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What new skills are required for a post-pandemic world? [BPF Event]
31 March 2021
Professor Yolande Barnes, Chair of BREI sits on panel with Experience Makers and British Property Federation (BPF) to discuss how property management and customer experience will be key to the future value of real estate, whilst tackling the property industry’s skills gap.
Professor Yolande Barnes stated:
“The things that make real estate valuable are the people and what they do in the space. There was a weird time in the 20th Century when money was made through inflation and the value-adders were those who could trade property at rising prices.
However, the closed club of big-building real estate is dismantling. Upward-only rent reviews won’t be what creates value in the future, it will be the long-term performance and management of the building.
It’s about the income which can be generated from the people in the building and that puts property management and customer experience front and centre.”
However, according to a report for the British Council for Offices, written and researched by customer experience consultants RealService, the industry is not blessed with a customer-centric culture and those who have been employed in customer-facing roles have come largely from outside the sector.
Howard Morgan, founder of RealServices and one of the authors of the BCO report commented:
“We found there is nothing in the major real estate universities or in the APC process which emphasises the importance of customer experience. People are graduating without an understanding of who their customers are.”
In an effort to transform real estate and provide training to ambitious young property professionals, BREI has teamed up with Experience Makers to launch an executive short course. Find out more.
Experience Makers is a research, education and networking community which aims to put ‘life and soul into property’ and has a number of major landlords among its members. Many have contributed to the course content and endorsed it as a much-needed game-changer for the industry.
