The classic view of real estate is the connecting of a client who has a real estate need with available space that meets their needs. To do this, clients and landlords rely upon brokers bring the two sides together. It works well because brokers are the independent parties that know their markets extremely well and market their services to clients. For the most part it is a very effective and straightforward approach.
As technology and corporate complexity has grown, it changes the dynamics of this setup. Clients’ needs are now more complicated – often it is hard to understand exactly how much space they need, which market the space should be in and if there is actually a need for new space at all. To really understand this they need a real estate partner who can get through those three questions first before they go into the market for space. This means they need a partner who knows their portfolio extremely well, is not tied to a specific market and is incentivized to give them the best solution regardless of if that means a real estate transaction occurs on any given project. The data and processes all exist, but under the traditional model it means the client needs an architect, workplace designer, location specialist, portfolio analyst and then the broker. That’s inefficient and costly – and hard to do right.
It’s necessary to adapt the brokerage approach and develop a platform that transforms the traditional real estate broker into a client service team. Based on requirements, that team provides the functions necessary to solve these sophisticated problems so that the client doesn’t need to deal with 3+ different parties to develop 1 solution. It’s a novel – yet difficult – approach that can be extremely effective.