SPEAKER_00 0:00

How can we improve the industry to more alignment data financing?

SPEAKER_01 0:04

So you and you need to think about it in this way. It's not about increasing speed, it's about reducing cost. If we look at the hotel industry, they seem to be able to receive someone within 20 minutes notice up and book them in a room with access towards services and it works. There's no reason you can't do that. You have to be different, you have to innovate. And once you've done that, you have to then repeat the cycle again and again and again and again.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hi Zach and welcome to the Built to Perform podcast. Thank you for coming on today. How are you doing, James? I'm good, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Good. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Yeah, I'm pretty good. Um it's been. I kind of look at workers seasons, if you like, and we're in the sort of September to December season. It's as per usual been a very, very um hectic start. And obviously you start to approach the middle of October and it's sort of you get over the hump and you'd sort of on the you want to run into Christmas. So I'm still feeling good. I'm not feeling downtrodden into into the into the deep dark winter yet. Um, good. Good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Um, so what I'd like to do is just go into who are you and why do you do what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:17

Um I'm Zach Goodman. I am a guy that moved down to London after university. I was, as you can probably hear, born and bred in the north in Manchester. Um, and I've been in London now for gosh, probably around 20 years. Um, I run TSP, uh, which is my property company, which I started in February 2009. So in a few months, we will be 17 years old. Before that, after university, I was a banker at Goldman Sachs, and I worked here in London, and I did uh some work abroad in India and also New York.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Love yourself. So nearly 17 years old, TSP, and you've grown it from scratch to now, I think is at a 1.5 billion amount of uh property under asset management now?

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Probably closer to 2.5 now. Wow. Uh valuations are moving quite a lot at the moment though. But um I think we're at about 2.8 million, 2.9 million square feet, depending on on how you count it.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

So that's quite a big jump in probably the last year or so then as well. Year and a half.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Yeah, I think that we we've we've had a bit of an exponential jump over the last sort of I'd say 20 months. Um where I think we we've won some quite large mandates, and then we just sort of won quite a lot of mandates um in a relatively quick period of time. But I think the biggest thing is we're starting to win much larger mandates than we used to. So I suppose the numbers are kind of logarithmically going up at the moment. Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

And over those 17 years, and growing a company from scratch, what's the biggest lessons you've learned? Would you say?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Straight in at the deep end.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Yeah, get straight in.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Over 17 years, what are the biggest lessons that I've learned? I think the number one lesson that I've learned is um, and you can read it on my profile page, um, it's a long game. There's no such thing as a short-term win. Um things take time for a variety of reasons. It's a long game. Be patient. Uh, in your worst moment, when you're stressed, try and zoom out and think about yourself in a year's time, in ten years' time, in twenty years' time, and like how much of a big issue was this in the span of your career. I think the next major lesson, and I'm still trying to teach myself because I forget it, is growth isn't linear. There is no world where people plan to just grow and grow and grow and grow at a certain rate, and that actually happens. And there are times, i certainly for me over the last 17 years, where I've felt I've been extremely consistent and moving backwards and actually having not realized I was moving forwards, and I've there's times when I've thought I was moving forwards and actually I was moving backwards, and it's a really hard I was told this kind of truth when I was younger and I just ignored it. Um but as you get older you build a little bit more wisdom through experience and failure and success. Um, and you start to to realise it. So I suppose big question to kick off with, but um, it's a long game and growth is not linear, probably the two biggest lessons I've learned.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Yeah, I think um from starting up my own company as well, I kind of in the early stages and I'm feeling that as well. I think you you have the excitement in terms of that fast that fast growth, but then sometimes you do need to stop, reevaluate, look at your foundations, and then go again, basically. And I think you have to go through those cycles, I think.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah, and also I think when you're entrepreneurial, when you're starting a business, one of the skill sets that people probably don't credit entrepreneurs with in the right way is like people say you've got to have vision or imagination. Um, to a greater degree, you almost have to be a fantasist. Because what you have to do in your mind is build a construct of not only what will something look like, but why you're doing each step of the way and what that will lead to. And actually, what can be really hard is sometimes you get those initial assumptions wrong. And actually, for an entrepreneur, when you discover that something that you thought, if you did, would lead to this doesn't actually work, it can be quite earth-shattering. And so you need to be able to have a really healthy degree of humility and introspection to be able to change course and re-evaluate, um, and resilience as well, to not, and this is where I think a lot of people fail is someone pulls out a sort of they rug pull on on a on a construct that you built in your mind, and they just say, Well, it can't be done then. They don't necessarily get back underneath the problem, say, okay, why did I think about that in the wrong way? Why didn't that work when on paper I think it should have worked? Um, and where do I go from here?

