In the fight for the future of the real estate industry, legacy firms are trying to figure out how to contend with WeWork. The beer-loving co-working startup that landlords once welcomed has grown into something much more complicated and powerful, in part through technology. The company has developed both consumer facing tech, like an app for booking conference rooms and checking out events in its co-working spaces, as well as operational analytics that makes its offices and overall business more efficient.
But at Dock 72, an innovative new building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard where WeWork’s custom co-working offices and Rise by We fitness studio will soon fill a third of the square footage, landlords are claiming a small victory. The building, co-owned by Boston Properties and Rudin Management, has its own tech. Rudin’s technology subsidiary, Prescriptive Data, has developed a mobile app to serve as tenants’ main portal for interacting with the building.
The Dock 72 app will allow tenants and their employees to enter the building, register guests, book fitness classes at the in-house studio, order and pay for food at the cafeteria, book shared conference rooms, and submit work orders for maintenance issues. Data from the app will also provide the property’s operators and managers with real-time insights into the patterns of users, helping to improve building services and performance. With the app, Michael Rudin, senior vice president of Rudin Management Company, says he wants the building to be cashless.
“The recognition was, we needed to be more formal in our process to vet and review technology and innovation in this space,” said Kent Tarrach, vice president of asset management at Brookfield Property Partners, speaking at the Real Estate Capital Management Conference in January.
To remain competitive in real estate, developers and landlords realized they had to pay more attention to innovation in the field. As technology has made aspects of daily life more convenient–and as WeWork’s ambitions and breakneck expansion have upended the real estate industry–landlords and building managers have scrambled to figure out where they fit into a tech-enabled landscape.
“You think about Starbucks,” says Georgia Collins, head of workplace experiences for CBRE, a real estate services and investment firm, “It used to be that we all waited in line and waited for our name to be called. Now there’s so many people who order ahead of time and just walk in and pick it up.”
