BEYOND SILOS:  PROPTECH, GENAI & THE FUTURE OF REAL ESTATE -
ANTONY SLUMBERS

CRA: Anthony, welcome to the TechBurst Talks podcast. Antony: Hello. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. CRA: I'm really looking forward to this today because we're gonna cover three topics that I've been passionate about over the recent years. So one of those is PropTech, then there's the Future of Work and GenAI. But before we dive into all these different topics, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and I'm really curious to know how did somebody who studied history and the history of art a successful software developer and then move into PropTech future of work in Gen ai? Antony: It is. A very odd, odd story, but it, it is a, it is a function of age, Charles. If you, if you're old enough to be around, around where, when, when I was basically pre, pre-internet, well, not pre-internet, but certainly pre, pre pre the web, you get to, you get to [00:01:00] do different things. So I did history and history of art for my degree and then worked for about 10 years or so for one of the leading European art dealers, which was, which was a lot of a, a lot, a lot of fun. But he, so, so happened that a lot of art dealers at the time also did some property development on the, on the side. And I got involved with someone who worked with, with the gallery doing doing property development. And we did, we did quite a, quite a lot. And then to cut, long story short, we hit the, the 1987, no, 19 19 90 crash. And it was sort of stay alive till 95 is what is what they said. But in 1995, I went, went into what was the first internet cafe in in London. It's, it is funny you tell people that you used to have to go to a shop to, to use the internet. It's quite, quite funny. And I, and I immediately thought this was going to be pretty good for, for [00:02:00] real estate in the sense of there's lots of, we deal with lots of documents, we deal with lots of images and we deal with lots of different parties and they're all over the place. And so at that time, believe it or not, there was only the entire HTML specification was only 36 pages. So even a history of art graduate could learn, learn the worldwide web in, in that days. And then essentially I spent 10 years learning it as it as it grew. And then eventually it got it got too complicated for me. But by then I had some other developers working for me. So I, I morphed from doing the art dealing into property development, into being essentially a web agency doing company's web websites and intranets as they used to be called then. And then I did a co a, a couple of, a couple of research companies. And the main thing I did was I had a joint venture with British Land who at the time were the biggest real estate company in the uk and we developed for 15 years property management software. So the, [00:03:00] the software that goes into managing big, big office buildings. So it's, it is just one of those weird, weird things that are over a long, long time. You move from 1, 1 1 to other, but it is, it is, it is, it is always been an interesting angle that, that I think has been very useful for me because being fundamentally a lovey. But also running a tech company, there's this left brain, right brain, slightly, slightly strange or unusual way of looking at, looking at, looking at the world, which has always made things fun. CRA: Well, I think it's good to have those things 'cause it gives you a little bit of balance then as well. And you can look at things with different perceptions as well. So, I think it's interesting 'cause you went through this whole tech, you saw the tech growth when the internet first came out. And I, funny enough, I was working in banking during those years, but then my friend and I started doing websites for a couple of companies as a side project. And then eventually around the.com I moved from banking into just tech. Antony: Yeah. CRA: so I think we wrote a lot of that [00:04:00] same wave. because you had so much experience on the property side you were really, you know, doing property with technology, when that took off about, I mean, PropTech became a buzzword, maybe 20 17, 20 18, you were really like at the forefront of that. So like, what was it like then with PropTech? Was it that the most exciting time, or you're like, finally you guys have caught up with me? Antony: Well, the, I I actually not, not quite, because the, the, the most exciting time, there's been two, two most exciting times in, in my, my tech, tech career. 95 to 98. From right at the start, right at the start of the, the web or almost at the start of the, of the web for the first three years was incredibly exciting. Things were changing every week, every week. And then the last two and a half years, which have been analogous in the sense of things have changed. So, so incre, incredibly qui quickly, re PropTech. We are much, much better now than we used to be. [00:05:00] But I still, to be honest, somewhat despair that I still have conversations I had 30 years ago with people in, in terms of, oh, well we don't do this and we don't, don't do that. And you think, oh, for God's sake, you've had, you've had three generations to, to get, get this right. So it is, it is, it has got a lot better over the last, over the last decade. But it, but it's still an in an industry where, I don't know where, where with the early majority, I don't think we've actually passed the hump in the, in the adoption, in the adoption curve curve yet. And there's still, there's still a, a lot, a lot to be done. but para, but paradoxically. All, all, all this AI stuff is actually just going to turbocharge that and is, is blowing everything up. So we, I I, I feel we're almost gonna be starting with a clean, clean sheets of [00:06:00] paper very, very soon because there's people that are gonna be able to do things today and start companies today. This simply weren't possible a few, a few years ago. So the, the, CRA: months ago, Antony: or even a few months ago. Yes. So the ability to fast forward into, into the, into the future is, is, is a rare thing. And as I say, it had 95, 98. You, you, you found that. And then the la the last couple of years and over the next couple of years, I think there's gonna be extraordinary, extraordinary changes. CRA: think I would agree with you on PropTech, where I think like if you look at when it was all the rage. lot of it was fluff. A lot of it was ideas, but they hadn't really thought through it as much. And what you had was a lot of marketing hype going on around it. Instead of people just doing what made sense and what has happened with a lot of those buzzwords, like IOT, like smart cities, they haven't gone away. People just got on with it and started delivering it. And I think what's happened today with gen AI and [00:07:00] AI in general, traditional AI, is it gives real estate firms and startups that opportunity to really just go out there and turbocharge these things and actually start to really transform the way that we manage buildings going forward, where we