Real estate distinguishes itself from other sectors in that the user of a building is rarely the same party as the owner, the developer or the investor. An office building has a tenant, a landlord, a manager and often a fund behind it that invests on behalf of third parties. A residential complex has residents, a homeowners' association, a housing corporation or private owner, and a municipality that oversees the surrounding area. This stacking of roles means that the picture a board has of 'the stakeholder' usually consists of multiple figures, while internally the discussion often revolves around a single group.
On top of that, real estate decisions have long-lasting consequences. A building stands for decades. A commitment about maintenance, noise, greenery or parking made at completion is still being tested years later by the people who walk past it every day. The gap between what was once promised and what is experienced now is correspondingly larger in real estate than in sectors with a shorter life cycle.
Anyone living near a factory, a construction project or an area development did not choose that neighbour themselves. That makes local residents a separate category: they experience the consequences without having a business relationship to offset it against, unlike a tenant or buyer who does. The questions relevant to this group are closely related to nuisance, safety and the liveability of the immediate surroundings. What exactly you want to know about this, and from whom, is described on what do you want to know from local residents.
The tenant experiences the building daily but has little say. The owner bears the financial risk but is often not physically present. The manager sits in between and carries out what has been agreed, or just doesn't. In a survey about trust, this results in three different answers to the same question, and it is not self-evident that management knows which of the three carries the most weight at any given moment.
In commercial real estate, the visible owner is not always the party that makes the decisions. A fund, a pension fund or a foreign investor may be hidden behind the structure. These parties have a different kind of interest: return and risk at the portfolio level, less so day-to-day use. What is a small commitment about maintenance or sustainability for one party can be a condition for further investment for another. These two time horizons run through each other and are not always identified separately internally.
Real estate projects are connected to zoning plans, permits and sometimes political decision-making. An alderman, an environmental service or a municipal council member is then not a bystander but a party with formal influence on progress. Commitments made to a municipality, about sustainability, social housing or fitting in with the surrounding area, are often recorded in writing and are therefore easier to verify than verbal agreements with residents. That makes the difference between what was promised and what was delivered more visible in this domain, not necessarily smaller.
Besides the external parties, there is the organisation's own staff: the people who plan maintenance, deal with tenants or supervise construction projects. They often form the first layer at which external trust is tested, simply because they are the point of contact. What is relevant to ask this group is described on what do you want to know from employees.
The layered structure of real estate is not unique: in construction too, the client, the contractor and local residents overlap, and in the installation sector it is likewise the case that the end user is not the party that placed the order. Real estate adds to this the long lifespan of the object, which increases the chance that a commitment made years ago is still being tested against what happens today.
The Trust Baseline asks internally who these parties are and what has been promised to them, and places that alongside what is said externally. It makes no statement about what a local resident, tenant or municipality actually thinks: we do not know that until that party says so themselves. What does become visible is whether the internal picture of the promise matches what is recognised externally, and whether a small, practical commitment, such as a noise barrier or a maintenance round, has been recorded at all so that it can be checked later.
The Trust Baseline for the real estate sector is now being built. Anyone who wants to be the first to hear about this can sign up for the waiting list. There is nothing to order yet; there is an intake in which it is determined which stakeholder groups are relevant to your portfolio.
Mapping out who you need to speak to and what has been promised is partly manual work: holding conversations, searching through files, tracing commitments from emails and reports. Part of this kind of task can be broken down into steps that lend themselves to automation. Anyone who wants to know which part of the work within their own organisation is suited to this, and which part remains human work, can have this calculated with the work scan from FTE TO AI, which indicates per task what portion of the work can be taken over by AI.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.