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Software company HqO has built and released what it’s calling the commercial real estate industry’s first “system of record for customer experience,” according to a May 15 statement.
“The new platform unifies asset management, tenant lifecycle, and operational workflows into a single, intuitive system — empowering property owners and operators to drive loyalty, efficiency, and long-term asset value,” the release stated.
Commercial real estate is historically challenged by a lack of uniformity in business operation software because of the widely disparate methods by which its practitioners function. In short, it’s still very much a face-to-face, offline referral-driven industry. Office space use needs vary widely and are subject to uniquely negotiated terms, dynamic pricing, logistical variations and other challenges that vary building to building, often on the same street.
HqO’s solution promises to eschew fragmentation by integrating that data and processes of asset management, tenant lifecycle and building operations — typically separate lines of business for commercial real estate companies.
“We’ve partnered with the most sophisticated operators across the globe, and what we continue to hear is clear: The market has lacked a holistic system to manage the full lifecycle of both the tenant and the asset,” said Chase Garbarino, CEO and co-founder of HqO, in the statement. “At its core, it’s a purpose-built CRM for commercial real estate that acts as the system of record for the customer experience. It also accelerates operators’ AI-readiness. That’s the gap we’re solving, and it’s one of the industry’s most urgent needs today.”
Commercial leasing has taken massive blows of late, largely due to remote work trends exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. Instituting modern operating systems with a focus on tenant relations should assist the industry in its efforts to win back a workforce increasingly under the expectation of high-touch vendors, including their office managers and occupancy partners.
The tenant lifecycle features of HqO promise to “digitize and streamline tenant onboarding, access provisioning, amenity usage, events, and communication,” according to the statement. Those efforts will be buoyed with management-focused systems for marrying data that historically exists in stand-alone systems, whether in individual buildings or across portfolios.
The software aims to make it easier to align transaction insights, financial performance, tenant information and vendor contracts through a single-number interface to, in the end, improve property value.
The new product will be delivered through HqO’s REX (Real Estate Experience) Framework, an underlying operating system that adheres the user to their building’s outcomes. Its mobile and browser-based UX provides access to the system’s suite of features and tools, including a vendor marketplace, building performance dashboard and real-time operation insights, among other products.
