Unlocking the Power of Connect: Flowing Data in Commercial Real Estate

Introduction to Peak Property Performance Framework

Drew: Welcome back to the Peak Property Performance Podcast. It's me again. Hello, guys. It's Drew and Bill.

Bill: Welcome back. Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Drew: Yeah. Well, how have you been, Bill?

Bill: Good. Good. It's been a dull moment. I love life. So every day is an adventure. Life is a groove. I love to say it. You know that.

Clarify: The First Step in Data Integration

Drew: Yeah. I agree with you. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, in the spirit of Peak Property Performance and our five Cs that we're kind of going through here, I was just thinking, like, it seems like these things kind of crop up natively on a day-to-day basis where, you know, we're in and through these campuses with our customers and helping them uncover these opportunities. I mean, literally within the last hour, there was another one that popped up just, I mean, unanticipated, just because someone happens to be standing in the right place. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, it's time for a review over here. So it's all good.

Bill: It's all good. Like we talked about Clarify last episode, and I think Clarify never really stops, especially in a retrofit application.

Drew: That's a good point. You'll be able to. Clarify is straightforward. It's a matter of enforcing it. But you do get rogues out there, you know, for various reasons we'll talk about in the future, various realities. Clarify is a constant improvement, you know, quality improvement, the old days QIP, right? It's a constant improvement in a commercial real estate facility. You have to constantly clarify what is that, who owns it, who controls it, and where's the data.

Bill: Yeah. Well, yeah. So, I mean, we did a decent little coverage of Clarify last time, which was the first C in the five Cs. So we'll just run back through real quick. Those five Cs again are Clarify, Connect, Collect, Coordinate, and Control. So Clarify was the previous episode, and today we're going to talk a little bit about Connect. So again, let's start with that, just a general theme. Like what's a one-liner that kind of sets your mind on the Connect, the principle of Connect?

Connecting Building Systems for Enhanced Insights

Drew: And I would say, unify your building systems so data can flow and insights can grow. How's that for a rhyme?

Bill: I like rhymes.

Drew: Yeah, exactly. A lot of clients and prospects or anybody in the industry, whether they're clients or prospect doesn't matter, anybody in the industry talks to me about, well, we're already integrated. Our systems are all integrated. So, okay. If that's true, if you Clarify, you'll find out whether that's true or not, but assume it's true. You have systems that you're paying for or licensing from vendors, maybe they're talking, but they're not connected to you. If they are sharing data, but that it's a two-way street or a one-way street, these two pieces are sharing data, but you are not seeing it and you can't use it. You being the premise, the facility, and in that facility, you might have 10, 12, 15 other systems that could benefit from that data or your own control system.

Bill: Our advanced clients have their own business intelligence system. We call it building intelligence, but they have their own business intelligence system that does read those and overrides other systems. But if you're not connected, you don't have a copy of the data. So it's, are we physically connected? Probably because they're going to need, I don't know, internet or power or something. That's not the kind of connect we're talking about. We're talking about the data. Some of these systems are in the cloud and some of them are physical sitting on-prem, right? Or you've seen, or some of them are hybrid. Like maybe it's an NVR, a network video recorder that sits there and records the video security and then pumps it to the cloud as a backup. So they can see, they being the owner and all the management can see those recordings from anywhere. So that would be a hybrid, but do you have a copy of that data?

Drew: Exactly. That's why I'm at, in the previous episode, when we were talking about Clarify, I was challenging us to think about the notion of being inquisitive, like what's possible with all of these systems, kind of go through the systems, look at them where you can look at them or however it is that you get a company comfortable with them and making sure that you're accommodated or accounting for everything. And it's interesting that you mentioned video because that's what I was thinking just now in terms of connecting, right? It's a great example with cameras, surveillance camera systems, because you're right. Sometimes there's an NVR, a network video recorder on the premise. Sometimes there's not. I will say like some popular modern camera systems that are scaling really fast, we see, are all cloud-based. It's very impressive in terms of what they're doing programmatically, making it very lightweight in terms of traffic on your campus-wide network across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of high-definition cameras. Pretty cool stuff in the geeky weeds, which we won't go, but what makes me think about that is, yeah, there's obviously a ton of data flowing, but it's flowing through that system of cameras and then out to the cloud, whoever you're subscribing, I won't drop any names here, but I think that's a good question to bear in mind here is, where's that data headed? Is that data proprietary to that vendor or, I mean, it's your camera system, you're paying good money for this nice system. You bought the camera system and you're licensing the software to run it.

