Exploring the Future of Commercial Real Estate in the Digital Age.
In our latest Proptech Panel, we explored in depth the evolving landscape of commercial real estate, grappling with hybrid work models, digital transformations, and the imperative for smarter buildings.
Here are the three key takeaways that are reshaping how we think about and interact with commercial spaces:
- Hybrid Work Adaptation: Addressing the challenges of hybrid work models, efficient deliveries, and enhanced security in commercial real estate.
- AI in Commercial Real Estate: Enhances support for individuals, optimizes logistics, and leverages data analytics for improved asset management and decision-making.
- Network Infrastructure Need: Rising demand for advanced network infrastructure to fulfill strict cybersecurity standards and ensure seamless tenant connectivity.
The insights from their discussion underscore the critical need for innovation in the commercial real estate sector, highlighting the potential of technology to revolutionize how we interact with our workspaces.
A huge thank you to our event partner Stone & Chalk for sponsoring this webinar and to our amazing panel:
- Mosstyn Howell from UbiPark
- Chris Mason from MobileDock
- Sean Lucas from Essensys
- Carolyn Trickett from JLL Spark Global Ventures
Transcript
Carolyn Trickett
02:46
All right, welcome everybody today’s prop tech panel. I’m Carolyn Trickett. I’m a growth principal at JLL Spark Global Ventures and I’m also on the board member at the Proptech Association of Australia and this is the first time that I’m hosting the proptech panel. It’s very exciting. I’m here in the JLL offices today, which is on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. In the spirit of reconciliation, Proptech Association of Australia acknowledges the traditional custodians of the country throughout Australia and their connections to the land, sea and community. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present and emerging, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples joining us today. I’d like to thank the fabulous support of Stone and Chalk who make these panels possible.
Carolyn Trickett
03:42
For those of you who don’t know, Stone and Chalkwas founded as a not for profit in Sydney in 2015 to help fintech startups commercialize and grow from. 40 startups in 2015 now has hundreds of startups in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide covering all areas of emerging technology, including proptech. So let me start by introducing my guests on the panel today. We’ve got Sean Lucas, who’s the Asia Pacific head of sales at Essensys. Hi, Sean.
Sean Lucas
04:16
Thanks for having me. Great to be part of the panel and discussion today.
Carolyn Trickett
04:19
Thank you. We’ve got Chris Mason, who’s the chief operating officer at best train group, also known as MobileDock.
Chris Mason
04:27
Good morning, Carolyn. And good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming along.
Carolyn Trickett
04:32
It is afternoon here in Sydney, isn’t it? Afternoon in Melbourne as well?
Chris Mason
04:39
Not the afternoon until you’ve had your lunch. So if anyone has had lunch.
Carolyn Trickett
04:42
All right, we’ll stick with that one. Mosstyn Howell, then also based in Melbourne, founder and CEO at UbiPark. Good morning.
Mosstyn Howell
04:53
Good afternoon, Carolyn. Thanks for having me.
Carolyn Trickett
04:57
Thanks, guys. All right, so let’s get stuck into today’s topic, which is all about enabling commercial buildings in the digital age. I hear a lot of buz lines in the industry. Things along the lines of real estate is slow to adopt technology or the property industry is averse to change. But this is a sweeping generalization. I’ve been in this industry for over 15 years and during that time I’ve watched firsthand the commercial real estate landscape undergo a remarkable transformation. In response to the rapid advancement of digital technologies. Commercial buildings have evolved beyond mere physical spaces and have become intelligent, interconnected ecosystems. From the integration of smart building systems to the rise of flexible workspaces and the increasing focus on wellness and sustainability, the digital age has fueled a paradigm shift in how commercial buildings are designed, operated and experienced.
Carolyn Trickett
06:01
In parallel, human behavior has changed dramatically over the last two decades with the introduction of the Internet, mobile connectivity, smartphones and cloud computing. And every year we as humans adapt to more services and facilities being available in the palm of our hand. And as a result, every year our expectations continue to increase. Along with that, ecommerce is creating changes in behavior. We’re ordering everything online, having it delivered wherever you are. And what does that mean from a logistics point of view? There’s change all around us. Then hybrid working brings another layer onto our expectations. I want to choose which days I work in the office, and when I do go, I want it to be a frictionless experience, completely connected and seamless. And some of us would also prefer a selection of different offices to go to.
Carolyn Trickett
07:01
And when I choose one of those, I want everything to work smoothly as well. So all this has created a new set of challenges for commercial buildings. We’re going to explore some of those challenges today and introduce you to an intriguing mix of technology solutions to address them. Each solution contributes differently to making the commercial built environment a more efficient and productive place to operate. So with all these layers of change, let’s start by highlighting some of the challenges that commercial building owners and occupiers still face, and often face more of in the world of 2024. Sean, can you give us your view on some of the challenges that you see in your area?
Sean Lucas
07:52
Yeah, sure thing. Thanks, Carolyn. So you’ve summarized very well there and touched on a lot of those sort of key underlying sort of issues and changes that obviously the broader industry is experiencing. So to that point, I think what we at a census do is sort of look to support our clients in an increasingly sort of fragmented world of work and sort of across the commercial real estate spectrum. Obviously, a lot of these trends were, as you said, already very much in place, but were just simply accelerated post Covid. So it’s our view that we’re going to continue to see that develop into a world of sort of extreme personalization as far as the office is concerned.
