EDITOR’S COMMENT The PM’s announcement of his “ambitious” 10-point plan for an industrial green revolution this week got me thinking about a 10-point plan for the real estate revolution.
I know these are the kinds of things we tend to start pondering as we reach the final few weeks of the year, but with what appears to be – according to a search through Damian Wild’s Twitter – a growing number of real estate professionals getting in the festive mood, with lights, stockings and even a Christmas wrapping station already installed in their homes, I thought why not?
Here are just five points to get us started:
1. Sustainability – we all know the huge role that real estate plays in the production of CO2 emissions, which means it should be playing an even bigger role in eliminating them. The sector needs to come together with a single goal to make a change. Its ambition should be to share best practice and to deliver as a whole. Competition should be in the service you deliver to your customers, not in how you treat precious resources.
2. Workplaces – EG’s mental health survey this week reveals that more than 50% of real estate professionals feel that working from home has negatively impacted their mental health. The workplace has never been more important. However, 43% of respondents said working from home had been positive for their mental health as they didn’t feel the pressure of presenteeism and that the flexibility it has provided had lightened the load. The new office – not necessarily in its design or even in its lease length – needs to be more flexible. It needs to enable workers to work where they work best at a time that works best for them and the business. Real estate holds the key to that, through the places it creates and through leading by example.
3. Communication and collaboration – in an interview last week, Philip Hammond gave away a gem of advice. Join up your thinking and deliver a single, fully agreed message if you want to get heard. Find a built environment spokesperson/vehicle, agree on your biggest issues (perhaps in a handy five or 10-point plan) and collectively take them forward. With no sneaky side conversations allowed.
4. Delve deeper – look harder for talent both inside your businesses and in new places. Stop looking for people who agree with you and look for the person who doesn’t. Find someone different to you. Ask them questions, learn from them, converse. Real estate is a special club but it should not be exclusive. EG, of course, is keen to help you with this and will soon be launching our latest series of the EG Future Leaders programme.
5. Innovate – offices, industrial, BTR, even retail are great assets (or at least can be), but real estate has such a powerful role to play in enabling the UK to be a leader in innovation. Think about how labs around the world have played such a key role in the development of a vaccine that will hopefully bring us back to some sort of normal and how plans are afoot to deliver seven giant space hubs to make us the leaders in space science. Let’s be ambitious about giving real estate a reputation as the enabler of this innovation. Let’s make it known as the provider of the places that enable great things to happen.
There’s an ambitious and bright future for real estate and like those that have shared images of stockings hanging on the chimney, I don’t care if it’s too early to be thinking about new year plans. It’s never too early to be hopeful.
Let’s turn five into 10. E-mail me your list and let’s set out that one ambitious action plan together.
To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
