Sage Realty Corporation, which operates in the office sector, has more than eight years of practice in using apps to improve the experience of its tenants. Not many CRE companies have the necessary resources to create their own software. They need “the human capital and dollar capital to maintain an app and update it,” CEO Jonathan Iger told GlobeSt.com.

Sage has gone through multiple app vendors and currently uses VTS Rise, but, like other apps, “there are a number of positives and still a number of negatives,” Iger says. “No one has found the golden goose when it comes to a tenant experience app that makes the app one of the apps on the home screen of your phone, that provides enough value to jump into on a daily basis.”

Part of that may be that not everyone in an office building regularly needs visitor management and services to reserve meeting rooms or breakout spaces. Iger sees greater value, adoption, and usage rates for residential real estate. From Iger’s point of view, there is a major weakness across the available products. “What the apps don’t do [is] they don’t interconnect,” Iger says.

There may be multiple capabilities, but they don’t work together well. For example, when trying to reserve a meeting room, there may be no tight integration with visitor management, requiring workarounds to bring people in from outside the company.

A reason may be that companies expand app capabilities by acquiring other companies with additional technology. But that can be like virtual duct tape without improving overall efficiency or creating a smoother experience for the user.

“That’s where every provider is lacking and who is lacking more than others,” he says. “What it has done though, as property managers and owners, as the ecosystem as a property evolves, you want to be able to communicate with all of your users. Not just your tenants but the property [employees]. Before any of us had tenant experience apps, we had email databases. That was hard to generate.” Back then, a company was lucky to capture 10% of users by email. Apps are better, although still limited. “To break 50% would be huge for anyone.”

And then there are the disappointments that technology can bring. “We had a manager tell us they were rolling out their AI chat bot,” Todd Watkins, chief operating officer and general counsel of RailField Partners, told GlobeSt.com. “Potential residents loved it so much that they came in looking for ‘her.’” But the property didn’t roll it out “because it couldn’t answer many customer questions.”

When programs overlap, it can be confusing. Watkins mentions using two packages, each of which is supposed to track customer satisfaction after maintenance is performed in their apartment units. “Then they post to social media,” he said. “When our rating changes, which one gets the credit for that change?”

“Again, like anything in life, some apps didn’t work, some of them just don’t work yet, and some of them are hard to evaluate because they’re too complicated to use,” Watkins added.