experience buildings going forward. Antony: I, I think, I think it also puts a lot more attention actually on physical real estate. I have a little bit of a gripe about the PropTech world in that an awful lot of the companies that are, are tagged onto PropTech are really FinTech. You know, it is financing in some ways. You know, who, who's raised the most money? Well, some company doing some, some new tech way of mortgaging or taking deposits or financing stuff. It's basically fin FinTech. There hasn't really been that much concentration on building a better built environment, CRA: Yeah, Antony: building better real estate. There's been, there's been some, but not really. And I think, I think [00:08:00] now with, with ai, there's definitely an opportunity to, to build a better built environment and actually focus on assets and neighborhoods and cities, and how do we ma, how do we make these things simply better, better places to be, rather than just to, how do we financialize 'em and trade them? CRA: and I think before it was much more about how do we just build and manage the buildings, but now it's about the experience because that matters and people have never really thought about it as much because that becomes the expensive side. But I think a lot of these new tools. Allow us to really design multi-use facilities and spaces that we can enjoy more. So it's not just about, this has to be residential, this has to be commercial, this has to be, office space. You know, you can actually start creating these different types of environments and bring nature back into these city centers that we've built up too much. Antony: Yeah, well, it, I, I don't, I don't think you've got any, any market in real estate unless you can, unless you're creating great user [00:09:00] experience in, in one way, one way or other. And that didn't use to be the case. You know, the game of real estate up until 10 years ago, had nothing to do with user experience. CRA: Yep. Antony: It was actually a financial game. You were building a product. The product was not, was not a, a physical asset. The po the product was a financial instrument that here's some way you can park your a hundred million and get a 3% or 4% return. It was a bond. You are build, you are building bonds and having no interest at all in what happened inside the buildings. But, but, but now, so certainly in the, in the, in the office market, you'd have no market unless you're creating a really good user experience. 'cause nobody needs them. Nobody, nobody needs to go to an office to do any work anymore. But that doesn't mean they don't want to go there. And if you want 'em to go there, you need to create a great environment. And [00:10:00] it's interesting, if you look at the market, the, the top 10, 15%, so the top prime market gangbusters, record record rates, not enough of it ma. Massive demand. But they're brilliant spaces. They are fabulous places to be. And then you look at the really good flex operators. They're brilliant spaces. They're really nice places to be, and they're busy as well. All the stuff in the middle, all the stuff in the middle is, is everything that people are resisting return to the office for. 'cause they don't want to go to these terrible places. They will, they want to go to great, great spaces. And if you don't create a great space, I think that's gonna be the, the fastest way to destroy value. There is, but also it is very interesting what you said about, you know, mi mixed, mixed use areas. I, I say if I was investing in, in real estate, I would definitely be invested in mixed use, real real estate places where you can actually bring back, work, [00:11:00] work, live, play, all in all within an an area. And the whole notion of f 15 minute cities and stuff of actually creating walkable, likable, interesting, attractive places to be is is what we want. And it's interesting, if you look at. Some of the American markets vis-a-vis some of the, the European markets. A lot of the American markets have real problems because their downtowns are nothing CRA: Mm-hmm. Antony: there apart from skyscrapers, skyscrapers and car parks. No one wants to get, no one wants to go back back to them. And there's lots of places like that where, whereas Europe, okay, you, you have the, the, the different attitude to sort of get up and go if you like, in, in Europe. But we have an awful lot of really nice cities and secondary cities and places, places people want to go. And we have got good transport links be between them. So there's a, there's a lot of opportunity within Europe, I think to really o [00:12:00] over-index on creating really, really, really wonderful places to be and attracting talent to these nice, nice places to be, you know, if you could, if you can combine a great university with a great place to live at an affordable level. You are ab you are absolutely. You know, you've, you've, you've ticked all the boxes and o off you go. CRA: That's interesting. I mean, I, I, I do think, I hope we do more of this and we've even seen it in Asia, you know, and in Singapore in particular, there's been a lot of mixed use type facilities coming up. You had POQ you know, maple Tree has a nice complex out there and all the big tech brands are all going in there. So it's, it's getting better. But you still, and most of our cities are not gonna be those mixed use, most of that middle section you're talking about, it's not a small middle section, it's the vast majority of the market are these buildings and offices that, yeah. You just, it's not really that exciting to go into. Antony: Yeah, there's a, there's, there's an awful lot of obs obsolete space. [00:13:00] You know, there's vast, there's vast amounts of obsolete space. Cushman's, Cushman and Wakefield did a study last year, I think about obsolescence. And they, they put it, it's, it is in the multi-billion square feet in the US and it's actually billions of square feet in Europe as well. There's just lots of space that we don't really have a good, a good use use for in anymore. CRA: Yep. Antony: but we need to, we need, but that's the exciting bit. We need to work out what, what to do with, what to do with all this stuff. And yes, you always have the pain of, there's a lot of places that have collapsed, collapsed in value, which obviously is hurting someone, but if you don't collapse in value, you've got no chance to start a new cycle. So in a lot of these places, and you see them, particularly in America, you see places that sold 15 years ago for $400 million being sold for $60 million, 15, 15 years, LA later. But they need to be, because you've gotta start, you've gotta, you've gotta roll with it [00:14:00] and, and, and start, start again and reset all the prices and then you can get going again. I mean, we are slightly. Sort of at the end of it. But in this sort of zombie land at the moment where, you know, extend and pretend goes on and everything, everything's fine. And people aren't living up to, or really accepting, accepting losses, but they, they always, always come in the end. And then, and