The New Workplace Experience.

With over 25 years of professional property experience, Jon Lesquereux certainly has a lot to say about real estate, so we were thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about real estate innovation and tenant engagement in the workplace. Check out our interview below!

Future Place: Would you be so kind as to describe your role at Equiem?

Jon Lesquereux: I’m responsible for the overall performance of the APAC region, including oversight of a team of around 80 across customer services and engagement, growth and acquisition, the region’s product roadmap, and services evolution.

FP: What’s a challenge unique to Equiem’s product that keeps you on your toes, so to speak?

JL: There’s more than one answer to that. Probably the biggest is grappling with where we focus our energy. There is constant pressure globally to do so much. It takes a lot of discipline to ensure that we stay focussed on our core strategy and don’t become distracted by every complementary technology that comes along. Day to day, the challenge has been to ensure that our clients, mainly building owners, can deliver a differentiated ‘custom-fit’ service or product to their customers. Still, as our product has become more sophisticated, this has become much easier.

FP: Overseeing client retention is a big part of your role as Regional Head of Asia Pacific at Equiem. What is it about your leadership that encourages customers to keep coming back?

JL: As a starting point, no matter what kind of leader you are, you’ve got to have a good product, and this has been our primary focus over the last 18 months. With that in place, it’s about having the right people with the right expertise looking after our clients & customers. Building, deploying, and managing our platform involves a really broad suite of skills – many of which I don’t have! This means that I rely heavily on my team’s expertise and empower them to get on with the job. I think this has flowed through to the high-quality relationships that we develop with our clients. Generally, there’s an acceptance that, as an industry, we are young, and there’s a need to experiment and sometimes fail, which is the perfect environment to build collaborative working teams.

FP: You have a quarter of a century’s worth of professional property experience under your belt. What is the biggest industry change that has fascinated you the most?

JL: *Laughs* I have been around for probably too long – but jumping from property to proptech has kept life interesting!

In terms of change, the office and retail sectors are at a fascinating point right now, with even the strongest analysts struggling to unravel the complexity. And this is what happens when markets turn. Many in the industry have only seen growth, which may be great, but the interesting stuff happens when markets come off the top or bottom, and that is where we are now.

But to answer your question, in recent times, the most fascinating industry change is actually what brought me to Equiem. It was the convergence of technology, the changing workplace, and the concept of the customer in the eyes of building owners. These elements had always been there to some degree, but it was clear that they would become much more interdependent – and this is exactly what has happened!

FP: What do you mean by your customer comment?

JL: Well, many owners now recognize that their customer is every individual occupant of their building and every visitor to that building. It wasn’t long ago that they didn’t even believe they had customers!

And that’s a dynamic influencing how they think about commercial real estate across the board. But it also plays into Equiem’s platform because we provide the technology to communicate with individuals, provide them with a whole range of products, tools, and services and gather data on their satisfaction.

FP: There’s a pervasive idea that tenant engagement can drive success within an office building. What’s the full breadth of the argument behind that notion?

JL: The logic really goes back to the war for talent. Corporations have realized that they can use real estate as a powerful, affordable lever to attract and retain talent. And so those corporate entities are looking for real estate that is differentiated in some way, that can provide an enhanced experience for their people. Added to this is the Covid effect – so now, more than ever, building owners need to deliver a product that helps their tenants provide a reason for their staff to be there. Whether it’s ‘tenant engagement’; or ‘workplace experience,’ the concepts embedded in our technology have quickly become mainstream and, in many cases, a not -negotiable requirement for workplace environments.

FP: How can the consumer, who is often the landlord of a building, identify which Proptech technologies will drive tenant engagement and which ones offer more frills than functionality?

JL: Great question – This is a massive challenge for building owners at the moment. It’s exacerbated by the meeting of two very different industries, by vapourware, by language barriers. What’s great in Australia is that building owners are now building highly skilled teams in this space and I think that is really adding value.

You can look at evidence-based research on what others have done to discern what has and has not been successful. Then you need to understand the profile of a building and its occupants – what do they want? Most importantly, – speak to us – we have a decade of experience & some pretty strong views in this space!

FP: As someone with an extensive property background, what would you say is something that the most successful property owners understand?

JL: That’s a big question! But in relation to proptech specifically, the evaluation and decision-making fundamentals are not the same as at a traditional property level. So to be successful in proptech, owners need to have the courage to get a little out of their comfort zone. There needs to be an appetite to take a degree of risk, a commitment to continuously drive improvement, an acceptance of bumps in the road, and, most importantly, a true partnership approach with their proptech providers. The traditional service provider mentality doesn’t deliver the best results in this space!