By David Fuller-Watts, CEO, Mallcomm
Whether retail, office or mixed-use, gone are the days of ‘them and us’ for commercial real estate landlord and tenant relationships. Today, the best commercial real estate businesses thrive on a shared approach to success. Activating your CRE community to achieve this is essential. Investor focus is shifting to those companies breaking down the barriers between landlord and tenant to achieve this collective goal.
Tenants too appreciate their success isn’t isolated. In a retail centre, for example, they realise that their performance now relies on a unique, experience-driven shopping environments that include a mix of entertainment, dining, and lifestyle components to attract additional footfall and engagement.
Creating these types of holistic experiences requires engaging with management and other tenants around them. Deloitte’s 2024 Commercial Real Estate Outlook emphasises the importance of transforming operations and technology to build stronger community ties and create value through tenant engagement.
With the right support and technology at the heart, tenants – be they retailers in a shopping centre or businesses in an office block – are stepping out of their bubbles and realising they need to play a part in something bigger.
There are several ways that landlords can improve tenant engagement and tenant experience to bring their wider community to life:
1. Imaginative placemaking
A successful community needs the right environment to thrive. Placemaking plays an essential role as it helps attract customers to spaces where everyone wants to engage and spend time, whatever the commercial real estate type.
At a high level this increases visitors and sales but at a community level it imprints an unforgettable experience on the customer, bringing them back, keeping them engaged and creating advocates for the space.
To foster even more customer engagement, spaces are looking more to the digital world to create this sense of belonging. As the Olympics now has an app, so too do centres that are serious about placemaking and entrenching experiences into the community.
If one store has an event and there’s a queue – how is this managed? There’s an app. Need to push out messages about a particular wellness event happening in that activewear store everyone loves? This is done through an app.
The beauty of placemaking is you’re not just creating a community for customers, but tenants too. Communicating tenant benefits within one single source of truth helps to build loyal tenants and loyal tenants are more likely to want to create loyal customers.
2. Understanding tenant needs
Understanding tenant needs is crucial to a community where everyone feels heard. It enables management teams to identify challenges or pain points while instilling a sense of purpose for tenants within their centres. This goes a long way to increasing the likelihood of mutually beneficial information sharing.
There are a range of ways to collect such information, ranging from regular surveys to feedback sessions and personal interactions. Once tenants feel that their needs are being listened to, and responded to, engagement with these initiatives will come.
3. Enabling responsive management capability
One of the most significant risks to community creation and tenant engagement arises when tenants stop sharing information. Communities can quickly crumble.
Once surveys are out and the votes are in, being seen to be listening and responding to tenant feedback is crucial. It’s also about being available for tenants at any given point.
In sectors such as retail, being physically available may not alway be possible. Centre management teams, for example, might have traditional 9-5 hours that are at odds with their retail tenants’ or leisure operators’ opening hours.
But being accessible is different. It’s now expected that management teams are able to provide tenants with access to information and responses to their questions 24/7 via specialist communication platforms. When done right, Chatbots and AI can become your saving grace and go a long way to building trust in management.
4. A cohesive and holistic approach to tenant engagement
A holistic and cohesive approach combines the needs of all – from asset or facilities management to engaging tenants and shoppers in the example of retail. It breaks down silos and enables all parties to be on the same page about updates, critical communications and events within one centre.
To enable this, everybody has to be brought in and pull together for the greater good of the community. Having a launch for your one single platform to manage this process with every stakeholder together is important so finding a partner who is invested in the centre’s success is a good starting point.
5. Delivering data-driven decisions that fuel actionable insight
Successful commercial real estate management relies on data-driven decision-making that delivers actionable insights for tenants and management alike. Organisations that are highly data-driven are three times more likely to report substantial improvements in decision-making compared to those relying less on data. This reliance on data helps in verifying, understanding, and quantifying decisions, leading to more confident and accurate outcomes. But managing such data, as well as persuading reluctant tenants to share it, can be challenging.
Combining anecdotal information with actual knowledge, such as footfall heat maps and sales data in the case of a perceived poorly performing store, for example, can help to deliver insights that can drive improvements. This improves business opportunities for your tenants and the centre and becomes another visible marker of your responsiveness.
6. Proactive management to boost NOI
Understanding tenant needs, being seen to respond to them and working together for the greater good of the wider asset with data-driven insights allows property managers to move to proactive management which can have a very positive impact on NOI.
Proactive management illustrates your willingness to go beyond the norm to help and engage tenants, rather than waiting for them to come to you.
An activated and engaged tenant community will be more willing to share data and to move further away from the historic them and us approach that plagued the industry for so long. That generates rewards as more stakeholders get involved in sharing information, providing feedback and becoming more proactive themselves.
7. Supporting tenants through clear and concise communication
A truly successful community comes when all parties are singing from the same hymn sheet which makes effective communication critical in activating your community and engaging your tenants. As well as a goal of shared success they must share the same values.
CRE owners can offer a range of support in addition to basic information needs, such as marketing assistance, training workshops and community-building activities. However, technology must be at the heart of this quest for communication, service requests and community engagement.
Actively supporting your tenants and providing the information they need is one of the most important things you can do as a landlord. As they thrive, so do you.
Creating an activated tenant community drives engagement and experience but importantly it’s cost-effective too. In a time of shrinking budgets and resources, your tenant community becomes additional eyes and ears on your property. Working together becomes a collaborative approach that delivers results. ‘Them and us’ becomes we.
And that’s positive for all.
Find out more about how Mallcomm can help support you in activating your community and creating an environment within which all stakeholders can thrive.