Real estate investment and management company, Jamestown, wanted to improve its use of technology and so “launched a tech and innovation department in 2018,” David Himmel, a managing director and chief operating officer of Jamestown Real Estate Services, tells GlobeSt.com. “Having a dedicated team … would allow us to accelerate some of our change management work to deploy technology.”
Choice and deployment are complicated, though, because Jamestown is in multiple property types and software doesn’t necessarily cross boundaries with ease.
“The technology stacks for each product are relatively different,” Himmel says. “Office and retail have overlap. Multifamily and office don’t have as much overlap.”
There are examples of tech products used widely across the company. Loan management platform Chatham is a central repository for loan data, such as interest rates, principal, and maturity dates.
For big data, the company’s main choices are Placer.ai for location analytics, Earnest Analytics for real-time performance benchmarking and behavioral insight, and Markerr for insights into economic, population, jobs, and spending tied to a location.
Leasing and asset management data platform VTS provides the ability to use data for greater insights. It includes such data as tour frequency, conversion rates, and tenant retention rates and is used across office and retail for real-time data capture and availability. However, the vendor didn’t historically work in multifamily, according to Himmel, so Jamestown uses a different product for those properties: Livly multifamily rental property management software.
Jamestown is currently piloting a project at its Waterfront Plaza in San Francisco with Prescriptive Data’s Nantum OS technology that calculates adjustments to save energy and lower operating costs while cutting carbon emissions.
The trick to keeping things as manageable and efficient as possible is to rely on areas that can overlap and then focus on the aspects that need specialization.
Part of that is ensuring that the company can achieve three goals over all the property types: create frictionless tenant experiences out of Jamestown; drive building efficiencies and NOI; and leverage big data to improve performance of the portfolio.
“In 2023, I think we’re really focused on bucket 2, driving building efficiency and NOI, and technology that produces a clear [benefit],” Himmel says. The company wants clear and measurable results. “In today’s world, where we’re so focused on the impact of resource allocation, these are so important.”
Complicating choices is a general development in proptech that is a repeat of what has happened in other areas of software and technology services: a trade-off between best integrated packages and best-of-class functions.
“This first chapter of proptech, call it the past three years, has really been about single problem, single solution,” says Himmel. “I think what we’re moving into now is a lot of consolidation in 2023 and 2024 with providers bringing multiple service offerings into one place. You as a landlord could partner with one company and they could provide a lot of these services. I think it’s cumbersome to onboard lots of different systems.”
They choose not to build solutions in-house. “We know our swim lane,” Himmel adds. “As a real estate company, you’re not meant to be a programmer that’s developing this [software].”
One more important insight: be ready to cut your losses. “It happens frequently,” he says. “When something’s not working, we turn it off as quickly as we can and move on. We also have to constantly iterate when we see things that aren’t working, and we need the ability to change and pivot. Historically, this industry has not been one that embraced failure or change well.”
