The tenant experience is at the forefront of every CRE professionals mind – that goes without saying, but do property teams truly know what their tenants want from the buildings they work in? Or are they constantly making decisions strictly based on presumptions?  

Many times, we find that new amenities, technologies, and services are implemented based on pure assumptions, rather than concrete facts. Today, the stakes are too high to continue to guess what will keep tenants in buildings. Implementing expensive amenities that tenants don’t actually want, is detrimental to your bottom line.  

Just think, if a property team assumes that a café is the most important amenity to their tenants, and they decide to add one to their lobby just to find out that tenants would prefer stronger Wi-Fi or a gym, they’ve just wasted time and money implementing an amenity that isn’t going to truly affect the tenant experience.  

In fact, according to a recent Building Engines’ report, The Tenant Experience Gap, we found that this could actually happen. During the study, we discovered that Wi-Fi is the most important amenity to building occupants, while CRE professionals ranked Wi-Fi as the fourth most important amenity. If the property manager in the scenario above knew this fact, they would’ve known to improve their Wi-Fi rather than adding a new café that would run them an unnecessary large expense.  

By comparing the responses of CRE professionals to those of building occupants in this study, property management teams can gain a better understanding of what amenities truly matter to tenants. They then will know where to invest budget in the movement to improve the tenant’s experience, offering amenities that tenants actually want and as a result, generating future loyalty from them.   

This infographic displays a snapshot of what tenants want and how they prefer to communicate with property teams compared to what CRE professionals assume.