Sean Lucas
08:44
So I think you mentioned earlier sort of not just the binary option to work from the office or from home, but perhaps a network of locations that might suit those different needs. I myself will do two or three days in our office, a day or two at home, but oftentimes a day at a client site. And that can be anywhere from Sydney, CBD, or somewhere closer to home. So that’s exactly sort of the world in which we’re supporting our clients sort of manage and navigate through and try to provide the technology that better enables that.
Carolyn Trickett
09:21
Thank you. And for a very different angle on that, Chris, can you explain challenges that you’re seeing in your line of work?
Chris Mason
09:31
Yeah. Thanks, Carolyn. The challenge we see is the fact that there are more deliveries coming into more locations. So one of the things that was absolutely true during COVID was everyone got into the world of online shopping. Now, online shopping has translated into online things coming into commercial buildings. And with the numbers of deliveries coming into commercial buildings and the restrictions on street parking for commercial vehicles, particularly within our big cities, the challenges of actually getting stuff into a building becomes harder and harder. So one of the things that Mobiledoc does is to effectively schedule the arrival of each of those vehicles so as to effectively remove congestion. Interestingly, our business has kind of got two halves, one in the commercial real estate section and one in what would be known otherwise as the industrial real estate section.
Chris Mason
10:20
So we’re helping on both sides of the equation in so much of how do the shippers of the product actually manage the inflow and outflow of their own warehouses? And how do the receivers, sometimes not quite willing receivers of products in commercial buildings kind of get all of that stuff in and out? So a very vibrant space.
Carolyn Trickett
10:39
Thank you. And mosten, I think the challenges that you’re going to describe are an interesting mix and angle on the two challenges that Sean and Chris have just highlighted. What can you tell us?
Mosstyn Howell
10:54
Yes, thanks, Carolyn. I think there’s probably two main challenges we’re hearing from asset owners. The first is around helping tenants get staff back into the office. Especially in a world that doesn’t see us in the office five days a week anymore, that’s not normal. So getting that flexibility and the flexibility to have a car parking space that maybe the CEO isn’t using or a CFO isn’t using on that day. And the other area I think is probably more topical in the current environment is around security and having everything integrated into the current access control systems. Having that as the single source of truth, and having that as the way that gets people in and out of the asset.
Carolyn Trickett
11:43
Right. So that paints a pretty challenging landscape for a lot of different commercial buildings, which is why we’ve put this panel together today to talk about some solutions that have come up in the prop tech world that help asset owners to address these. So let’s get stuck into a bit more detail about that. Sean, can you explain a little bit more about the Essensys solution and how it helps to create Internet connectivity for people in commercial buildings?
Sean Lucas
12:15
Yeah, sure thing. So at Ascensus, we primarily help automate the management of tenants and digital services and spaces across our clients’portfolios and deliver a network of connected locations. So we do this via two main products. We have our census cloud, which is our global private cloud solution, provides enterprise grade, as you just mentioned there, Carolyn, enterprise grade, resilient, secure connectivity to help support sort of smarter buildings and spaces, which we all know, it’s all trending in one direction. And then our census platform, which is the software interface that automates the complex processes and all that’s involved with the back end of managing those occupiers and provisioning the it services required.
Carolyn Trickett
13:06
Do you think that improved digital infrastructure in commercial buildings is essential for the management and operation of flex and multi tenant spaces?
Sean Lucas
13:18
Yeah, definitely. And I guess it always has been. But I think that the key change as moisten and yourself have just alluded to there, is that the nature of the space and how it’s being utilized has just changed so significantly. Over the last four years. So in a world where hybrid is sort of the norm, and it’s quite hard to sort of now quantify the utilization across a particular asset, let alone a portfolio of locations. It’s all those moving parts and the complexity that sort of flex and hybrid and these working patterns is delivering. And so that core infrastructure and the ability to sort of manage the spaces, as moisten’s mentioned there too, the security that sort of needs to underpin it all, who’s in the building, when and where and for how long.
Sean Lucas
14:08
So all of those challenges sort of culminate in what we would suggest requires more tech enabled solutions and that digital infrastructure to be really meeting those needs.
Carolyn Trickett
14:21
Is the census really a solution just for co working spaces, or has it got a bigger use case?
Sean Lucas
14:27
Yeah, great question. So we sort of grew up in that serviced office era, I guess we’ve been around for 17 years now, and the sort of co working of all the boring version of coworking, I guess you could say it’s maybe being a little bit unkind, but service offices and co working, but increasingly it’s sort of flexible space in the most generic and sort of widely used version of that term.
Chris Mason
14:52
Right?
Sean Lucas
14:52
So amenity spaces, meeting rooms, any on demand spaces within a building all the way through to plug and play spec suites, for instance. So lots of our clients now recognize the fact that in a sort of leasing market or an environment where the lease tenure is perhaps getting a little bit shorter on average, and tenants are expecting agility, not just within the sort of built environment, but also the technology, they’re providing fully plug and play and connected spaces to help meet that demand.