then you, you start again. And one way or another, PE people roll, roll with it. We always have gone on for a thousand years, isn't it? So just do it again. CRA: We will find our way through it. But I, I do like the idea of this reset because I think with the technologies we have available today, it creates a lot of opportunities to do interesting things going forward. But now on the technology side, do you see more of this being led by the commercial real estate firms or is it startups or is it somebody else? Antony: I [00:15:00] I have a hypo, a hypothesis at the moment built up based on. Based on the transform formative power of, of AI that I think we are gonna see a lot of new companies, possibly spin outs from large, from large companies that do start from a clean sheet of paper where you get a couple of serious professionals, been around a long time, plus some juniors, plus a ton of new money, different business models. Totally AI first from, from the offset. And I, and I think a lot of these companies are gonna be small and agile and hyper productive and they're gonna be incredibly, incredibly competitive. Competitive. And it's interesting, there's a company, I can't remember what what its name [00:16:00] was, but was started recently. By two people. One used to be one of the heads of ey and the other one was the woman who didn't get the top job at PWC last year, and they've got $300 million I think, of funding from warburgs. And basically they're, they're being E EY and PWC without the auditing, but specifically they say with different business models. And the most important change in the business model is that because of ai, you don't do hourly billing anymore. You know, if you need, if you took you three months, three people, three months to do some due diligence, bill it by the hour, that's great. If it takes you one person two days to do it, you don't wanna bill by the hour. And, and you look at com companies like that, where you, you, you, you are bringing together established talent. [00:17:00] With, with networks, with, with clients, with big dollops of money, and they are, there's plenty of money around for the, for, for the right thing and basing the whole thing on, on new, new technologies. And as I, as I say, I think we're gonna see a, a lot of, a lot of that, whether there be, I don't think there's gonna be many PropTech companies that manage to manage to do the whole thing. I think you're gonna get a lot of, a lot of mergers. I think you're gonna get a lot of real estate companies that actually look a lot more like PropTech companies because you, you need, you need this domain knowledge to go with the techno, techno, the technology knowledge. And that's always the criticism of PropTech, that the tech people know nothing about real estate and the real estate. People know nothing about tech. And I think, and I think we need, we need to merge the, merge these now. And I know it's [00:18:00] slightly of the unfashionable way of thinking about these things, but, but I, I can see the, I, I can see a number of these companies coming from the real estate side, but transmogrifying themselves into much more technology. AI first, right, right. From the off. So they, they will pull in a lot more technology. I mean, there's no, there's no company that's really gonna survive without being top to bottom AI literate. So you're gonna have to know a lot more about technology. Everybody's gonna need to know a lot more about technology, but at the same time, they need to know a lot more about technology. They need to know a lot more about humanity as well. You know, you've got the, you've got this strange paradox brewing and building, where as we get more and more technological. Actually, the super skill for [00:19:00] humans has gotta be being a really good human because the machines are gonna do everything the machines can do. So don't, you know, it's a knife to a gunfight. You know, don't, don't think you're gonna beat the machines at what they're good at, that they're better than you. So what, what do we humans have? Well, we have to be really much, much better, much better humans, and we need to bring that extra qualitative understanding, our ability to have much stronger critical thinking. Be much better at data analytics, be much better problem solving, and essentially having more, more human skills and asking the best questions along alongside all the technology. So companies I think are just gonna be different. This is what I think people are underestimating at the moment, that one, one always thinks. Tomorrow is just an iteration of today. 'cause it [00:20:00] sort of feels like that. You know, even you go back to the year 2000, how much is really different in many ways, not that much. And then you suddenly, you suddenly think, well, hang on a moment. I've just been sitting in my car watching a, a video as we go along. That would've been magic 20 years ago. But you don't think, think about it. But there's such a, there's such a, in, in, in biology, there's a term called punctuated equilibrium that says the way, the way evolution works is that actually everything is pretty much stable until you get a big break and then you jump. So you don't, and evolution is not an ongoing thing. It's a stable and then crunch something, something big happens. And I think we're in that crunch. Something big happen is happening world and the, the nature of a company. The, the, the, the way it's operated, its organizational model, its constitution. I [00:21:00] think it, they're just gonna be fundamentally different companies. CRA: But how, this is the question. 'cause I agree with you. We're going through a period right now. Like I, I always say like I think that this era of, especially with generative AI moving towards AgTech will be the biggest bit of innovation in my lifetime along with the internet, the launch of the internet. it will deliver more value and more transformation faster than we got with the internet. Because the internet we started with dial up, you know, you ended up, you know, I mean, I remember getting my first GPRS card Antony: Yeah. CRA: you know, and ooh, 256 KK per per second. Yeah, that was great. But I, so I, I agree you, but I can see these new companies being formed now and being agile and small and AI first, what does that mean for the real estate industry? Because let's face it, a lot of these larger commercial real estate firms are physical, asset heavy, and also people asset heavy. So how, how do they actually start adopting this and what do they do? [00:22:00] Just, you know, whack half their workforce. Antony: Well, there, there's, there's different ways of looking at it is, and the, the way I look at it, CRA: Yeah. Antony: when I'm, when I'm teach teaching my course, what I always say to people is, there is going to be a lot of disruption and lots of people will be losing their jobs, CRA: Yeah. Antony: but so what's the what, what's the way to respond to that today? Well, you need to be the person who's not gonna, who's not gonna be disrupted. You need to be the person