Top 10 Tenant Experience Companies For Landlords to Explore Today
The mindset and expectations of the modern tenant have completely changed thanks to the rise of coworking and flexible space offerings, the influx of millennials entering the workforce, and an increased reliance on technology. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed forward a new emphasis on tenant relationships and the importance of managing them more effectively. Landlords are now laser-focused on maintaining occupancy in a market of diminished tenant demand.
In response, a new generation of companies focused on delivering a great tenant experience has quickly emerged to meet this need. If you're not working with one or a combination of them today to enhance the experience you offer your tenants, you can bet your competition is. Here’s our list of the top 9 tenant experience companies (in alphabetical order) landlords need to know about:
1. Better Spaces
Better Spaces helps landlords understand what attracts and retains tenants. The company offers a platform that enables building owners to capture data about their tenants’ preferences and discover what makes them tick. It then helps them deliver on those interests through engaging programming and amenities spaces. Check out their Instagram for a look at their beautifully curated environments, including surfing classes and peaceful library spaces.
2. Comfy
Comfy is an intuitive mobile app that connects tenants and their employees to their buildings. The app enables users to control different parts of their workspace, such as temperature and lighting, or to interact with their spaces by booking meeting rooms. There are also maps and navigational instructions to help people get around the office and building. The data it collects enables employers to understand how their teams are interacting with the office environment and it allows building managers to improve performance by understanding work requests and maintenance issues.
3. Convene
Convene, a “workplace as a service” platform is on a mission to help landlords reinvent the human experience by running office buildings and workspaces more like lifestyle hotels. The company, which recently announced a Series D funding round, partners with landlords to provide tenants with highly amenitized, flexible-term meeting and workspace solutions. Learn more about how Convene is disrupting the tenant experience in our Q&A with Convene CEO Ryan Simonetti here.
4. ESI Design
The power of digital media to completely transform a tenants’ experience in a building is immense. That’s where the non-traditional digital displays created by ESI Design come in. ESI works with leading landlords such as Beacon Capital Partners to transform buildings into experiences. For an example of their work, look no further than the large-scale reactive media on the lobby walls and corridor at Beacon’s historic Terrell Place in Washington D.C. This installation created an immersive experience for tenants and visitors and instilled a sense of connection across the building’s common areas.
5. hOM
With many highly successful people touting meditation and yoga as maintaining their sanity, it’s no wonder many landlords are turning to hOM. hOM is a tech-enabled amenity provider that partners with office and residential landlords to develop communities by providing onsite fitness programming and unique events for tenants. The firm’s mission is pretty simple – it wants to bring meditation, yoga and fitness practices into the mainstream by making them more accessible and convenient.
6. Industrious
“Co-working redefined” is the tagline on the Industrious website and that’s exactly what the company is doing. The brand partners with leading landlords to provide tenants with flexible and collaborative co-working spaces that are as comfortable for older professionals as younger ones. This is achieved through offering amenities including nursing rooms, fitness centers, and concierge services.
7. Lane
Lane was founded in 2014 to deliver the future of work to commercial real estate properties around the world. The first technology solution of its kind, Lane's workplace experience platform addresses the needs of the entire workplace ecosystem — from corporate tenants and their employees, to asset managers and on-site building teams, to retail tenants, visitors, and everyone in between. Putting all the pieces together, Lane turns any workplace into a place that works. As of October 2021, VTS has acquired Lane to strengthen their existing market-leading tenant experience solution, VTS Activate, and enable both Rise and Lane customers to benefit seamlessly from the combined technology.
8. Rise Buildings — now VTS Activate!
Rise Buildings, now VTS Activate, is a comprehensive tenant experience and property operations solution that provides tenants, building operators, and visitors with an immersive, tech-enabled experience while in your building. VTS Activate captures 95% app engagement among occupants which arms leasing and asset teams with real-time insight into building performance and tenant engagement. The app goes beyond the offering of traditional tenant experience companies to provide a fully integrated experience at every asset. The offering and benefits span four main areas:
- Access: From the lobby to the elevators and into the actual office space, VTS Activate provides employees and visitors mobile credentials to allow access throughout the building. This enables a contactless and hassle-free experience for occupants and a seamless way to control capacity and scheduling for property managers.
- Operations: The app also provides tenants and their employees everything they need to support day-to-day operations, such as service requests, deliveries, amenity bookings, and building communications.
- Experience: Curious how your tenants are actually engaging with your building? VTS Activate also enables you to offer and track events, polls, and satisfaction surveys as well as a private social network to help users deepen their relationship with the building and its community.
- Advanced: On top of all that, VTS Activate provides payment management, deep reporting and analytics, a network of perks, and space utilization data.
All of this together creates a platform that increases efficiency by automating daily building tasks, fosters a sense of community, and increases accountability for property managers and landlord companies. Back in March 2021, Rise Buildings has been acquired by VTS and relaunched as VTS Activate, the most adopted tenant experienc technology in the market. With the company and platform now backed by VTS’ deep funding, you can be sure the technology you implement in your buildings will be around forever, not just a fad that fades out or a player who runs out of money leaving you with a half baked solution for your portfolio.
9. VTS
While VTS acquired Rise Buildings and Lane, the VTS platform was already an important player in the world of tenant experience. That's because the tenant experience involves not just what goes on in a building, but also all the interpersonal interactions between tenants and landlords. When well-managed, these interactions can provide a landlord with valuable insights into a tenants' wants and needs, and allow the landlord to proactively respond and provide value. That's why VTS built robust tenant relationship management functionality. By giving asset managers, leasing teams, and property managers one place to aggregate every touchpoint they have with their tenants, teams can collaborate across the board to make sure they're providing the best possible experience and strengthen their tenant relationships.
And as VTS Activate becomes integrated with the rest of the VTS platform, VTS Activate completes VTS' ability to enable your teams across the entire asset lifecycle. This brings an even deeper layer of insight as the two data sets are combined at a portfolio- and market-level to offer trends in space utilization, asset occupancy, amenity usage, and tenant sentiment — helping you make even smarter asset and portfolio strategies.
Talk about a one, two punch!
10. Workwell
Workwell gives landlords the ability to create a digital platform for their buildings by integrating all of a building’s systems, including service requests, room control, cafeteria, infrastructure, and building access, into one app. Tenants can access all of these services via a single login removing the need to sign in to multiple sites for simple requests. Tenants can also add their own internal or third-party experiences to the app, including meeting room bookings, floor plans, and company news, to create their own tailored experience.