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yeah. There's an interesting point there as well, because I think one of my questions further down the line was, Would you class yourself as entrepreneurial? I think you've answered that question already, that you see yourself as unashamedly, unabashedly, I'm an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

I was the kid selling you something at school, and I don't say that to romanticize myself. Like there's many parts of me sometimes that wish I could be a great professional or that I could be a great sportsman or or what have you. But for me personally, I'm an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Yeah, and I think that's quite interesting as well, because if you look across the commercial real estate sector, generally people have moved up into the leadership roles, ownership roles of companies from being great professionals in terms of surveyors or whatnot. Um, and that's not saying that's not what you are, but they'd class themselves as great professionals, they wouldn't probably see themselves as entrepreneurial. And I think sometimes you look across the industry and you go, have you got the business side of things right? Are you looking at it in terms of a business? Are you looking at it in terms of a service? And I think it's a very murky grey line there.

SPEAKER_01 7:44

I think specifically in real estate, there has been that type of culture for a large part of the sort of the history and the buildup of the kind of the real estate service industry. Um that being said, I think there's been some absolutely phenomenal uh entrepreneurs that have not come from a surveyan background coming into our industry. And also, by the way, being an entrepreneur and being a chartered surveyor and a professional, those two things are not mutually exclusive. Um, I know plenty of entrepreneurs that are qualified lawyers, doctors, um, and what have you. So I suppose when I say I'm an entrepreneur, it's for the lack of me being a professional or or or anything else.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

And I think that's part of it, isn't it? You've come into the industry from outside the industry. You you didn't go to university and do something in commercial real estate, you haven't studied in that, and then you've obviously been in the banking world, then you come in and report probably a different viewpoint. And how do you think that gives you kind of a different strength of something a little bit different in terms of how you run TSP?

SPEAKER_01 8:51

This is something that I constantly ask myself like, is it such a huge advantage that I didn't come up through the surveying path? Um, I think first off, with real estate, I think we all need to face something within our industry. Real estate is everybody's industry because everybody you know has either taken a lease on an apartment or has bought a home at the at the very least. Um and so in that respect, everybody's used the product, it's a $300 trillion product. So that alone makes it insanely different to any other industry, anyway. We all feel like we have a sort of uh a chip on the table with real estate, and it's interesting, isn't it, that when you look outside of the real estate industry and you look at people that have been successful in other areas of life, when they build up a bit of free cash, they invariably invest in real estate. Um, so in that sense, I think a lot of people have the advantage of looking at real estate from the outside in. I think for me, where I've probably been able to have greater impact is psychologically, I've looked at real estate as a product and as an asset class from the perspective of a customer, a user, if you like. And I can, and there's multiple hats to that because if you think about it, investors are a customer of real estate. They buy real estate to get a return. That's the that's the service that they want. And also being a user, like having leased my own office space, having been in office spaces and what have you. And I've always sort of tried to encourage the chartered surveyors that work for me and saying, look, it's very important. Life is centered around the lease in many, many ways. But it's very important that you learn to balance the way you practice looking at a situation as if there weren't a lease in the middle of it. Um and the reason for that is that's where empathy has an opportunity to kind of set in and grow and thrive. Because I've found that I almost feel sometimes that surveying forces people to be overly contractual, overly transactional with one another. Well, this is what the statute says, this is what the RICS code says, these are what the mandatory guidelines are. I'm not saying avoid any of those things, and we should always be operating in a compliant manner. But actually, it doesn't always have to go to the documents. And I was always taught in business when you're agreeing contracts with people, the point where you're pulling that contract back out of the drawer to have a look at it means something has gone deeply wrong. And real estate is a very tangible, emotional, physical industry, and it's and and it's an industry based on people and stories. And I think that maybe one of my advantages is because I don't have that professional surveying training, I have had a bias to the other side of it about how do you build relationships, how do you understand where someone's coming from, how do you move this away from being something entirely transactional to something that's more about diplomacy, negotiation, finding other paths around problems.

unknown 12:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

And it I think the landlord tenant has always landlord versus tenant, and that says a lot, doesn't it, in terms of that relationship, and it has been very adversarial in the in the past. It's I think it is improving, but there's still a lot way, a long way to go. And I think actually how you got into the industry working in with charities probably started off as a fairly adverse, not adversarial, but a protectionist role to help them out, really, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, I mean if you think about the word landlord, um, you know, it just takes you straight back to the the sort of the feudal system. Yeah. Um and in essence, and it's very deliberately so, and it's been to the great advantage of people in real estate, and I've benefited from benefited from it, the setup is geared towards landlord and the protection of property. And to a greater degree, I think it should be. But I learned very early on there's a time and a place for aggression, confrontation, being adversarial. Um but what I personally found in the industry is that so much more is achieved by building a great relationship first. Um you know, and it's always you know, truly successful people win wars without a bullet fired. Um, so that's kind of something that I've stuck to.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