disrupting the per the person who's walking, running towards the future. And I think, I think we're gonna get this for quite a long, quite a long time that there's gonna be companies who do, who say, look, if I can make all of our people twice as productive, and, and we all know if you use these tools properly, you can easily make [00:23:00] yourself twice as productive CRA: Yeah. Antony: in, in, in a lot, in a lot of it, in instances, you just, can you just talk to anyone who's used these tools on a, you know, a, a daily ongoing way in, in depth, you, you're not talking about being 10% more productive. Now you're talking about being multi multiples a time. So either you say, well, we have a fixed pie and therefore I just sack half my people. Or you say, whoopee, duh, I'm not gonna take all their business. And you know, you can you com, you compete your way forward. But fundamentally, we need a bigger pie. As a society, we need a bigger pie because if we do not grow a bigger pie, then there's gonna be a lot of winners, but there are gonna be a lot of losers because you see. CRA: very interesting point you're bringing up because what we're looking at is the technology that's gonna change us [00:24:00] tomorrow, but we're looking at it against today's pie. So what the market is today. We don't realize that our definition of what is the market for someone who does commercial real estate will dramatically change as everything else changes. They'll probably ditch off some of the stuff that they do, but they might grow into other areas. And if it does become these more multi-use facilities, that creates a lot more opportunity for new revenue streams in other areas they weren't even thinking about before. Antony: Ab absolutely. In my, in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the move from white, white glove services to commodity services in the center. And the argument was, and this doesn't apply just in real estate, it applies across so many industries. There's a certain section of society that currently gets white glove treatment. They, you know, they get personal shoppers, they get. Personal lawyers, they get personal doc, they get ev everything done for them with lovely white gloves and whatever. But that's only done because they [00:25:00] can afford a very high price rate. But if you can fundamentally change the price point where you can offer the equivalent of a white glove service at one 10th of the price, your market, it grows enormously. And, and I think in many ways that's the way we need to, need to be thinking about things. What, what is only available to a multimillionaire today That this technology enables a normal person, a normal person to afford. And there's, there's loads of in, I mean you just think about legal. So legal services, it's almost a CLA classic one. It is always the case, oh well what are lawyers gonna do? Because the technology's gonna be able to do all their work. And I think. How are, you've gotta be really wealthy to get a great lawyer, but why can't we all have great lawyers? You know, you start, CRA: great lawyers? Antony: you start thinking, thinking of it like that. And there's [00:26:00] that, and there's that old joke from year, years and years ago talking about how, you know, the middle of the 16th century, the only woman in the world who could afford silk stockings was Queen Elizabeth the first. Everyone can have them now, but there was a time that only one person could have them. There was a time, there was a time only a certain number of people could have potatoes. There was a time only a certain number of people could have sought to put on their food. You know, the, the, the, the point with all the these things is we have to think bigger pie and what worries me in many ways, and is the, the, I think is, it was, was it the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, an article about this last week talking about American CEOs bragging about how many people they're sacking. And really getting off and on a, you know, yeah, we're getting rid of people every quarter. We're getting rid of people, and it is become a bit of a, you know, a, a thing to brag about because that's the way we're gonna make more money, just get rid of people. And [00:27:00] that's a really worrying trajectory. If you, if, if you think, if you are incentivized to sack off your people, you will, but we need, we need to reframe things in many ways that you are incentivized to, to build a better, to build a better X, Y, X, Y, Z, and, and, and do more. And to be honest, this does normally happen. You know, there's a, the, the, the, the famous Jevons paradox as thing as electricity got cheaper we didn't spend less on electricity. We just used a hell of a lot more. And if you think of it now, we are, we are now in a world where. The price of intelligence is trending towards zero and E, even for a given unit of intelligence for the last five years. The cost of that with language models has reduced [00:28:00] by a fact a factor of 10 each year for the last five years for a given level, level of intelligence. Of course, what's happened is we are, we're gaining higher intelligences. But the point is, in a world where intelligence is free, can we not use it? I mean, serious, seriously. I, you know, I have conversations with people and say, yeah, but what's everyone going to, what's everyone gonna do? Are there gonna be any jobs? And I say, well, you know, that thing called the UU United Nations sustainability development goals, and we'll say 17, 17 of them, the big intractable problems that the world has. Well, we haven't sold any of those, have we? So when, when we've solved all the un sustainability development goals, then come back and say, we haven't got anything to do. But I think, I think this is a mindset, this is a mindset thing. We need to be thinking, given these new [00:29:00] technologies and this, and you can bring this down to just a real estate level, an individual company, not how can we do what we've done better and faster and cheaper, but what can we now do that has become enabled because of this new technology? And what intractable problems can we now address because we have some chance of actually dealing with them. And I, I'm hoping, and you'll notice I have quite a romantic and very optimistic optimistic view, view of this. But I, but I do hope as society we start think, we start thinking, well, not. Not about universal basic income, but how can we put all this intelligence and all this money and all this human PA capabilities towards solving, oh, I don't know, climate change or water shortages or, you know, there's, there's, [00:30:00] there's so many big, big problems that we, we, we just ignore 'em. We say, oh, it's gonna be nothing to do because, you know, marketing isn't so, isn't needed so much anymore, you know? CRA: But this is the thing. The, the tools that are available now us the capability to address bigger challenges. How do we solve cancer? How do we come up with better medications to allow people who have chronic conditions live better? You know, it's