Carolyn Trickett
15:26
I was in one of JLL’s co working spaces last week, actually, we newly opened one and I was given my little guest Wi Fi and noticed that a census was in place. So can you explain more about that practical side of managing a co working space and why the solution is.
Sean Lucas
15:46
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I’m glad you. I hope you had a seamless experience, Carolyn. Lastly, seamless. There you. Yeah, really the demand from enterprise users. So I think going back not that long ago, right, you could sort of get by with a fairly basic network infrastructure and technology that was underpinning all of that. But increasingly, and there was obviously a couple of fairly high profile instances of cybersecurity issues last year, increasingly, landlords and operators are recognizing the fact that they need to meet the sort of most stringent enterprise demand, and that has downstream benefits to everyone, right? Whether you’re a boutique law firm or a sole trader, you might as well have the best, most resilient sort of solution in place to meet everyone’s needs.
Sean Lucas
16:44
In that example you gave there last week, it’s then how efficiently and seamless can you make that experience from the end user’s perspective? So in your case, obviously, we’re a guest in that building for a number of hours in an afternoon. And that then also goes to say that when you’re onboarding a tenant with multiple users, say even 5002 hundred users who will be moving into a given space, you want to make that as frictionless as possible, whereby the person turns up to their new office and opens their laptop and clicks a button and they’re securely connected and ready to go. So that’s sort of where we focus our attention and support our clients with that.
Carolyn Trickett
17:30
And have you got another example that you could share with us, Sean, about the type of client setup that really needs a census to make things work smoothly?
Sean Lucas
17:42
Yeah, sure. So I think one of the best examples, I guess, from late last year was a client of ours who has a flex offering sort of more akin to, I guess, co working, but it’s a landlord that’s offering it, and they had a tenant grow, I think, from circuit ten staff to about 40 in a very short period of time, which is always a great problem to have. And the flex floors were actually fully occupied. So without a solution, without the sort of latent infrastructure or the core infrastructure already in place, in a normal sort of scenario, they probably would have lost that tenant into the outside market. But as a result of what they could do, they had a spec suite available, fully fitted, ready to go, and they just simply connected that space.
Sean Lucas
18:30
And so I think the client, now, our team was probably fairly stressed through this process, I must admit, but they had signed the agreement, I think, sort of later on a Thursday or Friday, and they’d moved in the following Monday. So that sort of onboarding cycle or that, I guess, speed to market that you can help deliver is sort of really key as to what the market is now, where the expectations, I guess, are shifting in the market.
Carolyn Trickett
19:00
When you say that they were able to move in that following Monday, that’s the ability to have every person walk in the door and get connected to the Internet and all the devices in the space as soon as they walk.
Sean Lucas
19:14
In on their own private network. And so they’re already tenants within the building, right within that flex space, but the spec suite. So one week it didn’t have connectivity, the next week it did. They moved down level 20. It was down to a lower floor where the suite was. And to your point, the printers, the Google Chromecast, all of the security devices all connected, and the end users sort of getting to work that next day as well.
Carolyn Trickett
19:45
I remember the days when the printer was a completely different network and you could never know if you were going to get it to work.
Sean Lucas
19:51
One person in the office that could use it properly and they got badgered by everyone else. I was wondering why.
Carolyn Trickett
20:00
It’s great how that stuff’s connected these days. Cool, thanks for that, Sean. Chris, let’s move on to you because you’ve presented a pretty interesting angle on digitizing buildings. The system that MobileDock has built is a bit of an air traffic control system, really, for transportation in and out of commercial buildings. Can you tell us a bit about your background, how you got involved in this space?
Chris Mason
20:28
Yeah, thanks, Carolyn. So I’ve been with best friend group now for close to ten years, believe it or not, after a career in primarily big companies. So I was in the technology side of Telstra and also PwC. Prior to that, we came across MobileDock, for us, has kind of evolved out of a problem that were trying to solve, which was how do we help some of our customers solve the issue of how do they get stuff into warehouses? And the challenge there is that a whole bunch of trucks kind of typically arrive all at the same time. Now, if you’re running that warehouse and you’ve got operators in that warehouse and staff, and you’ve got stuff to put away, it’s not very helpful to have either one or 100 trucks arrive on any given morning.
Chris Mason
21:06
So we worked with them years and years ago on the basis of, well, those things should be scheduled. Right. There should be some process of the site itself having visibility of what’s going to arrive when. And from that we realized that the process of being able to schedule that is actually relatively quite straightforward. But more importantly, the problem doesn’t exist just in warehouses. It operates right through cities in a whole range of different environments, and doesn’t just operate in Melbourne and Sydney. It’s actually a problem globally. So from that we got all excited and kind of drove ourselves nuts drawing up different kind of schematics in relation to how it is the mobile ops solution might work.
Carolyn Trickett
21:48
When I’m working with proptech startups, I love the backstory of how the solution came to life. And often it is someone working in a related area feeling a pain point, who then comes up with that idea. Love it. And so can you outline a little bit more detail about MobileDock and how it’s used and who actually uses it.
