Transcript: How to Use Real Estate as a Brand and Bring Transparency to the Workplace

To me, real estate is the first thing that a potential employee or new recruit to your company is going to see. I've been consulting clients on using their real estate as a brand. Well, today, a lot of younger workers that come into the workforce will hand over that resume and say, this is my background, this is my skill set, this is what I've done. Tell me why I should work here. And what that's done is it's turned the tables in the whole employment and employee recruiting scenario to one where the HR department has to show and prove to that perspective employee why they should work for that particular company.

Human-centered design is really what's important for creating the workplace of the future and creating a level of employee engagement that's necessary. One of the transformative trends in real estate, I think that smart cities, workplace wellness, focusing on the employee experience and understanding that the dynamics of work are changing. If you can get ahead of that, really setting yourself up for success in the future. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It, episode number 78. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget, and on schedule, and most importantly exceed your end user's desires. Last week we spoke with Maggie Clout, business development manager at Siemens. She's the lead business developer for 17 Project Winds, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority New York Prize Community Microgrid Program. We discussed a pilot project where Siemens worked with a company called LL3 to transact, buy, and sell solar energy between neighbors on a blockchain. From a real estate standpoint, using a microgrid platform has the opportunity to show transparency and information on how much energy you used, how much you sold and bought, and what the financial benefits are.

So it opens up a door for real estate owners to generate income from unused electricity or heat generation. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com. In today's episode, we're speaking with Vic Bangia. He is the founder and CEO of Varam Consulting, a corporate real estate strategy and operations consulting firm where Varam is Latin for truth. Vic also serves on the global board of directors for Quarantine Global and the board of Rebuilding Together Twin Cities.

Vic and I spoke on a panel at an international facility management association facility fusion event here in Chicago. But what we talked about here in this interview is about how real estate professionals may experience obstacles internally in their organizations where they're not able to proceed on carrying out all of the corporate real estate goals or just effectively make informed decisions where HR and IT are really incorporated in those discussions. So Vic and I spoke about how to hurdle those obstacles by adopting technology and doing more collaborative methods in facilities and in workplace.

We also talk about how to make RFPs fun again and we actually touch on the future of smart cities. So with that, let's get into the interview. Vic is the founder and CEO of Varam Consulting, a corporate real estate strategy and operations consulting firm where Varam is Latin for truth. Vic also serves on the global board of directors for Quarantine Global and the board of Rebuilding Together Twin Cities, a nonprofit that provides critical home repairs for homeowners in need. He's also the faculty member of Quarantine Global's executive development programs.

He's an inspirational speaker speaking at events and conferences across the globe regularly. In fact, I saw him a few weeks ago here in Chicago. He was on a panel with me for the IFMA facility fusion event. He was actually coming from Singapore at that time. So it's great to have met Vic.

He really believes in making RFPs fun and successful again. So I'm sure we'll be touching on that. Vic, I want to welcome you to the Constructor podcast. Thank you, Brittany. I'm glad to be here.

Glad to have you. So Varam is for truth. There's lots of curiosity about truth and transparency these days. And I think that in today's culture, there are a lot of us who are really experiencing the need to get things done fast, quickly. We almost have this fast food approach.

It's not focused as much on truth. I wanted to just ask you, like, how do we focus on that truth? What does that look like for you? The company name, Varam Consulting, Varam is Latin for truth. And when I started the company, I realized after sitting in a lot of management meetings that employees would nod their head and fake an agreement on a particular initiative.

And the challenge was that there was no validation being given on whether everybody was aligned with a mission or vision of a particular initiative. And so when I formed the company, I said, what we need to do is we need to make sure people slow down long enough to check and make sure that they agree with the mission and vision of a particular initiative. And so I came up with the name Varam Consulting, but Varam is also an acronym for the process that I use, which is validate assumptions, eliminate obstacles, recast expectations, unveil a new strategy, and manage the implementation.

So those are the letters in Varam. And what that does, slowing down to validate assumptions, make sure that everybody is in agreement with everything that's being assumed to be true with respect to the initiative. And then eliminating obstacles is really asking people in a safe and anonymous environment to raise those issues that they think could get in the way of success. And when you do that process, you do it in an iterative fashion, you allow people to voice their opinions, you allow them to really feel like they can commit and are bought into the initiative or project.