And so going uh back to TSP, um, you're not a one-trick pony. Uh you can I think it's fair to say you've got your your finger in a fair different amount of pies and it's not just doing one thing. Do you want to explain a little bit about that? And would you call that disruptive? Would you call yourself a disruptor in that sense?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

In the sense that I I do multiple things within the industry. No, I don't think that makes me disruptive. Um, it's funny, in the UK, it's sort of seen as like breaking down barriers if you're a real estate investor, if you're in a real estate service company, if you dabble a little bit in technology, if you've got other investments elsewhere. Were we to transplant over to America at the moment, that is the model. Um and actually, what you'll find is most property managers are also investors, they have multiple strings to their bow. If you're around an asset class, you find lots of different opportunities to uh make money, to start businesses, to do different things. And again, I think this may be the entrepreneurial side versus the professional side. Like I don't view myself on these kind of constrained train tracks. You know, throughout my real estate career, um we've TSP kind of sits at the core as the mothership, if you like, um, which is effectively a real estate services business that that specializes in asset management and property management. But over the years, we've had agency um involved in that business. I've had a prop tech business switched on space. Um, had a very large real estate investment business, which is a sort of investment manager, asset manager called North Hill, which actually we still own assets within that company. Um I've been involved in partnerships with other companies. We've done real estate development out of the ground, we've done a lot of refurbishment and what have you. And my view is that is the beauty of real estate, is that you it one does not detract from the other, and often these opportunities arise because you're in that space.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

So on that, and obviously we talked about you coming from a Goldman Sachs background, how much inf because you're there for five years, and that's quite a that's a decent amount of time. And would you say there's much influence there, or is it Massive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Massive. I mean the first thing is you know, let's be very, very clear here. The finance sector is and probably always will be, firstly, much more innovative, much more disruptive, much quicker, much more operationally slick, um, and far more cutthroat. And so when you come into real estate from that background, you're suddenly almost shocked by how glacially slow things move. So 2025, what would you say is the average length of time it takes for a lease to be agreed, a five-year lease, and signed and the tenant move in from their first viewing to them moving in? Six months. Yeah, it's probably somewhere like that, right? And don't get me wrong, there'll be examples in the market of where it takes, you know, a week or something. How crazy is that?

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah, it it's it's nuts, isn't it? And I think you make a really good point. There's a few things in terms of what you're probably saying there, in terms of your learnings from Goldman's, which I've I've kind of got in here to kind of talk about, which is obviously the speed of which we move and change, um, how we present ourselves as well, and I think that's something which you're you're very passionate about as well. But I think on the speed thing and um the glacial speed, that's one way of describing it. I've always described it as kind of like an oil tanker. If we're trying to do change, it's extraordinarily slow to turn, turn that ship and make it move in a different direction in commercial real estate. Do you see that improving a little bit now? I think there is some improvement, but how can we improve the industry to more align with, say, the finance industry?

SPEAKER_01 17:39

You need to think about it in this way. It's not about increasing speed, it's about reducing friction. Not to get to physics, GCSE here and what have you. But real estate is an industry that has, for one reason or another, I think it's probably due to its age, you know, it's thousands of years old as an industry, created so much friction. For things to happen, decisions have to be passed through so many hands, um, so many hoops that have to be jumped through. And it's everywhere, you know, from if you take offices, you know, needing to get new internet lines in can take time, lawyers wanting to do certain things with leases and the length of leases and the complexity and how much they have to be negotiated, title, registration, um, and all and all of these kind of things. Like, and what you have to do is basically you have to eat away at every separate part of that process, bit by bit by bit. And as you're eating away at those things, and you are, as Elon Musk says, deleting things out of it, be prepared for the most insane amount of backlash and resistance from absolutely everybody around you. And you have to push, push, push, push, push, push, push. And um, I think that's something that we have done progressively at TSP um time and time again. We continue to do it, we keep asking ourselves the question because and so I mean, we've done one, we've done one leasing deal, which was a 400,000 pounds a year lease. I think we did it in 2021, and we signed it, we did it in 40 hours. It was a competitive situation, but we were able to do it because the lease was right, the way the property was set up was right, the way our advisors and professionals and everything was kind of rigged up meant that it was possible to do on a traditional office lease. Um, but that's clearly not the standard in the marketplace. Um, and there are certain things that we in our various seats in the industry can do individually to make change. And then if you do, if you make change and it's right, people will copy it and then it starts to become standard. And there's things as an industry together that we should be expecting you know our industry bodies and associations to do. And in that respect, I think we're probably let down in our industry from the sort of communal leadership um perspective. I'll give you one example. When I was in banking, um, we had this thing called Isda, which is the international standards of definitions, et cetera, et cetera. And what it basically meant was that it was like a box of Lego, and each piece was kind of a standard definition and a standard clause in a derivative agreement. And um so you traded many, many, many of these derivatives every day, and each one of them needed like its version of a lease, its its document. And you could basically automate and pull it all together, and no one was arguing about the terms because they were all standard accepted, universally accepted internationally. Yeah, you know. Um we don't have that here. Every lease is still different, every single lease is still different. That's crazy. That's crazy, and that's before you get to the kind of exciting things about saying as well, like keep the lease on the blockchain and you know, all of these other things that seem very, very simplistic that we should be doing. Um and so, you know, for standard definitions and what have you. I mean, I know when I came to the industry, I looked for it and there was something called something like the Oxford lease or something like that. There was a templated lease that someone had suggested being used, but it never got picked up. But yeah, there are certain things within the real estate industry where, you know, technology aside, we just we need to move thinking forward first. And is that where you see the friction, right? It's one area where I see the it's one area I see the friction. Like we make the product complicated, we make trans uh pricing fairly opaque, a lot of buildings just simply aren't prepared to receive someone with a day's notice. Um you know, though there's just a whole myriad of things that, you know, if we look at the hotel. Tell industry, they seem to be able to receive someone within 20 minutes' notice, have them booked in in a room with access to all services, billing and everything is done, and it works. There's no reason we can't do that across the rest of real estate.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