Chris Mason
22:12
Yeah, for sure. So the easiest way to think of MobileDockk, and we describe it as an automated loading dock management system. And most people at that stage, their eyes glows over and they go, what does all that mean? We go, think of how an airport works with planes. Right. And your analogy around an airport is a very apt one. Planes arrive at an airport in accordance with a schedule which is set by the airport itself. Now, that’s managed through air traffic control. And what that does is it ensures that all the planes don’t arrive at the same time. Now, when you think about why that is, you think there’s pretty good reasons for that.
Chris Mason
22:45
Now, of course, as a traveling, as part of the traveling public, you know, the experience of taking off and then being sent to do laps around Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane or any other city, because there isn’t a slot available for you to park on the ground. Now, if all the planes arrived and there was nowhere to park, you’d imagine the chaos that goes on in the world of ground logistics, though. So ground logistics being the deliveries of something into a warehouse or an opera center or an art center or a shopping center or a hospital or a convention center, we work on the basis of who gets there first wins. And that’s pretty much the mentality of the way the drivers work.
Chris Mason
23:21
So what we do with MobileDock, is we work on the basis of, well, let’s take the principles of air traffic control in so much that the site itself can firstly determine who can land at their site. So there’s an approval process to work out who do you want to actually come, and then not just when do you want them to come, but where do you want them to park. So, of course, you want the big planes to park where the big planes go, and you want the little ones to park where the little ones go, and you want to have. Not all planes are as important as one another. So our rules engine allows people to determine what’s more important to them in terms of those particular deliveries.
Carolyn Trickett
24:00
If you’ve got all this work happening in the background to schedule all these deliveries, what then happens? What happens if a driver shows up late? Do they get kicked to the back of the queue?
Chris Mason
24:10
Yeah. So, look, one of the first things we realized was that, of course, drivers are drivers, and traffic is traffic in the world of kind of perfect scheduling is kind of one thing, but then that meets operational reality on the other side. So we worked very hard at solving what I described early on as the doctor’s problem. And the doctor’s problem is the one of a doctor has 5 minutes appointments. And if those five minute appointments start running late, if you get an appointment at 04:00 in the afternoon, you’ll wait for an hour because they’ve been exactly 1 minute late all the way during the course of the day. So the way we do things with mobile, doc, is we say we allow the system to calculate the time of the booking.
Chris Mason
24:48
We don’t ever let the drivers tell you how long they need to be on your site. We calculate that for them based upon the rules. We then allow a period of buffer time because even though an appointment may be, say, for 11:00, we know categorically that driver won’t be there at 11:00. They’ll be there 10 minutes inside of that, which is totally fine because the buffer process will allow enough kind of natural leeway in relation to how it is they are going to arrive. Now.
Chris Mason
25:17
Of course, if they arrive at 09:00 in the morning or 03:00 in the afternoon, it’s then to the site to determine whether or not, firstly, they like their driver, whether or not, and importantly, they’ll have a visibility of what’s going to happen at 09:10 or at 03:10 so when they do arrive at one of those times, they can go, actually, we’re going to be full, totally full. So you bugger off and come back later. Or actually, because we like you can come in and park. But.
Carolyn Trickett
25:43
There is a like factor, isn’t there? One day it’ll all be controlled by AI. So good luck to drivers then. All right. And could you just give us an example, practical example of a really interesting use case? One of your clients.
Chris Mason
26:03
Yeah. So look, a couple and kind of changes between the world of commercial real estate and industrial real estate, but from a commercial side, Brangaru. Most people know the Brangaru location in Sydney. They have underground loading docks that about 75 spaces underground. They take over 10,000 deliveries underground in any given month. Now, if you’d imagine one of the defining elements of the Brangaru precinct is the amenity on the street level is such that you get a large amount of kind of open space. You don’t get a sense that there’s 10,000 vehicles arriving every month in and out of that site. So one of the things we’ve done with Brangaru is not just help them schedule those deliveries coming into the building, but make sure that they operate in a way that kind of maximizes their sense of amenity for the location.
Chris Mason
26:49
But we’ve also taken it to a point of now where it’s virtually fully automated with the use of QR code readers, license plate recognition systems and boom gates and integration through into their building management systems and into contractor induction systems. So really quite a sophisticated process. All operating in the basis of how do they make the site more efficient.
Carolyn Trickett
27:13
Make a note of those few other types of systems. We can have another panel on those later this year. Cool, thank you. I think everyone can probably imagine the scale and the size of a precinct like barangaroo where you’ve got so many buildings and so much interconnected space underneath. So Mosstyn, giving your angle on all of this, we’re still talking about cars and deliveries. Can you give us a bit of a rundown on your three decades in this parking space?
Mosstyn Howell
27:50
Well, Carolyn, I think I always say to people that the good people get move on from parking and I’m still here. So I think that’s one thing I could say about myself. But I’ve had a great three decades or it’s 26 od years now in the parking industry in a variety of roles. So originally as an operator. So I’ve ran parking in properties that asset owners and seen that firsthand, experienced it. My first role in parking was probably not really overly technical. It was stamping early bird tickets on top of non evict parade in two degrees weather and pouring rain in Melbourne. So obviously things have moved on from there. I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to work in New Zealand as well.