And then what ends up happening is you actually recast the expectations of the project. And so in those three first steps, more often than not, people will change the scope of work, they'll change the outcomes or the goals, and they'll create clear, achievable and realistic goals out of what may have been too lofty of an initiative. Then you go through the U and the M, which is unveil a new strategy, which is usually a scaled back version of the original initiative. And then you have to manage that implementation so that everybody is staying in time with the outcome in a very even pace.

When you do that, you slow down long enough to change that dynamic from being fast food society, as you mentioned, you really achieve a level of success that previously was unavailable to a lot of clients. What they would do typically is go through a process, start the initiative, get halfway through it and find out that something that they neglected to face early on in the process gets in the way of success. And then you either have to start all over, or you capitulate and abandon everything that you're doing, or you just create a lot of division within your team.

Those are some really great points and all very valid. I love the idea of getting clarity initially and vetting a lot of those discussions that you may not get into, but really lifting them up to the surface and getting them on the table, getting everybody agreed, clarifying it even further to everybody marching to the same beat. It's interesting because in a team dynamic, there's going to be people who will hang back and not voice their opinion, or will just go along with the flow. And what I do in facilitating these meetings is I get the people that are usually the quietest, who have the most valid points, but are either passed over or aren't asked about their opinion to actually speak up and talk about what might be bothering them, what might be holding them back from fully committing.

And the process is done in such a way that people will actually enthusiastically take part in creating an action plan to preemptively or proactively solve some of the problems that they know get in the way of success. And once you start to do that, people will really come together. I just got done doing a project like this for a group out in Washington, D.C., and I was very happy with the outcome. At the end of the day, everybody was really enthusiastic about the initiative going forward, and they were able to voice their opinions.

And you could just see their mood change from going along with the flow to really being committed to the project. Yes. We're going to get into real estate. I wanted to just mention here, having spoken to you before, I really think that you're aligned on the real estate consulting side of things. And maybe I would even say the foundational topic of the podcast is lean construction.

And there's a lot of similarities in what you're talking about, as far as bringing everyone to the table and valuing the skill sets that every single person has to provide on the team and giving even people the opportunity to be excited while they're bringing those ideas that they have to the table. But you help companies develop real estate as a brand. What does that mean? Can you break that down for us? I look at it from the standpoint of recruiting and retention and employee engagement.

To me, real estate is the first thing that a potential employee or new recruit to your company is going to see. I've been consulting clients on using their real estate as a brand. So the example I give in a lot of my speaking engagements is about how I would go in to an employer if I was looking for a job. I would go in and hand them my resume. I would sit there across the table from an HR director and I would say, here's my resume.

Here's the background, my work history, all the things that I've done in my career. This is why you should hire me. Well, today, a lot of younger workers that come into the workforce will hand over that resume and say, this is my background. This is my skill set. This is what I've done.

Tell me why I should work here. What that's done is it's turned the tables in the whole employment and employee recruiting scenario to one where the HR department has to show and prove to that prospective employee why they should work for that particular company. The way they can do that is they can use their real estate as a brand. They can say, this is the work environment you'd be working in. Here's how we collaborate.

This is the technology that you'd be given to work here. You can see all the way around the facility that our brand or our company mission, vision, and values are everywhere you look. Once an employee really feels connected to their workspace and to the company that they work for, they'll become a more productive, happier, more engaged employee. When I accepted positions in previous employers, I was really never shown my desk until after I accepted the offer and started my job and came in on day one of being the new employee.

These days, you have to prove that to the prospective employee before they accept the offer. That's such a great point. I do know that one of my clients, they particularly focused on HR when I first got on board with them and they wanted to make sure that they had adequate technology in the rooms where they'd be interviewing people exactly like how you're describing because it's almost as if these are client-facing spaces because your potential employees, you're almost treating them like clients now when they're going through that phase of review.

Then also training and development. That's another space that they ended up wanting to showcase to say, yeah, this is the space where you're going to be learning about the culture, learning about how we function as a business and we want to make it appealing. Totally in line with what you're describing here. You're right, times are changing. Yeah, absolutely.

