CHICAGO—In the past few years, corporate real estate has assumed a greater importance. And JLL has just unveiled a new data and insights platform designed to offer a holistic view of a corporation's operations alongside the macroeconomic environment and allow real estate managers to present all of this information in an easily-digestible manner to C-suite executives.
Called RED, the new system has been under development for about three years, and a pilot program with three companies, one each in Europe, Asia and North America, has been operating for about eight months. RED is not designed for investors or developers. Instead, it's meant to provide those in corporate real estate a single solution to “drive overall portfolio performance,” John Forrest, JLL's chief executive officer of corporate solutions, Americas, tells GlobeSt.com. Historically, managers used many different service providers or their own workplace management systems.
“Real estate is a top three corporate expense,” Forrest says, and “has been significantly pushed up the corporate agenda.” But its growing importance is not just about dollars and cents. C-suite executives now recognize that the tremendous power of modern information technology means they can analyze how their office space is organized and show ways to increase both employee satisfaction and productivity. “That is very different from what was being asked of corporate real estate executives in the past.”
“There are just unbelievable amounts of data which historically have been siloed,” Forrest adds. “At the end of the day, RED brings together all the data they have on their real estate.” This includes expenses, lease terms, expiration timetables across multiple markets, energy usage, the number workers in each building, economic data on the surrounding markets, and data on companies' entire business operations, among many other nuggets of information. And with about three billion square feet under management, JLL has an enormous ability to take all of this data and compare it to other portfolios.
For example, whenever a company acquires another, officials need to know “the real estate implications of the decision,” Forrest says, including whether or not the acquired company can fit into the existing real estate footprint or where different divisions can be combined to eliminate redundancies. Normally, this painstaking process takes months to complete. But JLL's new platform uses the same technologies used by banks, telecommunications companies and other industries to automate and manage large volumes of data and presents the results with customizable dashboards. “With RED you can do it in days or even hours.”
The ability to do this and present the data in an intelligible way “empowers the corporate real estate executive,” he adds. And for JLL, RED is yet another step in the company's “evolution from a real estate provider into a technology provider.”
Whenever a client adopts RED, JLL will go in and do a data clean-up, since much of the information the platform needs to capture is typically dispersed into several silos. However, clients do not have to go out and purchase an expensive new system, says Forrest. “This is absolutely not a platform just for large occupiers.”
“We built this platform with our clients in mind,” explains Chris Browne, JLL's chief operating officer of corporate solutions, Americas. “We wanted to offer the only industry platform that advances the science of real estate without requiring our clients to make major new technology investments or lengthy enterprise resource planning implementation.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