Mosstyn Howell
28:39
And I’ve seen that and also move back from the operating into a technology hardware sales role, selling large parking solutions to the likes of Westfield and airports and large commercial property owners like Dexas and Langlease and the like. So it’s been a variety and that sort of forward into what we in creating Ubi park and what we’re doing today in the digital space.
Carolyn Trickett
29:09
I think I mentioned this a little bit with Chris as well, that in the commercial proptech space you really do find complex problems and often people that have worked in that space for many years who’ve seen those pain points, that are the ones that end up coming up with the solutions to solve those really complex problems. So tell us a little bit more about the concept of a digital parking platform. How does that contribute to the overall tenant experience within a building?
Mosstyn Howell
29:41
Yeah, I think parking as a service is probably the best way to put it. It’s putting parking as a service into what is actually operating the building. And we’re doing a lot of work with smart property apps like equiem and host, where we’re integrating the parking in as a service. So the same app that you’re using to buy the coffee in the morning, or book a meeting room, or get some catering for your board meeting, you’re also doing your parking transaction from as well. That’s probably the main thing. And I think the other thing we touched on in the challenges is everyone wants this integrated into the security system now. So having it seamlessly working with the credentials that people already have.
Mosstyn Howell
30:28
So whether it’s passcard or an app or another credential to get in and out of the property, then using that same credential, or being able to add things like license plate, which is more specific to the parking experience, really seamlessly, but also know that they’re here and the security system knows who’s in the building at any particular time.
Carolyn Trickett
30:55
Concept of mixing up the parking really does change the value of that space, doesn’t it? I know for many years the parking space was just reserved for the head honchos of an organization. If you’ve been there long enough, you’re earning enough money, you got to have one of those very precious parking spaces attached to the lease. So how does that then make the spaces more available and valuable for tenants?
Mosstyn Howell
31:26
I think you’ve touched on a really big point there and what we’re seeing, so in Australia especially and around the world, that parking is tied to status. So where you are sitting in your role and your role be tied to what Covid has done and hybrid working has done, it’s actually allowed us to get more people in the office, in the company, back into a car park actually in the building. And that’s actually helping with the emotion and incentivizing people to actually come back into the office. So I think that’s really a big piece of what we’re seeing now is if we can get, not the CEO or the CFO or the C suite that ordinarily had that, but the next level, the level below them, access to that car park, that’s helping.
Carolyn Trickett
32:14
Can you talk us through some of the practicalities of what a user can achieve when they’ve got UbiPark in their building? What are the options to them in terms of allowing other people to use that space?
Mosstyn Howell
32:28
Yeah, so what were seeing straight after Covid, and even now we’re seeing occupancy rates, utilization rates of 30% to 35% across our CBD corporate commercial properties. And with a solution like UbI park, we’re able to actually get that up to 98, 99% and be able to share those spaces. So you’re getting better utilization of the space. A lot of our customers are using it as a tenant experience and putting back to the tenant, and we’ve got others that are actually using it to create more revenue through the property.
Carolyn Trickett
33:08
It just really turns it on its head, doesn’t it? Turns parking into a shared economy for the right building.
Mosstyn Howell
33:17
Very similar to Sean. Sorry, Carol, I’m going to cut you off there, but it’s very similar to what Sean’s doing. We’re doing taking the same concepts and running that through the parking operation with our experience. And you have the ability to lock it down and just share it with. So if you’ve got a set of bays as a company in the property, you could just lock it down to sharing it with your staff. If you got oversupply still from there, well, we can share it with just other tenants in the building. And then if you’ve still got oversupply, then maybe there’s an opportunity to get public parking in and create some revenue out of that space. So it’s very flexible. But what we’re finding is the revenue is not as big a motivator as it is for the tenant experience.
Carolyn Trickett
34:02
And so you mentioned you touched a little bit on security. So in the simplest terms, right, Ubi park platform needs to talk to the boom gates, right? Let people in and out. So is that a challenge? Like, how do you get through that process of working out how to build those integrations?
Mosstyn Howell
34:24
Yes, we’ve done over 130 integrations now with all sorts of different systems. And that’s probably one of the tricky parts of our business, is getting integration with the likes of Gallagher in a range with infinity and integrity. Genitech, all the different parking equipments that you’ve got out of Europe, Skeetar shot and Bachmann designa and the likes, they’re all got their own challenges. But what we’ve been lucky enough is we’ve really got a templated process now to take on a new integration that rolls this out really quickly for us. And there’s good and bad bits around different technologies, depending on what the requirements are and how old that actually is. But what we’re seeing now is definitely a push from the asset owner, which is then putting pressure on the access control companies to actually make this easier.
Mosstyn Howell
35:15
And I’ve got a property we’re working on at the moment with JLL Carolyn in Melbourne that not only are we integrating into the integrity, which is the building access system. But we’re also integrating into a smart property app created for one of the new tenants. And they’re all working together. So we’re sort of being a bit of a middleware in between those systems and activating the boom gates from there.