There's a Deloitte study that was out that said only 28% of younger workers believe that their employer is making good use of their skills, which if you flip it on its head, that means 72% of employees don't feel their employer is making good use of their skills, which means they're out potentially looking for a job. If you want to retain those employees, you have to give them a sense of significance in the workplace. You have to give them a sense of connectivity in the workplace. You can do that through real estate as a brand.

You can do that through technology that allows them to have a better workplace experience. You can do that through leadership and showing the employee that they're in a place where their input and their dedication and their work means something to the company. There's a lot going on that's actually bringing real estate and HR together. Those are such great points. Let me ask you this.

What companies do you see doing well in this arena? Could you share? Actually, here in Minneapolis, one of the companies I'm really excited to talk about and I see creating real estate as a brand is a nonprofit organization called Be The Match. They have a brand new headquarters in Minneapolis. If you go into that facility, you'll see that their mission and vision and values are all over the walls.

Their company is very proud of their mission. You talk to the people that work there and willing to tell you why they work there and why they're so committed to the company. That's just one example. There's another one in St. Louis Worldwide Technology that has a very similar layout in their facility.

I got a chance to tour that facility last year. Again, the company brand is all over the workplace. That's just two examples or several of them. Both of those companies are really using their real estate as a brand. It's creating a work dynamic in the workplace that is actually pretty exciting.

You go in there, there's a vibe. There's an energy. That's something that's been missing from a lot of the older corporate environments where the workplace is stale. People are in cubicles and don't feel a sense of connectivity. Collaboration is still fairly foreign to those companies.

Because of that, I think they're having a lot of problems with employee retention and recruitment. They're companies, obviously, like you just mentioned, who are not doing as well. They might have, say, a vanilla color palette and those high partition workstations still even around the perimeter offices, things like that. But from the perspective of collaboration internally, what are the obstacles that you see companies facing as they are planning for either development or renovations in their space? Why do some of these transformations fail?

Well, I think that really boils down to who you're bringing to the table. Companies often operate in a very siloed organizational structure. What I've always advocated to the real estate department is to bring in those other groups, the HR, the IT operations and finance, and really think of real estate as an infra service. A group that pulls in all these stakeholders gets them on board early and gets them talking about what's important to them so that at the end of the day, everybody feels like they've had a voice and they've been able to be a participant in the future of the organization.

I think everybody within a company wants to be involved in these types of initiatives and wants to feel like they had a chance to give their input. When you find out who those influencers are, it's really important to create that influencer web because a lot of times you can't work directly with a particular person, but you might know who that person trusts and who that person uses for their guidance. Then you can talk to that individual. One of the things I've done successfully is I've used the HR department to help make pragmatic real estate decisions because oftentimes it's the HR department that can go to the CFO and say, we're having trouble recruiting.

The HR department can say, well, we need real estate to create a more collaborative workplace. A good example of that is one where I went to the CFO and said, we need to create a more collaborative workplace, but I could not show my CFO an ROI. When the HR department went and asked for the same end result to create a better workplace, the CFO said, absolutely, we need to make this happen. Then the HR department was asked, what do you need? The HR department said, well, we need real estate to get their act together and get going with this initiative.

Then I was given a call saying, why aren't you doing this? At the end of the day, I was asked to do something for which I was thrown out of the office two weeks ago because I couldn't show an ROI. Not that the HR department doesn't need an ROI, but they have a real world problem with the real world pain. Whereas oftentimes real estate is looked at as somebody who just wants to spend the money to create the workplace without having a very crystal clear outcome.

Nicole Sarris Yeah. I mean, we're dealing with recruitment, we're dealing with attrition, and those things make a huge impact. You can calculate the dollars easily. When you bring someone on board, it takes so and so many months for them to get acclimated. When you lose somebody, there's a cost to that as well.

Those are easily calculable. I think it helps also the mere fact that it's not just dollars. When it comes to people, it's almost like you're pulling on heartstrings now. It's like there's so much more of a dynamic for the CFO and all of the respective departments feel. It's very interesting that you've partnered with HR on occasion to really help validate the reasoning behind why corporate real estate decisions need to be made.