like we, we have the power to go after these things now. And you mentioned the SDG goals, we're not really doing that great against them right now. There's a lot of different funds and startups going after it, but it, it, it creates, it gives us more tools to try and solve these. Before they might have seemed insurmountable, but now we're seeing how we can leverage these new tools to drive so much value so quickly that we might have a chance actually of saving some of these things. Antony: Well, and, and I think so, and I, you know, I've, I've heard you talk, talk, talk, talk about this be before and it, and it's so true. And it needs [00:31:00] more people to say, you know, the, the mindset has, has to be bigger pie, bigger problems, and then, and then worry about having, having nothing to, it's sort of ridiculous. And it goes against, I mean, Sam Altman, you know, the boss of, boss of Open AI gets a lot of grief from a lot of people. They think, oh, you know, he, he's some sort of e evil little puppet doing, doing something strange. But I was listening to him the other day and he said, look, fundamentally, we mustn't try and argue against biology. The biology of humans is we like to do things. We like to be with other people. We like to be active, we like to demonstrate our status. We like to do X, Y, z. And that's not gonna change. That's absolutely not, not going to change The way people fundamentally want to behave [00:32:00] is, isn't, isn't going, isn't going to change. I mean, you just see it with you know, you just look at, you know, the multi-billionaires, the Bezos and all, all that sort of stuff. He's gone back to work at Amazon, $250 billion in, in the bank. All the toy toys in the world. I'm bored, I wanna go back. I wanna go back to work. And people are biologically, biologically programmed in a certain way that isn't going to change. So we have to, we have to roll with. Ho Okay. Ho hopefully the better angels of our nature rather than the, the less, the, the lesser angels of our nature. But I, I think that's a, I think that's a, a really valid point that if we want, we, we are clearly gonna need meaning, aren't we? You know, as you think of a world of abundance. So think of a world 20 years down the line [00:33:00] where we've got a million times more compute power. We can do so much more. Everything is cheap because everything can be made by, by machines. So it's all gonna gonna be cheap. We're still gonna need, we're still gonna need meaning, and we're still gonna need to believe in something. And, you know, I don't, I just, I just don't think we're gonna run out, run out of run out of thing. Things to do. CRA: I think there, there's plenty of problems to solve and I, I also think that we're both of a certain age, we've seen a lot of these things come by before where like, you know, everything seems so shocking when it's new. When the internet came out. I mean, I remember being in banking when Lotus 1, 2, 3 and Excel came out. It, it just changed everything. And we thought, and then when I put A-G-P-R-S card into the P-C-M-C-I-A slot on my laptop and I could get connectivity on the laptop, oh, that was just like the coolest thing ever. So it's like, we've seen these things. We tend to think up front like, oh, it's gonna destroy all of our jobs. And I, I've heard this for the last 35 years of my career, [00:34:00] all this is gonna just take away jobs. It, our jobs evolve. Our lives evolve. We evolved around the technologies that we have available. So I don't think we're gonna run into a situation where suddenly 50% of the people are unemployed because that would lead to a lot of wars and fighting. It's, it's not gonna work. Antony: Well, yeah, exactly. That has, has to be avoided at, at, at all, at all costs, doesn't it? And, and, and it will, will be. The other thing about technology. Is apart from a few people. Fundamentally, I think we're all very bored with it. We find it very boring as soon as we've had it for a little bit of time. CRA: Yep. Antony: Ev everything is magic for a short, a short period of time. And I always use an analogy, you know, you, when you buy a new car, you wash it every day, don't you? And you polish it and you keep it clean and it's lovely, you know? And a year later it's filthy dirty and you, you can't be, can't be bothered. I think with so many of these technologies, everything we do, and it [00:35:00] comes out every, every week now, you think this is magical and it's wonderful. It's just gonna be table stakes in a few months time, CRA: Trust. Antony: we won't even. CRA: going through it right now with, with Gen ai. used to, I was, I loved what I could do and I was running, I was mirroring two different models. I was using Claude and I was using chat, GPT. I used to call 'em my twenty four seven interns 'cause they could help me solve all Antony: Yeah, CRA: and make me faster. realized is when you're not average at something, it's the best tool in the world. So, Antony: yeah, CRA: learn how to use my new very complex which as the manual, just it's, I can't even look at it, it's too scary. I could use chat GPD to help me how to use an oven, whereas someone who knows how to use that oven would think it's stupid. Antony: yeah. CRA: where I think I have a bit of expertise, I'm not always as satisfied with the results 'cause it's pulling the average of everything. But I think it's this thing where I went through and first I was so amazed. Now I'm understanding the limitations, but what's important is I'm understanding how to leverage it and use it for what it's really good for, [00:36:00] which is helping me how to learn how to use a very complex oven and cook better food, hopefully. Antony: Well, well, well, exactly, but, but the, but the end output that you're really interested in. Is, is cooking a really nice dish? And ultimately you will work, you'll work out the oven, and then that'll just become boring. That's just, that's just a tool. That's, that's not the end, that's not the end point. And, and that's what I think is going, is gonna happen with so much of it, which is the great opportunity within real estate is to create spaces which are all about the human stuff. That yes, they can be super technological and they can have wonderful climate conditions and environmental conditions, and they can be beautiful and look nice and be com comf comfortable and, and monitored and maintained algorithmically. But really you are creating that dish and, and it's just a complicated [00:37:00] oven. And we are the create and we spend 90% of our time inside spaces. Why shouldn't every space we're in be a wonderful, wonderful place to be That surely has to be, you know, I always talk about building a better built environment. Everyone should have, everyone should be have, everyone should have the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time in spaces that are just really nice to spend a lot of time in. And we, and we all, CRA: on that. And Antony: we all know. CRA: segue right now because we've been going so far into the tech, we've, we've totally