No. And I think also what we're not very good at as an industry is sharing knowledge and talking between ourselves. I think everyone sees that as a guarded secret. This is a secret source of how we're doing stuff. And obviously, the idea of something like this podcast is getting people like yourself on here and sharing these pockets of insights which can really help the wider industry learn and look to move forward.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Yeah, I I actually think you're right. And I think funny enough, I think our generation is doing a much better job at that. So I think that the way in which the real estate industry has worked is it's an apprenticeship industry. And so, sort of from elder to younger, knowledge transfer has actually been pretty good over the years. But I think laterally, not so much. And I think you're right. And I think, you know, you would have had a senior property manager training a junior property manager, a senior agent training a junior agent, but you haven't had a senior agent sort of educating a junior property manager and that kind of cross-pollination that you need. And really to make things move quicker in real estate, you need so many different special specialisms working together really well. Um closely communicating now more than ever, as I see it.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Yeah, and I think that's a nice point to move on to one of your other mantras, which is when everyone's looking going right, look left, or the other way around. It works both ways. But I think it's obviously something that you're quite passionate about. Um, and how are you doing that at the moment? What what is what is your right or your left where you're going differently to the others?

SPEAKER_01 23:59

So to be clear, it's not my phrase, it's it's one of my hero's phrases, which is Samsell, who was a very famous investor/slash property manager in the United States. Um, and the concept of this is to be contrarian and is to be where firstly wary that there is groupthink in any given situation. Um and basically to question it and to question it hard, and often when you start questioning it, you'll see opportunity. I think for me in TSP, the biggest thing where I've seen everyone's sort of looking left and I'm going right is I think over the past three, four years since the pandemic, if you cut through the narratives of work from home and end of the office and all the rest of it, what you've seen is this huge rise of flexibility. Um, serviced offices, co-working, managed space, um this new age of office occupation. And I think everybody's been looking that way, that's left. And I think what we genuinely believed at TSP with our investor hat on, with our asset management and property management hat on, is that okay, Flex is maybe seven or eight percent of the market. There's another 80, 85% of the market, if not 90% of the market, the sort of the traditional space. What's going on with that? That's actually the mass. And all anybody was saying in the market was, well, that's just dead. Right? Because if it's not a wee work or something of that ilk, it's just dead. Well, you've only to look at the occup the occupancy numbers, the the vacancy numbers in the market to know that that's just not true. You know, I think we sit say in London at the moment at 7% vacancy. So that means there's 220 million square feet of office space in London, 215 million off uh square feet of office space in London that is occupied and is continuing to be occupied. And if you take the numbers of Flex being, let's even just say it's 10% of the market, which I don't think it is, that means there's still a balance of 190 million square feet that's kind of still traditional offices that are occupied. And so where we've looked, right, is we've said, how do we take that traditional mass in the market, that huge hunk of grey in the market? And how do we manage these buildings into being something that can compete with flexibility or that can offer elements of it? How do we actually innovate on that side of the market? So a lot of people have kind of moved to this like, you know, operator model and serviced offices and rent it by the desk and what have you. We've done the opposite. We're like, okay, that market's really well covered off. There's probably 50 operators in London doing that. Who on the managing agency side of things, the belt and braces property management side of things, is trying to do that with traditional office stock. And that is an enormous market that we think is untapped. We think there's a huge need and a big problem to solve for the asset owners there. And the challenge we've set ourselves is how do we do it without upsetting the cost model for the landlords? How do we do it at the same cost as our comp uh as our competitors charge for basic managing agency? How can we just do way more? And that is where we've looked right and we continue to look right, and we're, you know, continuing to just innovate, innovate, innovate in that space.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

And then how obviously, without putting it onto the cost model for the landlord, how do you do it in a way that doesn't offer cause issues with the service charge model and upsetting the agents as well?