Absolutely. I've been saying that a lot to my friends in the corporate real estate industry, that the HR department is really your best advocate. Of course, IT is important as well. Information technology groups within companies, it's important to get them on board, especially because they touch every aspect of the company and they create that mobility and that connectivity within organizations. Getting the three of those groups together, along with operations and finance, is really important.

Is there any other obstacle that you would see or is there any other challenge that you see from an internal silo perspective that's pulling away from people being successful in their transformations? Culture. I think that's the hardest obstacle to overcome. A lot of companies just have a very difficult culture and cultural bias. In some companies, especially in the energy business and in the financial services business, you can't really come to the company with a new way of working.

The pushback is always that you have to socialize any kind of change initiative broadly within a company. But if you've come up with a flash of an idea, a real disruptive idea, and you have to take that and socialize it broadly within the company, it can die. It can die because of the time it takes to get that socialized broadly and the fact that when you try to socialize it broadly, especially if you're dealing with a company with a strong culture, you're going to run into some landmines and some people who just don't want to have change.

Oftentimes, unless you're given some latitude to make those changes quickly, you run into obstacles. Other organizations, especially smaller, more nimble ones, are able to make those decisions much faster. And again, if they're willing to be coached and they're willing to understand that change is not easy, but change is something that needs to happen, they're usually much more successful. I feel much more successful at working with those companies that have management who really wants to see the change. Nicole Sarris One thing that I've heard you talked about is simply optimizing your influencer web.

Speaking about the HR department, IT, really trying to get the leadership aligned in their innovative approach, and then all those non-leadership roles, but influential roles or people within the organization on board, it really makes a difference. David Kramer Absolutely. And then you also have to look at what dynamic exists between you and the service providers that you use. Because I do a lot of work in helping corporate clients select and onboard their service providers. And so when I go through that process, I'm also looking for people who are influential and can make change and do it well.

People that have good change management within their organizations, the whole RFP process, doing that in a way that creates a better chemistry on the front end of bringing on a service provider. Nicole Sarris Well, yeah, you mentioned making it fun again. So explain to us how you work with procurement and all the relevant parties to make RFPs fun. This is going to be a fun conversation. I'm already looking forward to it.

David Kramer Yep. I'm in that business and you know how real estate outsourcing has always been much more of a procurement commodity driven type initiative with most companies. I've always maintained that the procurement of real estate services is really about relationship. When a lot of people that are in the same space look at real estate outsourcing, they look at it from a cost standpoint, they look at it from a commodity procurement approach. And what I've done is I've created a new way of doing RFPs, which actually makes the whole process fun.

But what it does is it brings the service provider community in early on in the process. And I can give you a good case example. I just got done doing an RFP process for a company called Avnet, which is based in Phoenix. And what we did there was we ran the RFP in a very, very different way. We brought the service providers in early and said, we want your best thinking about the current environment within the Avnet organization.

So we had everybody in the Avnet team write up a three page paper on what challenges they were facing, what they would like to see in a service provider relationship, what they were missing from their existing service provider relationship, and really had them write up the paper as if they were taking their car into a mechanic and saying, here's what is going on with it. I don't know what to do about it, but here's everything that's happening with my car. Then we told the service providers to put on their mechanic hat and say, based on what you've told me, this is what I think is going wrong with your car.

And this is what I would recommend you do. What we did there was we asked the service providers to not solve the problem, but basically diagnose the problem. And by doing that with a large community of service providers, what we actually were able to do was reverse engineer the entire RFP process, crowdsource all of the RFP questions that the service providers felt that we should be asking them, and then turn back an RFP to the service provider community that was made up of questions that they had actually told us to ask them.

Now, we of course amalgamated these questions so that they weren't identifiable. But what we did by doing that was we really got the service providers to help build the solution. The other thing that we got the service providers to do in that process was to break down those barriers that create that impersonal approach to RFPs where the service providers actually got to know the client's team early in the process to understand the team chemistry and to help the client proving early how they would behave once they were the service provider and were under contract.

So it was a really neat experience because we sort of gamified the earlier part of the process so that they would have to actually work on problem together with the client's team. And that team dynamic was apparent, visible, and palatable early on in the process. And it made the whole decision making for who the client was going to select as their service provider much easier. So the interesting thing about that process is it was actually recorded in a podcast that I did a few months ago.