bypassed a portion of your career. We became quite well known space as a service. So about seven or eight years ago, you came out with this idea about space as a service and you called it the trillion dollar hashtag. So tell us a bit about that and Antony: Well, it, CRA: tech later, I promise. Antony: it, it, it is exactly, it is what fundamentally underlies every, everything. We've been been talking, talking about [00:38:00] that space as a service CRA: Yeah. Antony: of had, had two meanings. One, one was. That, and this has been a natural progression over the last few decades. Lease lengths have got shorter and shorter and shorter, and we are much more likely to be hiring our space as a service for how long we need it. You know, an hour a day, a week, a month, a a, a year or two. But the more important meaning of space as a service or space that provides us with the services we need to be as happy, healthy, and productive as we possibly can be within that space. CRA: We Antony: So it's, CRA: this. isn't co-working. We're talking about, this is very different from just like your co-working. Antony: it, this applies across, across every office. CRA: Okay. Antony: mean, if you look at, if you look at all the best offices now, they are sort of are run on this principle. Even if they're being run, run by themselves. You know, why, why do you want to come into the office? Because it's a one, [00:39:00] it's a wonderful place to be. I need to write a report. There's gonna be a space there. Which is going to have everything I need and, and be tuned to enabling me to operate at my maximum cognitive capability. So it's gonna be the right temperature. I'm gonna have a comfortable desk, I'm gonna have a really comfortable chair. The lighting's gonna be right, everything's gonna be perfect about that space for me to do this particular task. And then when I wanna do a different type of task, I go to a different type of space. And each space is, is designed to maximize the, the user experience for a particular, for a particular use. Use case. Use case. And that's really what space, spaces and services is, is all about. And it was started from the idea that I hadn't been in an office for [00:40:00] 25, 25 years. So when I started talking about this, I was used to, I was used to not working in an, an office and my developers for my software companies were based in, were based in India, and my designer was based 50 miles away for away from me. So I didn't, I never congregated in a, in a, in an office, in a, in a communal office. And technology was just going to make that more and more possible for more and more people. So why, why do you go to a space un unless it gives you something better than you can achieve elsewhere. I mean, I always say to say this to developers or landlords, what can someone do in your building that they can't do anywhere else? CRA: So if I'm an employee, I obviously want to work in an office like that. And I've got, because I've done a decent amount of work with some of the big commercial real estate firms, I've got to see some of the best offices. I never had the opportunity to work there, but [00:41:00] I would love to work there. Most people would love to work there. So we know that there's the demand. People want to work in spaces like that. We have the technology to really create interesting spaces that are tech enabled as well. Why aren't we seeing more of them? Is it just a pure cost thing where people don't know how to do it or, or do we just not know how to design them going forward? Antony: It, it is a, it is a little bit of an oddity actually, because we absolutely do know, we do know how to create a great office. It's a known, no. I mean, lots of people talk about, oh, is it this or is it that? But frankly, frankly, it's a known, known, you know, there, there, there are, there are people who know how to create the right, the right types of spaces. One of the things that is very strange, and this comes back to corporate dynamics, is. The very low percentage of companies that actually ask their employees anything about their workplace. Like, does this workplace enable you to do your [00:42:00] best, best work? Does it enable you to do this, that and the other? If you go into any great office, which is busy, you will find that that company knows an awful lot about the, the wants, needs, and desires of their employees, and has, and has built the, the, the space around those wants, needs and desires. You can also go into, and I remember someone telling, telling me this, that they, they had a beautiful office and, and they spent, this company had spent a fortune on it. No one was in there because it completely didn't, it looked beautiful and it had all the bells and whistles and all the toys, but it was completely not designed. For the wants, needs and desires of a, of that particular, particular company. And I, I've always been amazed, and if you look at the stats, and admittedly I haven't looked at them for no, or seen them in the last couple of years, but it was a few years ago, it was only [00:43:00] something like 30% of companies had done any sort of any sort of in inte intelligence gathering about the need needs of their people. And then they wonder why people don't want to come to their, come to their spaces. But, but you know, it is, it, it is this, it is this con constant thing, isn't it? That there's a, there's a lot of problems that can be solved, but frankly, management is the problem in so many cases. You know, you look at the man, the management. CRA: We, completely agree on this one. Yes. Antony: Yeah, the, the management of companies, the toxicity of companies, the lack of training of managers. Somehow we just expect managers to be able to manage people through osmosis or something. And we don't, we don't train, don't train enough people. And you, you just sit on LinkedIn for a co couple of weeks and, [00:44:00] and listen to people moan about management in their management in their, in their companies. And again, I've, I've heard, I've heard you talk, talk about this problem, but if you don't sort the management. CRA: so I'm just complaining about me. Antony: Yeah. You know, if you don't, if you don't sort, if you don't sort the management out, you know, you, you can still have the, the, the, the best places. So real, real estate people do have, they are in a difficult situation because there's, there's pain points that they are not actually able to adjust. The levers for, so they can do an awful lot of good things. This, this is actually why I do like spaces that are run by for want of a better word, flex operators. So for, for, for instance, you, there's a, there's a building in the, I think it's in, so Soho Square, I'm not sure, which is fully occupied by bp, but it's run by fora. [00:45:00] the, the CRA: Yeah. Antony: office provider. So it is not a coworking place, it's not a flex office, but they've got a flex operator to run it. And in, in America, the, the, the biggest company doing this is industrious, which was recently bought by C-B-C-B-R-C-B-R-E, and they would