Carolyn Trickett
35:41
Even though these three solutions that we’re talking about today have got quite different use cases, it’s always integration that makes it more valuable in the overall ecosystem. One of the things I really like about my role is I get to talk to lots of different prop techs, and I often introduce them to each other. And that actually happened because of this panel. When were doing our prep session the other day, we came across a scenario where Chris and Mosstyn are thinking that their solutions might be able to work together. Without mentioning too many details. Chris, can you shed a little light on that one for us?
Chris Mason
36:18
Well, I certainly can, but I’ll look for Mosstyn to look into that as well. And I think the thing that both Mosstyn and I are looking at, from a point of view, from parking, because, yes, we’re kind of at the commercial kind of end of the delivery, as opposed to kind of the more tenant end of the delivery process. But it’s all about the efficiency of the site itself. There is a constraint in so much. There’s only so many spaces at times. If they’re not, you will utilize. That’s really sort of an issue for the site itself.
Carolyn Trickett
36:54
This is a retail scenario, isn’t it?
Chris Mason
36:56
Yeah, it is. Austin, do you want to take, I.
Mosstyn Howell
37:02
Think, Carolyn, to start off with, as soon as you introduce me to Seand Chris, I was looking for angle, and I think there’s angle with both Chris and Sean for the uv park technology. So you’re definitely looking on where your solution may be able to help. And look, we’re getting lots of inquiries around loading docks. And the problem that Chris explained in our meeting the other day was stuff I’m hearing from asset owners that we’re working with. One wants us to build a loading dock solution. I think that’d be silly. Where I can probably just add Chris’s solution directly in. I think there’s definitely lots of opportunity for our solutions to work together.
Chris Mason
37:42
Yeah, great. I think that sort of comes to also the point of the fact that the issue of integrations between all these individual solutions is prevalent. And I think the thought that we had from some customers to say, hey, does your solution do everything? We go, no, our solution does this really well. And we can talk to, and quite deliberately by design, we said, well, we’re going to build a best in class loading dock management system that can then talk. It can talk to boom gates, it can talk to LPR systems, it can talk to other forms of bookings or other forms of building management systems.
Chris Mason
38:16
And I think that is from a technology development point of view, the thing that we are big on promoting with the customers that we’re talking to is the look for the best in class solution and look for the level of integration capability. And with modern APIs and the like, those integrations aren’t as scary as they might seem.
Mosstyn Howell
38:37
That’s a really important point, Carolyn, that Chris has just made. I think a lot of people will say to us, can we just tack in a loading dock booking solution on top of the technology you’ve got? We’re really focused on solving one problem where Chris is actually solving a completely different problem and it needs a different set of skills. Yes, we could adapt, but it’s definitely not going to have the same outcome as what would be if we actually collaborated.
Chris Mason
39:07
And with the ability. Yeah, the ability to sort of. Now, we’ve integrated MobileDock directly into some of our customers concierge apps within their buildings themselves. So the tenants within the building would be able to access, presumably kind of uber park for the purposes of their customer parking, but in order to track their commercial deliveries. In terms of, has my box arrived downstairs yet? They can see visibility of that directly through the same app. So the world is really our oyster in relation to how we think about solving some of those problems.
Carolyn Trickett
39:44
All right, so I’ve seen a few juicy questions coming through on the chat, and I know we’ve got our backup team having a little look at those coming through. I’ll flag the first one. Actually, I think this one’s for you, Chris. What are the environmental benefits of better timing for dock management? Is there a carbon benefit attached?
Chris Mason
40:12
Yeah, there definitely is. And that’s one of the things we talk about insomnunch that. Firstly, one of the things we saw very early on with MobileDockk was the carriers themselves who were making the bookings became very big at sort of picking up the fact that they were sending multiple trucks to the same location during a day. So one of the things they approached us around was, well, hey, we’re sending two or three or four trucks to make three or four different types of deliveries during the day. How can we use moldoc to kind of aggregate those solutions such that we’re only sending a single vehicle? Now, given that we charge on delivery we kind of went, whoa, we don’t really like that.
Chris Mason
40:46
But of course it’s a really good thing, right, because you got a truck that’s coming in that might be making deliveries, particularly in a sort of a retail or into a know if a vehicle from toll or Australia Post comes in, it’s making multiple deliveries and that’s a very good thing. Instant is reducing the numbers of vehicles on the road by having the appointments scheduled. So the drivers know that at that proverbial 11:00 they’ve got a guaranteed car park. They’re not circling around the building, they’re not idling out the front of the building. So of course there are direct reductions in relation to the amount of kilometers, the amount of time which is being driven around as well.
Carolyn Trickett
41:27
Very good points. And it’s not really a revenue stream, is it, to charge per delivery?
Chris Mason
41:34
No, what we’re looking at is that kind of how can we obviously make the site more efficient through the use of the technology and kind of bring value of. You’d be surprised when you go into buildings at times the scale of some of these loading docks. There’s a lot of utilized space. So that provides the ability for us to utilize that space or otherwise give that underutilized space back to the landlord to say, hey, do something else with that. Re let that space because you don’t need it for the purposes of parking.