And the client recently submitted a whole initiative as a global innovators award for Cornet. So we'll see what happens there, but certainly excited about the process and the client is thrilled about the outcome. What I appreciate, it supports your vision with establishing truth and transparency way up front. It enables that interpersonal relationship capability to take place. You definitely have carved out an interesting way to carry out RFPs.

And I can see why people would have more fun doing it as well. It was really based on the fact that real estate outsourcing decisions that are made by corporate clients are made often on poor quality bids. Recently gave a presentation to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals. And in that presentation, I was saying that 76% of the bids that were received by clients that were making these decisions were made on bids that were of average quality and only 24% of those bids were of outstanding quality.

So can you imagine a client having to make a five-year commitment on a bid that's in a survey, 76% were poor quality? That's a difficult decision to make if the bids aren't high quality. And so what we were really trying to do was improve the quality of the bids up front. Yeah, that's crazy, especially if you have four bids. That's one company.

That's right. That you have to select from. There's not a lot of options after that. Well, that's what sparked my interest in doing something different because every outsourcing relationship follows that same pattern. There's a happiness level right at the beginning of an outsourcing relationship and then it actually degrades over time.

So what ends up happening is it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you don't do this up front and create a good working atmosphere with your service provider, there's a good chance that halfway through your five-year relationship with that service provider, you're already thinking about making a switch. And my goal with the way I do things is that five years down the road, I want you to still be absolutely in love with your service provider. And I want the service providers to feel like they're really committed to the client.

This process allows for that to happen. And it still uses that same verum process that I mentioned earlier, because I use that same process to help the client and the service provider develop that scope of work. Kind of moving on a little bit. How do you socialize the benefits of utilizing technology when it comes to making decisions about using your real estate portfolio? And then also, what do you recommend to incorporate, just even monitoring the lifecycle of your property and things like that?

Yeah. So there's a few different technological aspects of where I come in and work with clients. The first one is really that employee engagement piece. And that's really using technology to create a working environment that allows clients to be productive, to be able to do all the things that they can do when they're at home. With all of our smartphones and our technology, we're able to do so many things outside of the workplace that we can't do within the workplace.

So the technology in the workplace ought to let you schedule meetings, book conference rooms, get your dry cleaning done, get food ordered. It should be smart enough to where if you have a meeting with your team, that whenever you set up a meeting with your team, the app that you use to do that in the office knows what each individual that's coming to the meeting likes to have as refreshments. So when the room is booked, the catering brings those refreshments in, it creates a higher level of employee satisfaction to be able to use technology that enables people to be much more collaborative and not have to think of all of the small details of putting together a meeting and really lets them focus on their work.

So that's one aspect of it. That's more of the employee-focused technology. Then there's larger technology, which includes, from a facilities management standpoint, for instance, it includes the Internet of Things and predictive analytics so that when a building is being managed by facilities management group within a corporation, that they're relying on the predictive analytics to help them do proactive and preventative maintenance work for them to be able to do their capital budgeting in a way that much more accurate. I was managing a number of facilities before where we would have emergency challenges and problems with a chiller, boiler, or elevators, for instance, and all of those expenses would be surprises to my leadership.

And I would always say, gosh, I wish I was able to do a better job of knowing when certain systems are going to fail. Well, these days, the technology exists and there are companies out there that are fantastic in developing predictive analytics platform that can tell me exactly when a particular system is going to go down or a part is going to go bad. And when I know that, I'm able to put that into my capital budgeting and I'm able to know in advance when certain things are going to fail, I can solve for those things before they actually fail.

In the future, in the very near future, you'll never see an elevator out of order sign within a corporate building because you'll be able to fix those problems before they happen. Preventative maintenance at that point. Absolutely. And there's companies like Uptake Technologies, which is based right there in Chicago, that are doing that type of work. And it's an amazing technology.

And if you build in the AI side of that, the buildings will actually get smarter and become able to self-manage and able to learn from those types of failures so that they're not only being predictive, they're anticipating things are going to go wrong within a facility. And it's really interesting to think about what that could look like in the future. Building that is managed by AI. There's just lots of opportunity there to take advantage of the technology that we have at hand in order to learn from how the building is being operated itself.