run spaces on behalf of people. They, then you get over that business of not having, you know, I can control the building, but I got no control about how the, how the company works. And you, and you can square that. You can square that circle. But without that, it, it, it's very, it's very difficult, difficult, in many cases for the real estate company to how does it create a space when it's not in control of the variable that really matters. I, CRA: We were both very active during the, the pandemic with future of Work and looking at what needs to happen. And you probably had similar questions coming to you like I had, which is like, you'd meet with executives, whether they're on the real estate side or [00:46:00] just a corporate executive is like, I want my people back in the office. And what I would always say is, give 'em a reason to come back. You know, you have an office that's a dump. It's not an exciting place to go if you have something that brings, it creates a sense of community. You know, do you understand what your employees are looking for? And we just ignore that. It's, we still tend to have this thing about our offices. It's build it and they will come. We have Antony: yeah. CRA: no matter what. You're Antony: Hmm. CRA: to come here, you will come here. World's changing a bit. If you wanna retain your staff, make them come in. I mean, there was some offices in Singapore that were really struggling the pandemic, when everything lifted, there was one office, and I won't name the commercial real estate firm, which it was, but they had an office that was going at 95% occupancy. Over five days. And they got to the point they had to start booking spaces in the office right after the pandemic when they didn't have to go to work. So they created that right environment for it. And it's a Antony: Hmm. CRA: can do this if you're willing to seriously to think about your people. I think, I mean, my issue is a lot of the challenges and problems that senior [00:47:00] management face is that they're targeted quarterly they don't take a long-term strategic outlook on what is best for the company. Antony: Yeah, CRA: I might say that the best thing for my company is to build an office where Antony: I, CRA: to come in that costs me X over a period of Y number of years, but I'm only gonna be knowing if I have my job every quarter if I'm hitting my targets. Antony: yeah. CRA: get pushed off, and I think we need to rethink on how we do these things. And the companies that do do that and do it strategically are having a much easier time attracting and retaining the best talent. Antony: Well, it's interesting, you, you, you use that word best talent. And I think, I think that's increasingly important now and, and partic particularly in this AI mediated world we're going into that the best talent is partly going to be talent that knows how to work with the machines that that actually works human plus machine very, very well. And they're gonna be enormously productive and [00:48:00] enormously capable, and they're gonna have an awful lot of options. And that's the thing we really need to pay attention to in, in, in companies that you might retain a lot of your staff, but if you lose all the, the real talent, then, then, then you've got a, got a pro got a problem. But again, again, if the, if these are, I mean they talk about 10 x engineers, don't they? In in software. And there's a, I mean, Zuckerberg's trying to hire a number of them at the moment and paying them vast amounts of money because they genuinely are 10 x, 10 XA hundred, a hundred x. CRA: Did Antony: And CRA: two 50 million as well by any chance to come in and lead their real estate practice? Antony: his, his timeline was just a bit long. It was over, it was, the payout was a bit over too many years. But you know, you are gonna, you are gonna have these, the, these individuals and these small teams that are gonna be super, super productive. And we really need to, [00:49:00] I I, I, I always think about, I always say you need places to enable people to be happy, healthy, and productive. And that sounds sort of fluffy and woo woo, but I said it's not, this is pure Adam Smith. 'cause you're paying an awful lot of money for this person. So you want them to act. To operate at their maximum productivity, and I'm sorry to do that, you've gotta make them ha quite happy and, and healthy. So you've gotta worry about the soft stuff so you can brush the hell outta them on the, on the productivity side. And that, that's where, that's where I, I think the whole space, a service thing done absolutely right. Really, really hits home that when, when you can put Charles, when he's doing X in this environment, perfect for what he needs to do, and then in that environment for something different, he's, he is gonna, he is gonna operate as maximum, maximum [00:50:00] capabilities. I mean, there's been so much research about cognitive function and environmental conditions. That is it, you know, the, the, the, the correlation between bad environmental conditions too hot, too cold, too light, too noisy, et cetera, and cognitive function. It is long known. We, we know people do not operate at their maximum cognitive function if they're in the ba in the wrong environmental conditions. But somehow, somehow we go, meh at that. And I, and I don't un I don't understand it, you know, I always think of, you know, the old thing years ago, Ben, the the, the sky tour de France team used to win, used to win everything. And Dave Bras force, the chap who run it, used to talk about these marginal improvements that he'd do something to, to the, to the clothing they wear, and it would make it just half a percent better and he'd do something else. And it's only 1%. And you sort of think 1%, I don't care. But, but it, it tops [00:51:00] up. And if you think of the way I always, I always think the way we treat athletes to perform at their optimum, but somehow we never think about employees working at their optimum. CRA: it's Antony: I mean. CRA: We, we still think that there, we give you cash, you owe us, you come in here and do what we say, and that is not the way the world is anymore. Yet the vast majority of the companies still operate that way. Antony: Yeah. CRA: But I wanna Antony: Well, CRA: well. Now you've talked about this space as a service. You must have some great examples. So like where is, where are some of the offices, offices or companies that you've seen who really get this and design amazing spaces that allow their employees to be the most productive and inspired and engaged? Antony: well, I, I, I did, I did do a talk a couple of years ago at Accenture's office in Hudson Yards in New York, which was pretty mega. They had the top company, how many floors of one of these towers. And that [00:52:00] was pretty awesome. 'cause it was Accenture. 