etc, etc.

Michele Cobb: All good points, and we talked about, like, what they find most challenging in the process? And then Ryan, you actually hit on this a little bit, how do they go in and fix it? Right? How do they go in and make sure they understand what KPIs are important? You know, clean the data, things like that. Denise, what are your thoughts on how they fix this problem?

Denise Hinkle: Well, I think it’s all, as Ryan said, situational, I think every corporation is unique, every company is unique, every situation is unique. We have real estate, that’s unique as well. And I think it’s really, the first step in fixing it is being able to take a treetop type Look, I mean, understand that you might not have all the answers, that you might not have the experience either in house or on your team, to be able to look at your situation from a lot of different lenses, there’s, there’s a huge blend of skill that I think creates a best in class solution. In order to try to fix a problem, I’d say the first step in trying to fix it is really to understand what you have, understand what it is that you have. And then second, really spend time defining what you want your outcome to be. What do you want your benchmarking to look like? What do you want your reports to look like? And then third, try to assess or create an analysis, a gap analysis, basically, in basic terms about what do I have? And what do I need to get me to that desired future state? And then once you determine where you want to go, then you can either correct or supplement or create a plan around getting you from where you are today to where you really want to be? That’s pretty basic stuff. But again, understand that there are a lot of different factors. And there are a lot of different angles that need to be considered when going through this exercise.

Michele Cobb: Very good. Let me ask on this because I think we can point out what the challenges are. But I think people want solutions to solving the problem. Do either one of you guys have examples of how a customer has specifically solved this data challenge?

Ryan Turner: Yeah, I can think of a couple different examples of where we’re bringing in information and putting it at their fingertips to drive the decisions. I think one of the most interesting ones that we’ve seen recently, is a technology company, evaluating that hub and spoke model. And we had to decide which metrics we wanted to go after. And which KPIs were important to the decision-making process. That led us back to which data are we missing? So we had to get to our baseline first, like Denise said, What do we have? And then we started with, what do we wish we had in order to answer the question, which is, where should we locate if we were going to do a hub and spoke model? And is it more costly to do flex space versus traditional space in those locations? And so, we came up with KPIs like hours saved in commute time, which led us to annual days saved in commute time to help tip the scales towards one decision or another, and we standardize it across every market so that we could say, if it’s above x, we really need to look at that harder and moving. The other one that we’re seeing a lot of is the average number of daily workers versus, you know, seats versus butts and seats is how many employees are going to be in our office on any given day, and when What are they going to do there? Those sorts of things. So, we’ve helped them get to those by peeling back the layers of the onion, starting with the baseline, layering in other pieces of information that are valuable to the outcome. And I think it’s really been interesting and exciting to see how fast that can happen. Because the data is all out there it exists. We just need to pull it all together into one source, validate it, verify it, make sure it’s usable, and then wield it put it to work.

Michele Cobb: Yep, exactly. So now that we know what data we need to collect, that we need it clean and accurate, how do we use this data to drive our portfolio strategy and execute quickly? Either one of you guys.

Ryan Turner: Sure. I’ll hit it first. And I’ll be kind of brief Denise. I think that action has to happen. And we’re starting to see it. I think six to nine months ago, we were all in a little bit of a paralysis mode because we had no idea how this was going to play out. We’re starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. Now we’ve got to take action and put this information to work in solutions that allow us to go drive decisions with context. That’s I think the key is, so what is we collect this information? How do we actually use it to make decisions where we have to have context? Is it, now that we know our cost of occupancy in a market? Are we above or below market rents? which types of work are employees doing there? How much space do we actually need in which types? When we have all that information, we can align the pieces of the puzzle together to say, X marks the spot, here’s exactly what we need to do. So, I think it’s gathering the information, but then coming up with actionable ways to use it, to build the business case, for every single facility out there. And I think that that’s something that we all can do with information that exists in today’s environments, it’s really exciting to see all that come together into that business case builder, ultimately, at the end of the day.

Michele Cobb: Absolutely. Denice, you have a comment on that one?

Denise Hinkle: Sure. Yeah, I’ll just add that, from where we said, it’s all about being agile and quick, which means you really have to have the right team, to support the decision-making and to support the data. It’s critical. And we’ve seen this with many clients that had, portfolio-wide changes and amendments with COVID amendments, as what we would call them, where they were extending terms, changing obligations, maybe, doing something with their options, the quicker that you can get your arms around those documents and those activities in order to keep your database up to date, the better the information is going to be for your leadership to be able to make agile, quick decisions. I’ll agree with Ryan that, we were in a little bit of a state of paralysis, I think because nobody really quite knew exactly how this was going to shake out. But as we come out of this period, where there’s going to be great change, I believe in portfolios, overall, it’s important to be agile enough, and be quick enough to get those changes made. So you can continue to evolve as an organization.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. And we’re kind of running out of time. But I do want to ask one more question. And then I want to get to the questions that were asked of us in the q&a section. I’m hearing increased chatter about sustainability and ESG in the corporate space. What do you guys make of this increased chatter? How do you think it’ll impact how we think about our corporate real estate?

