5-step approach to help landlords retain key tenants after COVID

It's October, and uncertainty has become the only constant we can rely on in commercial real estate.

There's uncertainty around the "start date" for the post-Covid world; when building occupancies will rise above 50% again; and how companies plan to change their workplace policies for the long term, if at all.

There are also rumblings from tenants about rethinking their real estate footprints: downsizing their offices, adding flex space outside of the city, and investing in their employees' home offices.  

But no one knows anything for certain. And this is a problem for our multi-trillion dollar industry. A problem that has many key stakeholders sitting around, waiting to react, without a plan.

However, problems create opportunities. And we believe this industry-wide uncertainty creates a unique opportunity to evolve the landlord tenant relationship, allowing landlords to become strategically aligned with tenants to help them design a next-generation workplace experience, together. 

To jumpstart this evolution, we've worked with our global landlord community to develop a 5-step approach to retain key tenants, through the pandemic and beyond, via employee data and bespoke services. 

Align interests

We provide landlords and their onsite teams email templates to proactively reach out to key tenants, explaining their desire to "build a win-win relationship", and offering to help better understand their employees' current and future workplace needs through professionally-designed workplace surveys.

Collect feedback

Once interests are aligned, landlords can edit a series of workplace surveys — with or without the input of key tenant contacts — to deliver directly to employees through our platform, allowing them to gather data on work-from-home sentiments, current workplace concerns, and future workplace expectations. 

Build a plan

With this feedback, we help landlords build key tenant retention ("KTR") plans — one-page business plans for delivering customised experiences to large tenants with upcoming renewals (or any other tenant landlords deem critical to retain).  

Develop partnerships

Once plans are in place, our Engage services teams help landlords connect with the right local, regional and national partners to deliver bespoke programming and services, alongside providing budgeting tools and sample contracts and resources to onboard vendors seamlessly. 

Deliver value

Finally, thanks to Equiem's new segmented communications platform, we're able to give landlords and their onsite teams the ability to deliver these bespoke services and programs directly to specific companies (and even specific employees within companies) and groups.

With the impact of the pandemic increasing the accessibility of remote working, tenants are no longer obligated to return to the workplace in a hurry. Nurturing tenant relationships and better understanding how to meet their workplace needs, will be vital for adapting office offering from obligation to destination.