'cause they had every toy, every toy imaginable. And, and, and that was, that was, that was pretty damn cool. But I'm really interested in watching, an Aussie company called Adian, CRA: Yeah. Yeah. Antony: who, who, you know, a, a tech company, CRA: of Australia. Antony: Who have an incredibly progressive way of thinking about, about work. And actually they have a lot of offices and they built some wonder wonderful offices, but no one has to go there. But they, they do an enormous amount of work opt, optimizing, optimizing their workforce for enabling them to do their best work, but also for the teams to work together. So they, they put a huge amount of thought into how often does this team have to be together and how, and, and, and digitally how connected is this team? So how physically connected are they and how digitally connected are, are they, and how temporarily connected are, [00:53:00] are they that they're, I think they have to have four or five hours of overlap. So they're in work working hours, but they really think through. A lot of the detail of how to create the best spaces, the best spaces for people. And they came out with something recently where they talked about measuring the metrics for measuring some of their offices. And they didn't do it on per square foot or per person. They did it on cost per visit. So they literally monitored, who visited for how long, and then divided the, the total cost up by the number of hours for who visited for, for how long. And then they, they could look at is, is that, what is that, you know, are we making the, the, the best use use of space? But really, really paying huge attention to the, the, the [00:54:00] physical environment, the, the technology. Also the, the human, the human factors on under underneath. And I know they, they, they, they, they arrange that they have to meet a certain, certain number of times a, a year. And as I say, they have to have o overlap of overlap of spaces. So there, there are companies doing really interesting stuff. And I mean, if you think about NVIDIA's interesting as well. They have some amazing office spaces, but they, they're a hundred percent remote. That doesn't mean a lot of them aren't in the office every day. But no one has to be in the office by, by, by nature, by nature. They're a remote company. Air Airbnb is a, is a remote company. But again, they have, they have lots of spaces. CRA: Oh. Antony: and they pay. CRA: have done is they've focused on not only what is the office that they can go into, but how do they actually work remotely? And this is the challenge, like the, the, with the future of work, we just basically said, fine. Well, everyone's gonna be at home because it was the pandemic. We [00:55:00] didn't have a choice. We never thought about how do we train managers on how to manage those people when they start working from home? How do we Antony: Yeah. CRA: tools? How do we redesign job requirements based on it? And the thing is, it can be done. It's not rocket science, but nobody had the time or the bandwidth or the headcount to actually go ahead And do it. And this Antony: Yeah, CRA: I find frustrating about the industry is, I mean, there's, there's major problems in the world that are difficult to solve. This isn't one of them. This is putting some people together to look at the way that your employees work today and the way they could optimally work. And how do we adjust the physical and digital environments for them. Antony: yeah. And a hundred percent it is a, it is a, it is a known, known, isn't it? We, we, we absolutely know, know what should be done, but mostly, mostly we don't, we don't do it. But, you know, again, I think this is going to be part of the bifurcation between [00:56:00] average companies and great and, and great companies that this is gonna be passed and part and parcel of things. I mean, I, I, again, I don't know if this is true, but, and in one of my talks I talk about space as a service and, and ai, ai being great bed bedfellows in the sense of you just know small, productive agile teams are gonna have good, good space. 'cause they're gonna need to have, they're gonna need to have good, good space and they're gonna need to have, need to have thought, thought about that. And, and I mean, is. There's, there's, there's also the problem, the, the problem about everyone deals with this on a, a binary thing, don't they? They'll say, you've gotta be in the office or, or not. And it's, I mean, that's, that's so ridiculous. And it depends what type of company you are. You know, if you are open ai, open AI have most of the people in the office all the time, but they're growing at the most incredible rates. [00:57:00] And if you are in that sort of environment, you probably do need to be really together. But if you are a more mature company, then, then you need a different, a different type, different type of environment. But we, we just don't seem to be very very smart about how, how we think, think about this, this, CRA: but Antony: stuff. CRA: your part now. You're actually trying to help out real estate firms, and one of the things you're doing is you have a course now, Antony: I do. CRA: gen AI for real estate, I know a couple of people have done it. So I know a bit about it, but why don't you tell us a bit about what this is and what you hope to accomplish and what the end goal is. Antony: Okay. The, the, the end, the end goal of someone doing, doing my course. My course is for practitioners. It's not a, it is not a tech technical course. It's for real estate professionals actively working within the real estate industry from, from a, A to Z, all, all areas. But the idea is that [00:58:00] they should finish the course. First of all, understanding what generative AI is as opposed to predictive ai, what it is good at and what it is not good at, how to work with it. And we pay, we spend a lot, a lot of time working on good, prompt, good prompting techniques. So they will go, they will go away with really good prompting technique because you, you know, the difference between someone. Who doesn't know how to prompt and someone who does know how to prompt is the one who knows how to prompt gets a 10 times better answer. You just get a much better answer if you know what you're doing. So what is this technology, how to use it? And then we spend a lot of time thinking about how is this gonna impact our industry? So what is gonna change within, within the industry to how we, how we operate, and how are we gonna think about where we go? And then the last section is about how is it, how [00:59:00] is this likely to change the nature of demand for real, real estate, for d for different ad asset asset classes? So it is partly, it's partly a pragmatic pragmatic, practical tool course, but it's quite strong on how to think about where this is all going and, and your place in, in it. So when someone finishes the course, they should have a pretty good idea how to use the most important tools, how to get the most of outta things today. And then they should also have a good understanding of how to think about my career, my team's career, my company's career, and, and the industry's industry's future. And we pack all of that into three weeks or so. And then we have, CRA: I've Antony: we have a really nice, sorry. [01:00:00]