Ryan Turner: Yeah, well, I think Michele, you and I have heard it from our customer council, right, where we’ve got, I think, seven of the largest occupiers, you could probably think of asking these questions of us as their next big challenge. I always think it’s interesting, it’s just add it to the bucket of things that corporate real estate executives are responsible for, and know that their air conditioning is broken, and we need to get new space lit up in Denver. And now we need to think about sustainability for the corporate real estate function, supporting our organization from an information standpoint. So it just speaks to the level of challenge because again, no standard, it’s an extremely heavy lift, to try and figure out how do we measure our carbon footprint for our real estate portfolio? And then even further, how do we give it context in the universe so that we can actually tell our investors or tell our leadership, we’re doing great, or we’re not doing great? And so I think that that’s what we’re all scrambling to figure out we’ve just started to wrap our arms around it and we can now give our customers based on their utility spend, some semblance of idea about how they’re affecting the environment with their carbon footprint, and methane, etc. But I think that this is going to be a long road for us to figure out both how we can gather and collect the information. And also, so what can we use it to align with the new administration’s compliance rules? Or can we use it to drive better incentives for our business, from state and local municipalities? So all sorts of doors opening up and some closing relative to that, but I think, again, it’s adding to the imperative of things that we must do as corporate real estate executives.

Michele Cobb: Exactly. I’m excited to see where this one goes. It seems new and exciting. And definitely, the way that a lot of things are trending. Shameless plug, we’re going to have a sustainability webinar next month, so be looking for the email to register for that one. So if you’re interested in ESG, sustainability, be on the lookout. Okay, final thoughts. Then we’ll get into questions. Any final thoughts? You know, when you do these talks, you’re like, oh, gosh, I should have said this, or I should have said that. This is the time to give anybody any of those that we missed.

Ryan Turner: There’s probably more things I shouldn’t have said than should have said. So. Usually, usually, how am I end up?

Michele Cobb: Denice, anything on your own?

Denise Hinkle: Sure. I mean, I’ll close by saying that data is really a very powerful foundation for making agile decisions, especially in today’s environment. And I think the more that this industry evolves, in the changing reshaping of corporate real estate, we’ll go back to the title really comes around, you got to know what you have, you need to know where you want to go. And then you have to get a plan to get there. And don’t be afraid to seek that expertise that might not be in house, to find those that are well versed in this space to help you make those decisions, and hold your hand along the way.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. Okay, getting into some of our questions. Here is the question our team has more on our plate and ever and is struggling with what challenges to tackle first, what’s the one thing I can do now, to understand how I can better I can be better prepared for the changing landscape? Which who would like to take this one?

Ryan Turner: I can hit on it and I think it’ll speak to where Denise and Scribcor play well, is that data foundation, that’s the first step in everything. And we kept banging our heads against that, as we’ve evolved our business. And have actually come to make that, the first thing that we include in everything that we do is that data foundation, getting to quality, accurate information from our multiple sources of truth. And making sure we’ve got good process to extract that information at scale. So it’s repeatable. And we know that it’s accurate, we know that we can trust it. That’s the prime number one thing everybody we’ve talked to, across, I think 120, some product demos in the last nine months. That was the number one thing that came out as that’s what we need. And that’s what we need to do first.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. Another question. This is a good one. It’s a toughy though. It’s a good one though. When pitching solutions up the chain, it all comes down to dollars and cents. What type of return your clients seeing is they invest in digital transformation. Denise, you want to tackle this one first?

Denise Hinkle: Sure. So I think, dollars and cents, when you’re looking at budget, I think it can go in a lot of different ways. And there’s no one right answer, I think, to this question. I think, you need to consider what skills and expertise you have in-house again, look at systems, data, where you want to go, and then also consider your growth plan. Because the most expensive, most sophisticated solutions to these problems might not be right for you at this particular point in time. And really, it’s all about building that team and surrounding yourself with people that can help you along the journey. And the journey is not always a straight line.

Michele Cobb: That’s exactly right. Okay, one last question. How are you seeing companies adapting today to accommodate increasing demands for information and decision-making agility?

Ryan Turner: Sorry, I’m looking at there’s some other questions in the chat as well. Michele, I wanna make sure we get to. So companies adapting today to how many increased demands for information and decision-making agility.  That’s really what I think we’re talking about is going through all of the steps it takes to get to information at your fingertips in real-time that you trust. And that’s really the bottom line is how do you do that? Who’s responsible for it? And how do you do that without creating a monster or a beast that you’ve got to feed? And I think that those are the types of challenges that we’re out here solving for our customers so that they don’t all of a sudden have to become data experts. And they can actually just wield the information and align it for their organization’s best use.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. Okay, moving over to the chat. Lead ENERGY STAR Boma 360 wealth fit while smart buildings. Where’s the industry trending?

