The rise of innovation in commercial real estate

With diversified lines of business that include commercial leasing, real estate brokerage, management, and financing, Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) is equal parts commercial real estate heavyweight and cutting-edge tech company. It's invested in creating new technologies and platforms to help clients better mine data, leverage predictive analytics, and harness business intelligence across their real estate investments.

Stephen Ramseur, Managing Director of Occupier Services for JLL, holds the vision for where expertise in physical space intersects with the digital business. "We're facing tremendous disruption," he says, "and as a leader, you need to embrace the paradox — that cognitive dissonance of operating the business while we're leading through digital transformation."

Putting scalable tools in place that enable work while supporting future potential requires best-of-breed partners with a similar vision.

Using Box Platform APIs allows us to bring disparate applications together in a seamless experience for our customers, accessing that data to really save them money.

Enabling an 83K-person workforce to access content from anywhere

JLL's 83,000 employees are spread across nearly 300 offices in 80 countries, and their work often takes them into the field, meeting with customers at potential sites. Naturally, mobile collaboration is a huge element of working at JLL, as is protecting sensitive IP and customer data.
 

As he makes technology decisions that support a mobile and digital workplace, Ramseur looks for partners and tools that work well within what he calls "the three lenses of the future of work:
 

• Human experience
• Digital drive
• Continuous innovation

Human experience means creating a more agile workplace to enable a fluid, mobile workforce. Box allows brokers to get work done wherever they are, with immediate access to tour books, marketing assets, contracts, and project files. By making it easy to access content without having to email files around, Box innovates real estate file sharing and reduces repetitive tasks. It also makes employees' work days more satisfying and productive without compromising security.

Sales assets created while clients wait — in just 23 minutes

The second lens of work, digital drive, is about finding best-of-breed tools that integrate seamlessly and make everyday processes easier. In commercial real estate, part of the process of surveying a new property is to create a "tour book" for the customer, an asset that used to take several employees about three-and-a-half hours — or 210 minutes — to compile. Now, with a custom app built using Box Platform, which enables custom development using Box content APIs and SDKs, this same task can be accomplished onsite in just 23 minutes (9x faster).
 

Since JLL adopted Box in 2017, it has become part of everyday work at the company along with other best-of-breed cloud tools. Teams use:
 

• DocuSign to help with secure contract processes
• Okta for secure authentication
• Custom experiences built on top of Box

These integrations and customizations enable a more sophisticated, mobile use of content. This approach — building highly customized experiences using proven partner platforms — is a major game-changer for a centuries-old company serving digitally native customers.

Creating a better digital experience for customers

Customers expect transparency and control over their experience at every touchpoint, and JLL has invested tons of resources into customer-facing innovation. The company has a complete in-house user experience, design, and engineering team that focuses on agile application development to deliver optimized value to both clients and employees.

JLL has used Box Platform to build several apps that enable clients to:
 

• Access quick snapshots of their commercial real estate portfolios and real-time data on building performance metrics
• Scout properties via mobile VR experiences
• Use different custom apps to conduct market analysis and location selection

Deep insight into data empowers commercial real estate investors to make smarter investment decisions. Ramseur says, "Using Box Platform APIs allows us to bring disparate applications together in a seamless experience for our customers, accessing that data to really save them money."
 

Stronger workflows are just part of JLL’s commitment to innovation

Ramseur's third lens of the future of work is continuous innovation — a central tenet of JLL's business. In fact, the company's Silicon Valley-based innovation arm, JLL Spark, is exclusively devoted to the intersection of real estate and technology. The newly created JLL Spark Global Venture Fund will invest up to $100 million into companies focused on leveraging technology to improve the commercial real estate industry.
 

AI is poised to have a huge impact on the construction and real estate industry, improving things like smart leases, lead prospecting, customer management, and agent recruiting. Ramseur describes one in-progress project: "We're accessing metadata with our partner Codelitt to understand our customers around sentiment and demand — how they want to use space."
 

As more sophisticated technology tools become the standard operating procedure in commercial real estate, JLL is committed to staying at the nexus of where physical space meets the digital business.