Yeah. And the AI and the predictive analytics is also working in context with understanding weather and understanding other extenuating circumstances as it relates to sensor technology because sensors obviously give off data, but it's the data science layer that really makes the difference there that when you can actually clean up some of the furious data and some of the false data that's sometimes inherent in the sensor technology. So I think there's a lot that AI can do to help create a more accurate maintenance program and a predictive analytics program.

I interviewed the architects for the Edge some time ago, and I think that there are some elements obviously designed into that particular building that really combine that concierge app that you described before and just really recreating that quality through the building, like through your thermal comfort, making sure that the temperature is good and the lighting levels are adequate for the tasks that you're doing, things like that, that I think we can learn from. Are there any other things that you have been seeing? You touched on two of them.

So lighting and thermal comfort, there's acoustics, indoor air quality, and all of those things are very important to the future of the built environment and the future of buildings. It should be that when you go work in an office building, you're actually working in a healthier environment than you have outside of the building. I think that's not the case today, but it certainly will be. So you start to bring in all of those four factors, indoor air quality, acoustics, thermal comfort, and lighting, but then you also bring in some of the wellness aspects of working within a building, things like the DELO standard for well-building.

So you're really creating an environment that's actually healthier. And when you create a wellness-focused environment within a corporate location, you're going to actually have healthier, happier employees that are also more productive. And a lot of these wellness-focused environments these days are actually being built in and around a smart city so that the community ecosystem that exists in that entire smart city development creates a lifestyle outside of work that actually creates a happier, healthy worker who is happier and healthier inside the working environment as well. You started to definitely transition us to the smart city discussion.

I'd like to just kind of take your cue here. Talk about what you've experienced as far as some of the ways that people can improve their lives and be more fulfilled and be happy. But could you give us some examples of that, how smart cities are doing it now? There's one client I have in Florida, a company called the Tavistock Group, that's developed a smart city called Lake Nona. It's just south of the Orlando airport.

So to give you some geographical context, it's a smart city development that's actually focused on wellness and healthcare. And the theory there is that if you live in this environment, there are a lot of aspects to living there, community ecosystem that's focused on wellness. So your home is a smart home. There's a transportation infrastructure there that geared around removing and reducing the amount of vehicular traffic there. The buildings are all following the DALO standard for well-building design.

The study there is basically saying a healthier, happier employee is a healthier, happier, more productive employee in the workplace as well. The great thing about that particular development is it is the only iconic Cisco smart city designation in the United States. There's about nine of them around the globe, but it is a model for what smart cities should be like, especially when it comes to the marriage of technology and the built environment. They're an actual smart city, but I think there's also cities in the US that are doing smart things.

There are cities like Denver, which is really focused on a transportation infrastructure. I think they were number eight on the mobility transportation index. And they're trying to create an environment where it's a live, work, play environment where you can be downtown from a suburban location within 30 minutes, either by rail or by bus. But the transportation infrastructure creates this environment where people don't have to have a car. They've got a lot of mobility options and creating an environment where people want work.

Because a big challenge with smart cities in some of the other places I've seen smart city initiatives is while they're focused on the technology, they're not really focused on the employee experience. And so I wonder how people are going to want to live in some of these places if it's just based on technology and not the employee wellbeing and community ecosystem that needs to be there. Another city, I think, that's doing a great job of actually recruiting people and creating an urban, livable workspace, workplace and urban environment is Detroit.

And that was a real surprise. Eight years ago, I don't think you'd want to go to Detroit. And now they're doing some amazing things there where Bedrock Ventures, which is owned by Dan Gilbert, who's also the CEO of Quicken Loans and a sports owner as well, is creating a landscape within downtown Detroit that's revitalizing the area where companies are moving back into Detroit. And I think Dan has gone out and said that he's going out and recruiting from other cities to bring younger workers to Detroit, making Detroit a place that you want to live and you want to live downtown.

And so you want to basically live in the city and not live out in the suburbs and commute. One major thing you touched on was mobility. I'm curious, is Detroit focusing on how to improve that as well? Well, they have some transportation initiatives, but I think that they're creating the livability in the downtown area. So they've bought up a lot of the older buildings and they're rehabbing them and turning them into lofts and apartments.

