In the last two years, organizations across industries have undergone major operational transformation. Business leaders have been forced to rejig their portfolio strategy, revamp office operations – work from home, hybrid, or flexible work set-up – and chart out diversified investment plans. The continuous entry into and exit from uncharted territories has led to uncertainties around how today’s business decisions will have a bearing on the future. The real estate industry has been no exception. Some value chain members have thrived by making real-time decisions while others have struggled to cope up due to lack of insights. Even though the global pandemic has started to dissipate, real estate companies will need to continue making decisions based on real-time market insights and keep embracing innovative technology solutions to ensure steady growth.
This blog tries to identify some of the key business areas that real estate companies should be looking at. These include:
- Emerging market dynamics that are affecting commercial real estate customers
- Flexible working and co-working models that are driving the shift toward multi-business occupancy within buildings
- Property portfolio optimization aimed at meeting the needs of a redesigned workplace strategy
- Data integration, transformation, and harmonization for a unified market view and structured decision making
- Customer-led and technology-driven solutions to stay ahead of competition
- Understanding the market landscape, creating and optimizing go-to-market (GTM) strategies – knowing target customers, white space, local market, staying updated on what your competitors are doing
Future-proofing your Real Estate Business
Magnified Market Watch
The real estate market landscape is constantly evolving due to the broader implications of the pandemic and the continuous need to integrate digitization across the value chain. There has been a massive shift in real estate investments in the last few years, with corporate giants gravitating towards flexible or co-working models, and surging property prices leading to migration of individuals and mid-size / small corporations toward secondary markets. To respond firmly to the changing scenario, real estate companies need to proactively adopt tech-led solutions, which cover digital dashboards for property management, crowdfunding of real estate projects, innovative home technology, 3D modeling spaces, data collection, etc. On the other hand, facility management services that are slow, outdated, and time-consuming need to be relooked and digitized to increase business viability and longevity.
Pulse on Customer Insights
Digitization and disruption have transformed the marketplace in the last decade, but the previous two years have also witnessed a significant change in the workplace environment. The boundaries between work and home have blurred – a hybrid working environment has become the new normal for many. As a result, organizations are looking for very customized offerings. They want high-tech, design-led, flexible, and co-working spaces that provide amenities that appeal to their employees. In addition, many mid-size organizations are now looking for shorter lease terms of six months to one year as they want to keep up with the fast-moving global situation. These points make it imperative for real estate firms to keep a tab on customer requirements, develop strategies to optimize their portfolio, and offer high-quality shared working spaces. In a nut-shell, real estate firms need to create customer-tailored propositions backed by innovation.
Proactive Competitor Tracking
The current business environment is evolving at an accelerated pace and is paired with increasing market volatility. Real estate firms must monitor competitors and create strategies that maximize opportunities and reduce uncertainties. Competitive Intelligence (CI) will help firms be more effective in the marketplace and make proactive business decisions. A reliable CI program can help real estate companies gain footing against competitors, adopt new approaches on a tactical level, and swiftly adjust to a complete transition. Evalueserve’s AI-enabled competitor intelligence platform, Insightsfirst, can help real estate companies stand out among competitors. The platform equips companies with curated and real-time intelligence on competitors, including:
- Thought leadership and eminence
- Investments and capability enhancements
- Trends, disruptors, and differentiators
- Social media engagements
- Financial, transformational, and expansion strategies
Data-driven Transformation
Forrester research suggests that ~73% of real estate industry data is never analyzed. This indicates that real estate companies have not explored digital transformation opportunities compared with other industries. One of the key reasons behind this is fragmented and unsystematic vast amount of data within the real estate industry. However, changes in consumer behavior and technology have forced real estate agencies and brokers to embrace several new technologies to keep up with the industry’s growing demand. Tenant occupancy, energy use, and intertwining it with facility management, ongoing maintenance needs, real-time user behavior and scores of other data can be collected on a real-time basis and integrated into data portals. Real estate companies can reap the benefits of data-enabled digital transformation once all these data metrics are centralized into one dashboard and clubbed with external available metrics. However, this requires companies to harmonize the data to ensure meaningful insights come from it. It is also imperative to invest heavily in digital solutions and keep an eye on the upcoming technologies that will dominate the market soon.
Understanding the Market Landscape and Developing Powerful GTM Strategies
Many real estate companies lack a strategic plan and prioritization framework for delivering value to customers. Given the current global scenario, companies need to develop a good understanding of the market landscape. How big is the market / segment? How has it evolved / is evolving? What are typical margins? What are competitor’s offerings, if any?
Answers to these questions are important while building a robust GTM strategy and taking services to the market. Real estate companies need to develop an algorithm that enable delivery of right services to the right customer segment at the right time and the right price-point, thus gaining a competitive advantage. A robust GTM strategy should cover end-to-end market and opportunity assessment. The framework should address the following three main questions:
- What possible opportunities exist within a target segment?
- Who are the competitors and potential disruptors?
- How to reach target customers in a scalable and repeatable way?
In simple words, there is a need to create GTM frameworks that helps quickly reach out to the right customer segments.