SPEAKER_01 27:46

So the first thing you need to say to yourself is actually where serviced offices are getting more gross revenue, where's it coming from? It's not coming from the landlord, it's coming from the tenant. Yep. So what we understand from the service business is that tenants are willing to pay more for more. Okay. Um, and so when you look at that traditional model, you basically say, okay, well, how is that going to come in? Is it going to come in through the rents? Is it going to come in that they have to pay more through the service charge? Or are they actually just going to acquire add-on services that sit outside of the rent that sit outside of the service charge? And then what is the overall effect? What is the halo effect on that building? Um, and we're seeing that in many different ways. So it's fairly unacceptable to inflate service charges. Actually, if anything, we we'll work to innovate to reduce service charges. We work with you. Yep. Um, a saving we can make in a building on communal energy consumption is a gain we can make on having a line item for uh community events and what have you. And so it's sort of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. There's a degree of that. You have to spend you you have to stay competitive with the with the with the traditional.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

So this is the real constraint that we work with in a business. We can't charge landlords more, we can't have certain things like service charge being more, and yet we have to provide a significant, a substantially better product. Um and we've got pretty good at how to how to do that.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

Happy to divulge some of the secret source to that.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Yeah. Um I think TSP now are probably best in class at delivering front of house service and and and experience in in the traditional real estate management sort of segment. And frankly, we've looked at what the Flex sector were doing, we've looked at the hotel sector, and we've seen actually you're looking for a combination of both facilities and hospitality skills in that role. You're probably not going to deliver the sense of ownership, brand value if you're bringing these people in through agency arrangements. So you're going to have to employ everyone into the brand, which means that you have to develop them, that you have to provide training. So this year we were very proud to have launched the TSP Academy, which is 60 hours of training. It's a mix of online, self-guided training, in-person scenario-based training with a third-party training organization. And there's various levels that you get through. Um, but we've realized that it's a hugely underinvested part of the property delivery model. And it's crazy because when you look at the basic numbers of it, your customers, your tenants, they're interacting with those people 80, 90% of the time. They are 80, 90% of the service area of your brand. And yet they're typically in most businesses, there's not even a training budget next to them, which is insane. Um, and then lots of different add-on services and trying to not just give tenants a menu of additional services that they can get very easily, but also delivering value through our huge buying power. Um, so that actually not only can they just have a one-stop shop for the property services they need, they have flexibility on what they take. It doesn't have to be all. Um, and also they feel and they recognize that they're getting better value because they're they're using our buying power as a you know, they're sort of coming wholesale instead of having to go out retail on their own. And there are many, many other different innovations on the client side as well, whether it be reporting and how we're delivering certain services and what have you, or you know, use of AI and and and and certainly in the in the back end uh of what we're doing. And again, like working with with guys such as yourself, I view it as an innovation in terms of you know really trying to drive down cost in in these buildings. That is the enormous pressure for for everybody. We've been in an inflationary environment for four years now. Um and so prior to that, sort of in the zero interest sort of economy, I think there was a much bigger focus on kind of revenue maxim maximization as as opposed to kind of cost optimization. Um so yeah, you you you you have to be different, you have to innovate. Um and once you've done that, you have to then repeat the cycle again and again and again and again.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

And then kind of on that, as a kind of a macro view, and let's if we stick to offices as well, I think from speaking to fund managers and investors recently, um, and probably uh wider than offices across the whole commercial real estate, really, but probably focus on office to a degree, it's quite a depressing view from speaking to fund managers um in terms of we've hit the bottom of the market, is generally the viewpoint which I've had, but we're not seeing an instant reaction to that. There's not a lot of investing going on, a lot of buying going on still. Um and they're saying we're not seeing happen a lot happening between 26 and 27. What's your viewpoint on that? Are you able to see some opportunities and are you at a size where you can pivot and change a little bit more than some of the you know the big funds as such?