And then there's a number of great restaurants down there. And then with the sports theme, you've got the stadiums that are basically side by side. So you're creating this destination. That's something that's really helpful for Detroit. I don't think they're doing transportation that's in the same way that Denver's focused on it.

Denver's really focused on this live, ride, share economy there where there's a lot of shareable vehicles, again, lots of different ways to move around that city. Detroit is kind of concentrating their efforts in the downtown area. I'm just thinking about my past experience before I actually moved to the city of Chicago. I was in the suburbs and it took me almost two hours to get to work one way. So I can understand how valuable that is and how much it reduces the amount of stress that one has and how much happier you can be.

But that's just one small thing. You're absolutely right in addressing sort of the low hanging fruit. TM Forum puts out the Smart City Manifesto. Definitely spoke a lot about addressing the ecosystem that is going to make a small win, make an actual improvement that really helps people first. It doesn't necessarily have to be specifically about infrastructure.

And I think you really do have to think broadly about what that community needs, understand how they function already, and choose the right things to start with. And it sounds like Denver and Detroit are definitely well on their way with doing that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the transformative trends in real estate. I think that smart cities, along with IoT, workplace wellness, really focusing on the employee experience and understanding that the dynamics of work are changing.

If you can get ahead of that, really setting yourself up for success in the future, especially in the facilities management industry. I see that five years from now, nobody can say they didn't see the whole IoT thing coming. So it's a big risk. It's a big risk for facilities managers, but it's also a huge opportunity. And then again, understanding that that dynamic between corporate real estate and HR, I think is a very important one as well.

And all of that ties into those relationships that you have in place with service providers, because in the future, you have a different level of partnering, and it's going to be less based on a commodity type play. It's going to be more based on relationships. So I'm trying to spend most of my time out there on that edge, advocating for all of the changes that I see taking place. And I think it's a really exciting time to be in the corporate real estate and facilities management industries.

As it relates to construction, it's really about building buildings that are healthier environments, building buildings that are sustainable. You have biophilic design, you have all sorts of trends that are taking place in the construction business as well. But all of this human centered design is really what's important for creating the workplace of the future and creating a level of employee engagement that's necessary. And all of that can't happen without training and leadership. And so I'm trying to hit each one of those facets in the work that I do.

I think it's definitely appreciated in this industry. And I love what you're doing. There should be more people focusing on those aspects. So yeah, thank you for that. You're welcome.

As we wrap up, could you share the best ways for people to get in contact with you and learn more about what you're doing? I'm happy if anybody connects with me on LinkedIn. I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn. I write a lot of different articles on all of these trends. So anybody who wants to look up Vic Bangia or VIRM Consulting on LinkedIn, happy to connect with you there.

I'm also on Twitter at Vic Bangia and at VIRM Consulting. And anybody can reach me via email at vic.bangia at VIRMconsulting.com. Happy to talk to anybody who wants to make a difference in the way that they're approaching real estate, how they want to position themselves for the future, how they want to take their real estate, turn it into a brand, help them recruit and retain their future workforce, and help with establishing the right service provider relationships. So anybody who has any of those goals in mind, I'm always happy to talk.

That's great. And now I'll put those links and ways to contact you there in the show notes. This has really been a fun interview with you. Yeah, I've enjoyed it. Thank you, Brittany.

Thanks for listening to this interview with Vic Bangia. Find out more about what Vic is up to at Constructor.com slash EP 78. If you learned something valuable in this episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you've enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn or you can just email me too at Brittany at Constructor.com. That's BRITTANIE at ConstructRR.com.

Next week, we will be speaking with Todd Burns, the president of project and development services and general contracting units at JLL in the Americas. He is the chair on the global practice board with responsibility for the Americas representation, ensuring that the organization provides similar processes and results globally. We spoke about a new product that Todd and his team has developed called Insight. Insight pulls and cost data that JLL has collected from their office fit out guide and allows project teams and their clients to see instantaneous changes on how the plan will impact their budget.

We discussed culture and we discussed the future of the industry and what it will look like in 10 years. I look forward to sharing this interview with you guys next week. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at your preferred podcast player. Please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.

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