Landlords Need to Tell a Better Story About Their Safety Practices

A landlord can spend a lot of money upgrading the building systems to try to curtail the spread of germs during the pandemic. But if they can’t properly communicate what they’ve done, their investments may not mean to tenants

“A landlord will sometimes have installed UVC lighting or will have upgraded their filters from MERV 13 to 14,” says Dr. Michael Gao, M.D., founder of Haven Diagnostics. “Then, they send their tenants a list of the things they’ve done and say, ‘Look, we’ve done a lot.’ And the tenant goes, ‘That’s fantastic. I really have no idea what that means for me.’”

Instead of conveying all of the individual improvements they’ve made, Gao says they should tell a more cohesive story around how those efforts make the office environment a place that can be lower risk. “It’s that layer of translation between what you’ve done to what it means for you that I think a lot of landlords are currently missing,” Gao says.

People have fears about how COVID can spread, such as it potentially infecting them through vents and HVAC systems in their offices. 

“If you put yourself in an employer’s shoes, what you care about is that when your employees are in the office, that you’re not exposing them to huge doses of risk and that you’re helping make sure that employee feels reasonably safe and protected,” Gao says. “Otherwise, if they’re really worried, they’re not going to be productive.” 

Depending on a company’s policies and property management policies, Gao says an office environment isn’t just lower risk compared to a bar or a restaurant, but a lower risk compared to other settings. 

“When a tenant is asking its employees to come back into the office, they have an opportunity to be more nuanced and to understand all the things the landlord has done that help lower the risk,” Gao says. 

Ultimately, Gao doesn’t think the office environment will change that dramatically. But the pandemic could alter human behavior in offices.

“What will change is if you have a coworker named Bob and if Bob walks into the office walks into the office sniffling has a low-grade fever,” Gao says. “A year ago or two years ago, you might have thought Bob was such a hard worker. Five years from now, you are not going to think that. You’re going to think, ‘Wow, you know, this person is putting me at risk.’ There will be this change in mentality that getting sick or getting infected as a precondition of a work environment is no longer acceptable.”  

Landlords that take steps to communicate safe practices will ultimately have an advantage over those that don’t, according to Gao.

“We think that landlords who are making investments today and helping communicate the benefit of that investment, not just for COVID, but for any respiratory disease, we’ll be ahead of the market,” Gao says.