Software and Technology Use in the Real Estate Sector

Occupier Challenges

In the video to the second of our three reports, called Occupier Challenges, Harry Cole, senior vice president of Customer4Life, DHL Supply Chain in Europe, and Qube Global Software chief executive John Cuppello discuss how technology can help occupiers. Read excerpts from the interviews below:

Harry Cole

How can software and technology improve the understanding of the property function in the wider business?

Software and technology have an amazing part to play. Take, for example, visibility: we just need, as Europe’s largest occupier of commercial space, to know what’s happening. Locations today, tomorrow and what’s happening on price. We need it in real time – only technology can do that. If you look at it from another angle, things are changing.

How have developments in software and technology changed the way you approach finding the best available site?

Meaning, I guess, when do we get Rightmove.com for the property industry?

We used to, when we were quoting for business, get eight weeks to respond to tenders. We’re lucky today to get four weeks, so we need real-time information. Technology is the only way we can do that.

Occupiers and service providers seem more open to adopting technology to solve their challenges than other parts of the industry. Why do you think that this is?

We’re under great time pressures, we need to continually improve our operations. We can’t do that without technology and software.

We just need to understand what’s best practice in our business, and we need to transfer that in to the rest of our business, right across our global operations, as fast as we can.

Occupiers and service providers seem to have more issues with compatibility across systems than other parts of the industry. How does your organisation deal with disparate systems and data sets?

With the mergers and acquisitions we’ve made, we have a huge amount of legacy systems. It takes time to transition all those – and at a cost. We have been very successful at introducing what we call “middle-ware” – that’s a suite of systems, which are effectively interfacing with our customer systems to give us common visibility and interaction. And maybe that’s something the property industry could look at.

More than half of occupiers said they do not use software or technology to measure key performance indicators. Why is this?

I’m really surprised to hear that. We do – we have to, it’s in our contracts effectively to continually drive improvements. We can’t do that manually, we have to rely on technology. And we also have a mantra in our business: what we don’t measure, we don’t improve.

John Cuppello

Three-quarters of occupiers are looking to invest heavily in software in the next five years. Why do you think that this is?

There are a number of reasons for that. One of them is undoubtedly the technological advances that we’ve seen over the last few years, particularly in the area of cloud computing, and the increased usage of mobile devices which is very prevalent in the industry at the moment, and I think it’s no surprise that organisations are looking for solutions that have kept pace with those developments.

Another reason is the concern across the industry about legislative and regulatory changes. One good example at the moment in the occupier community is the proposed changes from IASB [International Accounting Standards Board] about lease accounting standards. I think that organisations with sophisticated IT systems already in place will find it much easier to react to these changes than organisations which don’t have them.