SPEAKER_01 33:24

So if you're looking at it from an investment point of view on your fund manager, you might call it depressing because for them, what's not depressing is doing transactions. If you look at it from an asset management point of view, it's probably a lot more exciting. Um, capital markets are a problem in commercial real estate at the moment. I'm not a guru in that to tell you that, but you know, the 10-year average of office investment in London is around 14 billion. And for the last two years, we've done six to seven billion. It does sound this year like it's going to be higher than that, because I think we hit six billion by September, which may mean that we end up being at somewhere like eight or nine billion, which is certainly an argument for some level of recovery. I think one of the things that many fund managers out in the space are coming to terms with is that they need to reskill in what it means to own the asset. Um, it's no longer a case of just being able to own it, pick a manager very quickly, crack on with the next thing. There has to be a much more kind of involved plan, a business plan, if you like. CapEx is a much more serious thing now. You used to be able to just say, look, I'd do it, buy an office, spaces will come out, we'll spend a couple of hundred quid on fit out, we'll get at least within six months, we'll give six months rent-free away, we'll get this headline rent, and we think this will be the yield at the end. Now it's people at that level of the game are having to ask themselves, what are we spending the 200 quid on? Like, are we investing in IT infrastructure? Are we investing in sustainability? Are we investing in cat B fit-outs? Are we investing in wellness? What are we doing about outdoor space in the building? Are we going to give a certain percentage of the building away as additional amenity? Um, if so, how are we going to operate that? And are we going to do the building on traditional leases? Are we going to offer managed space? Are we going to bring in a flex operator on part of this? And it's so much more complicated than it was.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

It's the hotel model. It is just, it's a variant of the hotel model, except we have a massive advantage over the hotels. Hotel's average stay is one night, offices' average day is three years, and we complain about that. You know, like it's it's an amazing business still. So from the asset management perspective, I actually think this cause for a lot of excitement because I think a lot of these new operational um practices are starting to mature and people are starting to understand them. Most importantly, I think the customer's starting to understand them and be able to discern and choose between them in the market and understand how much to pay for them and therefore have more confidence in transacting.

SPEAKER_00 36:13

Complete tangent, but you mentioned future and we talked about it. You you mentioned it earlier as well, but AI and how you guys are utilising it.

SPEAKER_01 36:20

So I artificial intelligence. Um, you know, where'd you start with that? I think firstly, I think it's a shame that the UK isn't jumping into it in the same way that America's jumping into it. Um it's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

There's no catching that now, are you? There's no there's no way of catching how far. I don't believe that. In terms of infrastructure, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 36:45

I I whether that infrastructure matters or not in the future, and whether you know, I think there's a big argument to say that so much of this technology gets democratized in the end. You know, America won the race to search for search engines, but we all get the benefit of it and and and and what have you. Um, you know, and and and there's also an argument to say as well, if you look at the UK and the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago, we were the first to lay train tracks everywhere, but that's not necessarily been an advantage to us in the end. Everyone else got to learn from the mistakes that we made, in particular China. Yeah. Um, I mean, we can't even have double decker trains on our main lines because of these tunnels we've got. So I'm not worried about that. Like, if we wanted to, we could catch up and we could catch up quickly. Um, the fact is, I just don't see, other than lip service, anybody doing anything meaningful to catch up. Like the Americans very quickly realized that they would need data centers, they would need more power, they would need a government policy that would allow people to achieve these things. And they've just attacked all of that at the same time, like with great speed. Um, and I think they're getting some serious benefits for it in terms of their stock market and valuation and excitement and what have you. And I think it's a shame because I think it's all there for the UK to go and do that. So I think in general, we've got to look at AI, what is the setup for the UK? And there are AI companies over here and what have you. And I see through our tenancies within our London portfolio, there's more and more people doing more and more exciting things with AI. Um, big question mark on like how deep we go with that and how that really impacts our economy, just as an industry, as opposed to the actual practical, applicable use of it. Because there's a whole industry around it, right? Of building things, of creating new companies, of raising money, of creating grid, creating data centers, um, and applying it to various things. So that's the first one for me that I want to see happen. I think within our own business, um, probably much the same as many people watching this pod, like we're we're big users of AI. I'm a I'm a big user of AI. We are grappling, as I think many companies are, of how to pool of your your data into a place where you can have an AI sort of use disparate data pools to create really interesting um outputs for you. We're starting to use it in sort of the facilities element of our business. We've used it a lot in sort of marketing, business development strategy. Um, we've used it a lot to help us with internal processes. Interestingly, like um one of the funnest applications is this new TSP Academy where we've created um, which I truly believe is the most incredible um online university for being front of house. Um we wanted to create video for it. And back in the day, that would mean hiring actors, hiring studios. We're using AI personas that are sort of we we've given them our operational frameworks, all of our scripting, our brand values, and what have you. And we've been able to kind of create an online university that is way beyond what you would expect the resources of TSP to be because of AI. So um, and obviously the cost, so we're we're getting an unfair advantage as a small firm because of this, and that's that's absolutely fantastic. I do have my concerns about it though, in the sense that I don't think all individual productivity gains are translating through to company productivity gains. And I think this is going to be the big topic of debate over the coming couple of years. In what sense? If you're and let's not talk about my business, let's talk about any business, but let's say, you know, ABC Corp, and you've got an individual that suddenly, with the use of AI, is able to do their eight-hour job in three hours. Is that five-hour gain going to the individual or is it going to the company and how is that arbitrated? Yeah. And how should it be as well? My view is it should be given to the company because the company's paying wages. Um, and therefore, the if the company's paying for eight hours of wages and is paying for the AI, then for me it's a gain to the company. But how is it, never mind how should it be how is that gonna ever be measured and what have you? And I I I think this is going to be the interesting kind of tension between employers and employees over the next couple of years.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