Challenges and Solutions in Data Flow

Bill: Yeah. That notion of data flowing, it's important. It's not just flowing for the purpose of a fully functioning camera system in this case. It's extremely important as a baseline, but that's only the start. You also want to make sure that that data is, it lives in an environment where you can leverage that data for the benefit of a collective decision based on other systems as well that can input. You know what I'm saying? It's not just about a video or an audio.

Drew: Well, for the data, I mean, I've had people say, well, you've heard them too, I don't want all the videos. It's too much data. Yeah. Well, back it out a little bit. There's all kinds of layers of data. These are emotion driven cameras. So it's a secondary occupancy tracker. What parts of my building are actually being used? Are the common areas being used? Are the outside areas being used? Do I want to light up this outdoor area? Is there enough traffic there to make it worth it for me by light up? I mean, put some wifi or cellular antenna out there. So yes, there's a tremendous amount of data around a video security system without looking at the actual video. Some people say, I don't want to track people. Well, yeah, you do. You don't want to track people as a person, John and Jane Doe. You want to track people as a body. Like am I servicing my tenants? Where are my tenants going? You'd be shocked to see how much data you can get from a video security system that would help make your tenant user experience better. But again, as Drew said, only if you have the data. So you own that data. Your building is generating that data. Are you connected and actually getting a copy of it? Do you have access to do it? Can you log in and see it? Sure. But I'm talking about, are you connected to that data?

Bill: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that's an all too common condition where the data is flowing, lowercase F, but it's flowing only for the purpose of that one system's capabilities. And sometimes those capabilities are great. Maybe we have security, but we see it with building management or building automation if it's a higher level. We see it with smart locks relative to, oh, it's integrated to our lease management system or our tenant facing, tenant experience platform. Okay. Those two systems undeniably are talking and you clinically own your data, but where's the data? Can you use it? Do you know? Do you actually know that that smart lock is working? Are you just trusting that the vendor is doing it and waiting for your tenant to complain if it's not working? How come you're not? It's your data. You paid for the smart lock, right? You paid for the building management system. How come you don't have a copy of the data? So after you clarify, then the next step is actually connect. You have to touch these, whether the touch is virtual or touch is physical. We address both of those. You have to connect.

Drew: Absolutely. Yep. I could see why this might feel like a daunting step, like, oh man, this is a big campus here. We've got a lot of data closets, let's say, a lot of systems. We have some, we have some inventory about some things that are on some of the walls and some of the closets. Like, yeah, there's a physical infrastructure involved in this, but it is something that can be sized. It is, it can be broken down into chunks. So that you can-

Bill: You're talking about in the book, there's plays, right? Do a couple of plays at a time. Don't try to conquer the world in a quarter or a year. Once you clarify, maybe the video security system is going to take nine months to get to, because the next step after connect is actually collect the data. Where does it go? Where do we do all that stuff? So maybe you run right to collect on one and the next one is stuck on connect for nine months or maybe connected one week and all of a sudden you're actually at coordinate, which is a further C.

Drew: Yeah. So these, once clarify is done and you actually know everything, you can move through these at a different pace. I'm waiting for a building management system before I can go to connect with automation. I mean, with video security. No, no, no, no. These are all by system. They're all separate.

Bill: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's, I mean, like a likely scenario here would be that one of the systems that's, you know, in the top five, let's say, of what you're moving through the seas on and you'd like to connect that so that you can capital F flow. You can get that capital F flow of data into these future, you know, seas of collect coordinate control. And as you do the research, you find that this make and model of thing, let me, let me reach out to vendor, you know, and as you start to, as we start to unwind that and figure out.

Bill: What is that asset? What is there? What is possible? You might find out that there's a hardware limitation or maybe a software limitation or something like that that prevents you from making that quick move into the next C, you know? It's like, you just, it's all part of the decision process for prioritizing, like, hmm, is it worthwhile to spend that time right now on this system to increase the capability of that system so that we can move through the Cs and have it join into that capital F flow of data? Or do we pause here on that system and focus on this one because of the potential upside of bringing its data into the mix?