Carolyn Trickett
42:09
Another question from the audience. Mosstyn, I’ll ask you to address this one first. How will AI and self driving vehicles impact the world of parking?
Mosstyn Howell
42:20
Yeah, I might start with self driving vehicles. Ubi park always had an eye as were formed around what was going to happen with autonomous vehicles. So we believe that the car park of today will become a service station of the future and that cars that are driving around will need somewhere to be stored, charged, cleaned, serviced tires changed, that type of thing. And I’m sure our governments aren’t going to let self driving cars just roam aimlessly around the streets. So we do think there’s going to be important role for our technology to play in telling the self driving car where and how to get to those sort of locations to get what they need. With AI, it’s probably a bigger question. It’s something we’re really looking at from a strategy point of view on where we can run AI through our platform.
Mosstyn Howell
43:15
And there’s a whole heap of options that we’re looking at. How do we support people better through AI? How do we make it easier for the end user to use or the staff or the tenant to actually use the solution through AI. We’ve just released a partnership with an AI dashboard company that’s analyzing all the data coming through all the different parking and other systems from the building to actually analyze out and show parking operators and asset owners how to actually better utilize the asset and actually make better decisions around rates and things like that. So that’s been a really exciting part for us. And I can just see AI definitely taking off through the next sort of era and future of parking tech.
Carolyn Trickett
44:05
Intriguing concept, isn’t it, that the parking system might talk to the car and that the car might go off and service itself in different locations just as long as it gets back in time. And Chris, what about your side of things? Is there going to be AI involved between MobileDock and the planning systems of your big carriers that you’re interacting with?
Chris Mason
44:31
Yeah, I would like to think there certainly will be. One of the things we can track through some of the metadata through MobileDock is that we can see individual carriers planning routes for their drivers. So they’re starting going to one location which is controlled by MobileDock, and then half an hour later going to the next one and then to the next one and then to the next one and then leaving. Right. So that ability to kind of plan those routes and you think of, well, if that was an autonomous vehicle and a number of our mobile customers use mobile for the purposes of scheduling the arrival of the vehicles to pick up product to take them out of their sites.
Chris Mason
45:10
So think of companies like Coca Cola or a snack brands who are kind of building up product themselves. Once they’ve got it ready to go, it needs to be shuffled out. They don’t want to have the trucks arriving half an hour early or 3 hours later than when the product is ready and available on the dock. So they’re getting the efficiency that they know where it’s going. If those sites are controlled via MobileDockk, we can have guaranteed slots for that truck to arrive.
Chris Mason
45:38
So it is a little futuristic in its thinking that it’s not impossibly far away to imagine a world whereby a driverless truck in the middle of the night could be leaving a warehouse and going to a known location and parking at a designated time and then going to another location and perhaps then returning back to that distribution center and rescheduling.
Carolyn Trickett
46:00
Itself if it gets stuck in a traffic jam.
Chris Mason
46:05
One would hope so. These are kind of futuristic things, but they’re not as we think about what’s happened with AIO, the course of even the last twelve or 18 months, it’s kind of coming up and down. So it’s source of wonderment.
Carolyn Trickett
46:22
Sean, can you elaborate on how AI might be impacting the world that a census works?
Sean Lucas
46:31
It’s, well, if nothing else, it’s just the quantum of data and compute power that’s going to be needed in the next sort of near term, right? Sort of the next two, three, five years. And I think the big trends that you mentioned at the start, Carolyn, around sort of the mobility changes and some of the key drivers of new user behavior, cloud computing is probably almost top of the list, I think, as far as that decoupling of work from a place, so work being the office or where you went to get work done. So I think AI is going to increasingly just continue to drive the expectation that where those applications can deliver benefit.
Sean Lucas
47:19
So not just used for the purposes of saying you’ve got an AI enabled building that actually sort of drives some outcomes, and preferably those being the end user outcomes or the efficiencies that both Mosstyn and Chris have touched on as well. We see that becoming sort of almost half a course. And then similarly, through our systems and our software, we’re doing something very similar to, I think, what Chris has just mentioned there as far as the data and analytics and our data lake just has such a depth of insights available. Again, they need to be sort of scrubbed and presented in a digestible way, but we’ve got sort of insights down to the packet level, and that can start to tell you how users are interacting with those spaces. On what basis?
Sean Lucas
48:10
Again, a lot of the efficiencies that both Mosstyn and Chris are trying to deliver on behalf of their clients.
Chris Mason
48:15
Right.
Sean Lucas
48:16
If a tenant’s going to say they need half the space at renewal, there’s a premium for the flexibility that they may then require moving forward, whether that be meeting rooms or event spaces or some sort of agile spaces thereafter. So it’s sort of helping our clients sort of get their heads around all that and then manage that in the most sort of efficient and adaptable ways possible.
Carolyn Trickett
48:42
Now, given that we’re talking commercial property, I’d like to pose one last question to our panelists, which is about the dollars. Sean, we’ll stick with you for a minute. Can you explain to the audience, what is it about your product that could either help a commercial asset owner save money or earn money, or both?