Yeah, and it it does also beg that question as well, if you've got employees who are not utilising it as well, and the employees who are utilising it, there's gonna be the argument between the two there, saying, well, I'm I'm using it, using it, I'm taking advantage of it, this person isn't. How does how do we get between that as well? That's gonna be a challenge.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Yeah, well, that that may be the thing that sort of actually arbitrates it for us. It's just becomes competitiveness. You know, if employee A is producing 80 units a day, and employee B is only producing 30 units a day, value can be attributed.

SPEAKER_00 42:00

Yeah. What happens if you've got 80-80 and one person doing in three hours and the other person doing it in eight hours?

SPEAKER_01 42:06

That's where the Well, again, and this is the you've literally hit the nail on the head. This is the and this is the tension, and this is the analysis, and this is the insight that I think is going to be um hotly debated in boardrooms across the world over the over the coming years. Because at the moment I think we're still very much in the novelty stage and the testing stage and what have you. And I think that spans small companies all the way through to very, very large companies. And while listen, there's some industries where they've had an immediate gain from it and they've been able to translate it and reduce headcount as a result to it, or basically be able to deliver to more customers as a result of it, whatever it may be. Um, but this is this is the thing that hasn't come through the pipes en masse yet, and I think that's going to be an interesting one.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

I can't have you on without quickly touching on LinkedIn. LinkedIn. And also just in general, I think something which you're quite passionate about, which is obviously the presentation piece. Um, so the marketing, but you know, how yourself you curate your personal brand, but also the brand of TSP. So just on that, how powerful is that for you and what's the level of importance?

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Oh, it's I mean, it's hugely powerful now. And a lot of people might not realize this, but up until sort of three years ago, I wasn't I wasn't even on LinkedIn. Um, and I wouldn't say I really had a personal brand, certainly not online. Um, and as we were transforming TSP and deciding that we were going to grow this into a really big management platform, it became abundantly clear, and the team sort of turned around to me and said, Zach, you know, you've got to lead from the front here. And I was like, Well, I thought I was leading from the front. And then, no, you've you you've got to you've got to be part of our shop window. And I was sort of like, I pushed back at first and I was like, Well, TSP is the shop window. Tsp's the brand. Um, and then very quickly, they sort of they educated me on personal brand, and then I went and sought advice on it and started to understand that the world was changing and that trust for businesses was developed through the association with individuals and the company. So it's Zach Goodman and TSP. It's not Zach Goodman on his own. And so then suddenly you're like, right, well, how do I go about this? And you know, I did the same as everybody else. I got my LinkedIn account, started adding all my contacts on it, thought, right, I'm gonna do my post and bang, put the post on. Like three likes. Probably one of them was my mum. Um, and um you very quickly suddenly become extraordinarily overwhelmed, and you start looking around, it's like, how do you do this? How do you make impact? And how do you measure um what the benefit will be? Yeah. Um, and I kind of we we we got we got a coach in, uh Louisa Reynolds shout out, who I think previously had worked at LinkedIn, but she came in and kind of explained some basics. I think one of the lessons I took from her was authenticity. You will invariably do well at any level of social media if you can convey an image that people genuinely believe is close to your true self. So I'm not gonna say like everything I am on LinkedIn is just me in a nutshell, because a lot of my friends would say he's even funnier than that. Um, but you have to be yourself and you have to write your own stuff. Um, I genuinely believe that. Um, and then there's the technical side of it, like building tribes and communities and starting to understand like who's gonna be a fan, who's always gonna like your posts, and you should like their posts, and that helps you with the algorithm and what have you. But the main thing is like what message are you putting out there? And this is the really tricky one. Like, I'm in real estate management. It's not the most sexy thing to talk about night and day. And a lot of the people that know me in the industry, when I meet them for a beer or I go for dinner, they don't go, Zach, regale me of all your management stories, please. We've only got two hours together. Actually, what they want to hear about is my life, is my viewpoint, the challenges that I've been through. And that's how you kind of think to me about LinkedIn. You know, you want to have, you know, two or three kinds of content pillars to you, which is I'm Zach, I built a business from when I was young that's interesting to people. I've been through the different layers of leadership and challenges. Um, I'm Zach, I have a bit of a view on current affairs, and every now and again I'm I'll let you know what I think. Um, and then I'm Zach, I'm in real estate and have a view on real estate and what's going on in the industry. And you kind of you have to pick your own balance and how often you're going to post, and the market will tell you if it thinks your content is valuable or not. But I think that for me, what it's done for our business is quite a few things that are extremely valuable. And I would say to any business leader that doesn't realize this, you should start thinking about it now. Firstly, recruitment. People are able to find out about the business and how it's led by going on to LinkedIn and seeing my profile and then discovering podcasts and various other things. You can see the way I comment on other people's things and kind of get an insight into how I think. Um clients are able to validate you for your personal values as well as your business values in a very, very quick way, in a very easy way, which is extremely valuable.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

