7 Steps to Fostering Tenant Loyalty With Innovative Building Technologies
Specializes in providing actionable insights into the commercial real estate space for investors, brokers, lessors, and lessees. He covers quarterly market data reports, investment strategies, how-to guides, and top-down perspectives on market movements.
This article was updated on 7/13/2023.
Innovative building technology has been a hot topic in the real estate realm for quite a bit. The trend gained a substantial boost in popularity thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing more businesses and salaried individuals to rely on technology to stay afloat.
Intelligent building technology includes everything from HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) automation, lighting controls, surveillance and security, and the ability to monitor and manage buildings through mobile applications and intelligent devices.
The technological possibilities are endless for both residential and commercial real estate, and they'll only grow with time. Like any other innovation and technological advancement, the goal is to improve the overall consumer experience; in this case, for your tenants. Today, building owners look at smart building technology as an opportunity to provide a higher standard of living to those who rely on them to do so.
From energy savings to optimized building efficiencies and even calculating improvement allowances, smart building technology helps you understand and cater to the needs of your tenants.
By making the right building technology investments to improve your tenants' experiences, you provide more value to the people in your building and gain a competitive edge over some of the others in your area. Naturally, that translates into higher revenues. With more satisfied residents in your building, you can expect increased tenant turnover, more referrals, and, most importantly, higher tenant loyalty.
What Is Smart Building Technology?
For building owners, smart buildings are managed with a centralized internet-based system. Every vital aspect of the building's function, from security, emergency alerts, lighting, HVAC, and more, is integrated, dramatically simplifying the hassle of managing the building and the operations within it.
For tenants, smart building technologies make communications and connectivity effortless: They experience a wide range of benefits, including cost savings through smart energy consumption, improved safety through smart fire extinguishers, smart lighting, and much more.
The Benefits of Smart Building Technology
Smart building technology allows buildings to disseminate and exchange information between core systems to create an easy experience for occupants through optimized performance.
There are many different types of smart building technologies. All of these have one common factor, though: They make tenants' lives easier by making tons of modern and unique amenities possible for occupants and visitors, along with custom solutions tailored to solve different problems.
What's the Market Outlook for Smart Buildings?
All trends related to smart building technology show massive greenlights and a bright future ahead.
The market for smart buildings is projected to grow from 66.3 billion USD in 2020 to 108.9 billion USD by 2025. The major catalysts for this immense growth will be an accelerating adoption rate of IoT-enabled systems for property management, increased space utilization awareness, higher demand for energy-efficiency and sustainable energy solutions, more regulations, and higher industry standards for luxury and amenities.
The Most Important Smart Building Technology for Fostering Tenant Loyalty
Here are 7 of the most important smart building technologies to adopt and upgrade in your building(s) to foster tenant loyalty.
#1 – HVAC Control
Manual HVAC control systems installed in older buildings can't adjust according to the building's occupancy. There's no place for such inefficiencies in today's world, especially in the fight against global warming and carbon emissions.
Smart building technology provides sensors that communicate with the building's HVAC systems and adjust to the usage of the building's occupants as it varies throughout the day, thanks to the real-time occupancy data provided by these smart sensors.
#2 – Real-Time Energy Monitoring
Through real-time energy monitoring technology, smart building technology can streamline the way we use power. This yields many positive results, such as savings on utility bills and transitioning infrastructure towards sustainability.
Modern software for managing buildings allows teams to access and analyze energy consumption data in real-time while also helping them project forecasts and define thresholds.
#3 – Air Quality Control
Caring about the health and well-being of your tenants will naturally earn you genuine tenant loyalty.
Just like how smart building technology helps with HVAC systems monitoring, it also helps improve the building's air quality.
For this purpose, specialized smart sensors are installed in the building to track indoor environmental factors, like heat and humidity. They also monitor the mixture of gasses present in the building, such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, etc.
This data helps to increase or decrease clean airflow into particular rooms as and when needed without requiring any physical intervention.
#4 – Software Influx
As the word "smart" suggests, these building technologies have very little to do with hardware. They are mostly software-centric. Property management teams can modernize even the oldest buildings using these innovative technologies.
These software solutions can integrate into the building's current infrastructure of technology and also function through cloud-based platforms.
A smart building that adopts cloud technology solutions or IoT can easily implement all of the solutions in this list at scale and conveniently.
An optimized software infrastructure means these technology-based amenities will work smoothly and as desired, and your tenants will thank you for it.
#5 – Energy Optimization
Smart buildings can optimize the usage of energy throughout the building in many ways.
Systems like lighting and HVAC can switch on and off automatically according to the building's occupancy. Smart sensors can also detect any underperforming hardware that's taking up more energy (and, therefore, money) than usual.
For instance, if the air-conditioning is using up more electricity than it usually does, the system takes note of this through consumption records and data analysis.
These sensors can also highlight the specific piece of hardware that needs to be replaced, resulting in cost savings for your tenants and improved tenant loyalty.
#6 – Remote Management
Most of the features listed above can automate themselves through smart building infrastructure without requiring any physical inference, allowing you to operate these systems remotely for any part of the building. Whether it be access to the building, HVAC, or lighting, property teams can adjust any aspect of the building as and when it's needed.
Problems get solved quicker as a result, naturally improving tenant loyalty.
#7 – Building-Wide Connectivity
A smart building is only smart if tenants can communicate seamlessly through all devices and channels. As they take a walk from the lobby to the rooftop garden or lobby, they shouldn't be afraid to lose connectivity.
Building-wide connectivity is the backbone of smart building technology: Everyone should have uninterrupted access to the fastest and most reliable internet connection, regardless of where they are in the building.
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