A sense of perspective

Take First Port, which recently hired its first sustainability manager, making it one of the first residential property management firms to do so. The move came at a time when the Covid vaccines were still being rolled out and the company could have been forgiven for having other priorities. That it chose to press ahead with recruitment says a lot about the company, but also a lot about the level of importance the industry more widely attaches to tackling climate change.

Doing so should, of course, be the overriding imperative for all companies. But it cannot be denied that greening the built environment comes with challenges, some of them perhaps unforeseen. In a fascinating article, mobile infrastructure provider Shared Access explains how environmentally friendly measures come at a connectivity cost. Put simply, measures that make it difficult for heat to escape from a building also make it harder for the mobile signal generated by external infrastructure to gain access, which is not acceptable in a modern business environment. Fortunately, Shared Access has a solution and it doesn’t have to cost the earth – literally or figuratively.

Then there are companies that simply want to make life more straightforward and efficient. ESmart Networks recalls some of the horror stories it has encountered with developers that thought connecting a new building to the power grid would be straightforward, only to find a connection was unavailable, underpowered or prohibitively expensive. Add to that the apparently painful process of dealing with some local distribution network operators and you can see the appeal of eSmart Networks’ alternative solution. Paying somebody else to do what you feel you should be able to do yourself may not always sound appealing, but it is often the best solution. It’s a conclusion I have come to with my accountant.

Similarly, KATE Innovations was born out of a desire to streamline the valuations process by automating as much of it as possible, thereby freeing up valuation professionals’ time and resources to concentrate on the elements of the process that cannot be done by machines.

All in all, we hope the following pages provide much food for thought and look forward to bringing you another collection of equally interesting reads in the near future. Above all, we hope that this edition of Perspectives will give you, well, a sense of perspective.

Adam Branson is a freelance journalist, writer and editor