Especially in a time when actually getting face-to-face time with clients is actually probably the hardest it's ever been because of the post-COVID recovery, still hasn't really happened there in that sense. I still see that being that that you know that one-to-one relationship piece doesn't happen as much as it used to be.

SPEAKER_01 48:05

Massively. Um, and by the way, however many people you think are seeing your stuff or not seeing you on LinkedIn, like multiply it by five. Yeah. Like, because you're just entering people's kind of frame of mind. And so if someone else recommends you to them, they'll be like, Oh, you should go and see James Hallworth. I'll be like, James, I know James Hallworth. And that I know him. Even if they don't know you and they've just they've they've scrolled past you, that is so, so powerful. I think the other final thing with LinkedIn is that it's a bit like a Twitter feed for business and for for microindustries. And so, you know, LinkedIn is one of my main sources of kind of like information and news. Like I can, I feel like I can take the temperature, you know, when when we're all miserable, it's like the I'll go and make sure we're all miserable. And when we're all happy, we're all happy. And when we've all got something to say about coming back off the summer holidays, you know, there's you can see the the group thing that that that creeps in. But I hate to say it, and I wish I could, I wish I could grow my business and get on without having to do it because it takes time and you have to think about it, and you don't always feel like doing it, and sometimes you get rinsed by your friends, and that the the that that's more in the early stages, and when they see you convert it to success, they then come to you and say, How did you do that? Um, but it's it's it it certainly for now it's part of what business is. Um, and I've really only had benefit from it. I really other other than a few mates ribbing me, which I don't really care about anyway. Um, I haven't had any downside, and it's very cheap, it's very, very low cost marketing.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

Yeah. So we're coming to the the very end now. Um so I'd like to finish on two types of questions. The first one is big picture, commercial real estate. What do you think is the fundamental biggest thing that needs to change?

SPEAKER_01 49:58

I think the biggest thing that commercial real estate needs to change on is its mindset towards change. It innately has a fear and a resistance of it. And I think that's based on the fact that for a long time not changing really benefited most people in it. The same will not be true of the future, and therefore the mindset must change. We need to embrace innovation and change very much in the same way that finance has and that technology has. That disruption will bring huge value, and there are grass shoots of that, but we are not there yet. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 50:46

And then finally, uh do you think we need evolution or revolution in the industry to achieve that? Evolution.

SPEAKER_01 50:54

Yep. Always evolution. Revolution's really sexy, but there's collateral damage in it. No, we should evolve. Um real estate is about evolution, it's about it's the patina, it's the character, it's the heritage. If you had revolution, you lose the story. So, no, it's a continuance of a story that's been going for a long time. Like we have not to be too cheesy, but we have a great foundation in this industry. We don't need to rip that apart and uproot it. There's a lot of wisdom and knowledge that um is rooted in this sector, and we mustn't dismiss it. I remember once asking a very, very great man who was one of the one of the major leaders in the real estate industry, and I said to him, What is the role of agents? Um and he went back to me and he said, Agents are the arbiters of imperfect information, and real estate is the story of imperfect information, of nuances, of differences, of character, of this happened here and that happened there. We just evolve that and we we we will make it more productive and more efficient. We don't just take it and burn it.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Yeah, we're doing a lot of things right, and we don't give ourselves credit for that as well.

SPEAKER_01 52:09

Oh, we're doing loads of things right, but we can always be doing more and better and faster.

SPEAKER_00 52:15

Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Zach. Um, it's been great having you on. And I think just really the the insight which you've given, I think, is going to give a lot of value. It's been really honest, open, and I generally believe that the people listening to this and watching this all get a lot of a lot of value from this uh conversation. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.