Vendor Cooperation and System Limitations

Drew: We've seen systems, too, where the vendor, whether it's purchased or rented, or, you know, it's a service provider, say, sure, that's easy. Just plug a wire into that port or just give me your access point coordinates, or, you know, or here, we'll give you a, I'm not the programmer, but we'll give you the location on the internet where you can pull your data, right? Yeah. There is a algorithm here. And then we have some that are like, hmm, you gotta put a ticket in. Our engineering has to work with it. Oh, we'll give you a data set in TBS or they get a flat ASCII file data set, right? That's completely useless because it's two weeks old.

Solo episode: If the data is not current, how are you going to make any operating decisions? You being your property, of course, especially when it's automated. How can there be any business intelligent or data-driven insights if you can't get the data in close to real time? The connecting, it's all over the board. Sometimes it's super easy, shockingly easy. And sometimes for the tiniest little systems, it's incredibly hard. And it's because of the vendor. And then you'll also get a good idea of, does this vendor want to play ball with me or they just want to collect my money?

Bill: Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. Critically important. I mean, I always say when I come into these situations, it's like, again, there's a life cycle in this building. This building is likely to have a very long life cycle, but every individual system, then the vendor who implements that system has a different life cycle. And let's be honest, a shorter life cycle, right? And so as one system is handed off from this implementation company to that implementation company down the road, down the road, something that hasn't changed in that handoff necessarily is the thing that's hanging on the wall and its capability to bring that data into the flow. So it's a bigger picture of the life cycle of the buildings. That's what we always try to keep in mind.

Drew: Our teams document as thoroughly as possible what these systems are, because sometimes we don't necessarily know until this review, this digital infrastructure review occurs. So we do some pretty thorough documentation with you on itemizing what those things are and what those capabilities are as we move through that review. And maybe if it's hard to connect to, it's not worth the data. Or maybe you know that the contract's up in two years and you'll just upgrade it then. Or when you have more leverage with that vendor, or maybe you're going to recap the building or trade the building. A lot of commercial decisions drive which ones you spend the time and energy on, meaning ones being system, which ones, there's some easy plays, there's some harder plays, and then there's some big plays and some small plays.

Prioritizing System Upgrades for Maximum Impact

Solo episode: So we would go with originally the first three, we wanna say which ones have the least friction with medium to high impact. There's a grading score in that too, we tell you how to do that in the book. So there is a numerical grading score, which one's gonna have the biggest impact and which one's the hardest. And somewhere in between, there's one straightforward because we want your team to succeed. You don't wanna pick the hardest one first and it take a year and a half or fail. We don't want it to fail, not the first one. Some of them aren't gonna work, honestly, but the ROI and all the other ones make it worth it. So you just keep knocking them off.

Bill: So we pick the first couple of plays that are gonna work, engage the right team members. And these are the rest of the Cs, of course, but Connect is critical. And a lot of times Connect could change the strategy. Like we're gonna go for that, ooh, wait a second, we thought it was easy and it's not. Yeah, maybe we'll shift it over there. Yep, yeah. Back to that next time, next quarter. Yeah. Something like that, let's get some NOI flow in first.

Drew: Yeah, and those results, those results are motivating. You know, when you're actually attaining results in the system where you deem as, hey, it's a high priority, and it looks like we're able to move through this Connect to move onward into Collect for the next phase. Like, let's do this, look at the difference. We now have data flowing.

Transitioning to Collect: Building the Right Team

Solo episode: Yeah, well, that's a good transition to Collect because Collect is not just about data, it's about the right team members that are gonna help you make this a win inside of your organization and the vendor base you deal with. You know, we're talking about Collect data, but we're talking about Collect the team. Yeah. And after that, we'll get into coordinating all of those.

Bill: Awesome. Well, I mean, that's probably the perfect jumping off point. I think that's it for Connect. And yeah, thanks everybody for joining in, and we'll see you on the next one where we'll dig into what it means to Collect. As always, don't forget to like and follow and subscribe. Appreciate your time, everybody. Thanks all.