Sean Lucas
49:06
Or both in an ideal world? Yeah, I think what I just mentioned there, it’s really about enabling and driving further efficiency. And actually, right from the sort of outset, I guess you want to take a view of how do we deliver better leasing velocity and speed to market. And I think the sort of standard sort of buying or transaction cycle of a previously occupied space was fairly long lease duration and a six or twelve or even 18 month for larger requirement briefs, sort of getting the options going and inspecting them. And that will remain in place for a particular cohort of occupiers. But increasingly, I think it’s sort of, people want space on demand, whether that be for an hour or two of a meeting room or for a 612 18 month project, or even, as I mentioned earlier, just the variability of growth.
Sean Lucas
50:10
Right? You don’t really want to sign a seven year lease on 1200 square meter floor and then find that you’ve outgrown it within that first couple of years. So it’s supporting our clients with that and then really ensuring that the digital foundations and the sort of connectivity solutions that they can offer meet the needs of, again, as I mentioned, those sort of enterprise users and then everyone else should hopefully be able to benefit from that as well. So that’s what we’re seeing a lot of both through the rise of flex offerings. I think the much touted JLL statistic around 2019 that a third or 30% approximately, of global real estate or commercial real estate, sorry, will be flexible.
Sean Lucas
50:52
I think that trend is still very much sort of in play, and our view is it will be asset owners increasingly offering that sort of that middle solution between coworking or one end of the spectrum as flex, and sort of a normal leased or conventional lease solution. It’ll be that middle type solution that will definitely drive a lot of that demand.
Carolyn Trickett
51:18
And Mosstyn, you’ve already mentioned that the main driver for putting in a parking solution is not really as a revenue earner. But can you just help us understand what is the value then to the owner putting in a solution like UbiPark?
Mosstyn Howell
51:37
Yeah, I think the first part of the answer to that question, Carolyn, is the ROI is really looked at originally around operational processes and the automation. So we’re automating the application of a parking permit. We got an auto approval process around that, sit around some business rules. We’re then able to activate access credentials automatically with the integrations into the parking systems or the security systems, and then we’re taking payment. And there’s probably a bit off that call, which is leakage or revenue that’s not being captured by the current solution because of the manual processes, we automatically block a user that hasn’t paid, or if a failed payment has gone through, so they don’t have access from there. And it might be a monthly Parker gets two or three days to actually fix that.
Mosstyn Howell
52:33
But then after the third day, if they haven’t fixed their payment, they’re actually blocked. And that’s probably one of the bigger areas in leakage, in a parking operation, in a commercial property. And I think the other benefits is, yes, you can create revenue out of it. We’ve got one customer in particular that was charging for parking for the other staff that didn’t have parking rights in the building, and they were creating revenue through that. So there is definitely revenue coming back to the asset owner. And parking revenue is a really big part of the asset value.
Carolyn Trickett
53:11
And, Chris, roi for air traffic control.
Chris Mason
53:17
Yeah. The first area that we get involved with is often during the planning of the building. So if someone’s proposing to build a 50 story commercial tower with 30 or 40 retail and food and beverage outlets, the question we get asked is, how big should the loading dock be? The difference between from a cost of construction and cost of ongoing operation and getting that number right or wrong is pretty significant. So we do a lot of work with the developers right from the get go, with all the metadata that we’ve got in relation to. Here’s all the different buildings. We know how long the individual appointments take because we watch things coming in and out. You don’t need that many doctors, you only need this many. Now you can then return that space to a lettable area.
Chris Mason
53:56
So there’s a whole world of science in relation to. And there’s a lot of science in relation to how many people fit on the floor of the building, but a lot less science in relation to how many trucks fit into the underground car park. And we’ve got that science which we can bring to bear. So some really good sort of thinking at the point of the building being kind of built from an operational side. Once the building is kind of built and up and running, then, of course, we can reduce the number of staff that are needed in the loading docks, because we only need to have the loading docks open for how many deliveries are coming in.
Chris Mason
54:25
And we can push those liveries back into a shorter period of time, or in an after hours environment, have it integrated such that an individual sitting at a control tower somewhere has got access to see the roller doors being opened and closed through the QR code the driver is turning up with. So through lots of automation, we can reduce the staff coming out of that in our industrial space. The capturing of a bunch of information through the booking of the appointment reduces a lot of the manual paperwork, which is very prevalent in the world of kind of some of the way that warehouses operate. There’s still a lot of paper manifests and the like being kind of passed back and forth.
Chris Mason
55:03
We can capture all of that and integrate it directly back into those particular systems with the ability for MobileDock to kind of talk to purchase order systems and kind of only present for the drivers. We only want this purchase order delivered kind of thing. It helps our customers manage their own stock flows and purchasing patterns because they’re not allowing the drivers to turn up with and the suppliers to bombard them with product. They’re only delivering particular purchase orders and particular line items on those. So lots of different angles in relation to the benefits of getting your act together.
Carolyn Trickett
55:41
Thank you guys. I think this has been a very intriguing and entertaining view on some really practical solutions and how useful they can be for our commercial real estate environment. So thank you very much. Thanks to all our attendees. I hope you found this really useful and we’ll see you in another month or two at another proptech panel.