Ryan Turner: Yeah, so I’ll throw this out there. I bet if you asked most corporate real estate occupiers how many of the buildings that they occupy are LEED-certified, or ENERGY STAR certified into which level? It’d be a hard, heavy lift. It’s probably not in the lease document. And it may not get recorded into a system. And so I think that’s challenge number one. I don’t know that we’ve seen a real trend in terms of companies focusing on we are only going to lease LEED-certified buildings. I think it goes down to that maybe for more core assets, headquarters in key locations. But I think going back to the thing that we’re probably beating over the head maybe a little too much is wouldn’t it be good to know where we stand today. And that’s that context that I’m talking about, where we take our customers data, rub it up against those data sets that tell us which of those buildings are LEED certified. So that we can actually build that into our data set without having to do a bunch of work, and go track all that information down. So then we can understand our baseline and we can say, oh, wow, 22% of our buildings that we occupy are LEED certified. And in those buildings, our total cost of occupancy is 15%, lower. Let’s think about adapting that as our strategy going forward. So those are the types of things that I love I can kind of nerd out about because it’s really getting to things that we can put together into the puzzle so that we can use it.

Michele Cobb: Perfect. Here’s a comment that was entered into the chat. I expect jobs post-pandemic will be classified with some sort of remote work index or RWI that will inform space occupancy requirements seems to be RefineRE’s, technology can allow visualization of this RWI across the portfolio. And companies can then make portfolio consolidation decisions, especially where Scribcor’s data can show the client where they have advantages and flexibility and lease terms. Thank you for that comment, Vic. Okay, here’s another question. As many organizations move into the hybrid model, where much of the space maybe flex or other forms of service office, many of the occupancy agreements will be very short term in nature, 12 months or less, with many variables associated with amenities and services? How do you plan to adapt systems and processes to deal with this high-velocity data, and manage the multiple variation of billings, within existing lease administration systems, this is very different from traditional leases, where there’s typically a three to a five-year term and much simpler pass-through costs.

Denise Hinkle: I’ll take this one. I think it’s all about speed. And it’s all about knowing what your lease administration system can do. So many of these systems are sophisticated enough where you can make modifications or customize them user-defined fields, custom fields, programming, whatever it may be, to adapt the presentation and the tracking of that data to where you’re going with your corporate real estate strategy. It all comes down to speed, as far as tracking, you are correct in that as we’re going to more short term leases, you need to have adequate resources and adequate bandwidth to make sure that those documents and that data is sufficiently tracked to enable the layering on of benchmarking and other services, it’s definitely going to be a challenge, I think there’s also going to be an increased focus on the fact that these leases may or may not have in the balance sheet, and what it does on the financial perspective as well. And we’re certainly seeing that amongst our clients.

Ryan Turner: And I would just add to that, Denise, me, this is something we see, inevitably, in every single portfolio that comes into our platform as you get this group of outliers where it says it’s $418 per square foot for these three employees in Chicago. And it’s identified as a traditional lease in their system because lease administration wasn’t quite flexible enough. And that creates a metric problem because it’s gonna skew our metrics and our cost per square foot, etc, across the portfolio. And we just have to resolve that and get it into an into a system the proper way and think about things like cost per employee. versus cost per square foot, and be able to come up with ways that this doesn’t affect our overall decision making in a negative way. And that that velocity that you mentioned, also Francis is, is a huge part of this is that we are seeing lease terms get shorter, our work load goes up, instead of turning maybe 20% of our portfolio every year, we’re seeing customers turn 50% of their portfolio every year, with the exercising of options, and tackling this with shorter-term deals. That’s just creating more work for us. And we need to work smarter, not harder.

Denise Hinkle: Yeah, and I think, Ryan, I agree with that, and I would say that consistency really kind of plays into this from a data perspective that if you start seeing these activities, and it’s tracked in 50 different manners, that output and the decision making and the reports and whatnot, the trending is going to make it more difficult if that data is not consistently tracked on the front end, or at a very big baseline. So, I think it’s valuable for people to put in that effort and that work up front. So everybody’s on the same page as far as what’s being tracked how it’s being tracked to make sure that that output is quality.

Michele Cobb: Right. All right. Well, we will wrap up now. Denise, Ryan, thank you so much for participating in this in this panel. I think it was very helpful. Hopefully, the audience got a lot out of it. Audience I appreciate all the great, fantastic comments and questions. I would encourage you all to follow us on our LinkedIn channels, our respective company, LinkedIn pages. And if you need anything from us, we’re here to help. We look forward to talking to you. Have a great day. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us.

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