Strategies for Increasing Your Commercial
KingsleySurveys Score in 2025

Hello, and welcome to our webinar, strategies for increasing your commercial real estate KingsleySurvey score in 2025. We have so much to cover today, and I can't wait to share our insights and strategies with you. You're going to learn so much from our guest speaker, who is one of my favorite people here at Grace Hill, and who I've personally learned so much from. So without further ado, let me introduce our star of the show, Katie Jeffirs. She's the senior manager of survey services here at Grace Hill, and Katie has been in the survey industry for over fifteen years with ten of them here at KingsleySurveys. And during her time here, she's worked on and presented literally hundreds or maybe even thousands, we were trying to count the other day, of tenant, resident, employee, client, and investor survey results analysis presentations. She's the first person that anyone here goes to if they have a survey question because she is far and away the most knowledgeable about our survey setup, implementation, and survey results analysis. I am so excited to have her share her expertise with you all today. And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Jen Tindall, and I'll be your host for today. I'm the VP strategic insights at Grace Hill, who's the firm bringing this webinar to you. But before we dive in, as a reminder, and if you didn't know, for everyone attending today, you will be entered to win our three thousand dollar travel giveaway. But remember, you have to stay for the entire presentation. We also have some other upcoming events, and the more that you attend, the more chances you have to win. Our team will include links to register for those events in our follow-up email along with today's recording. Alright. So what all are we covering today? First, we'll talk about highlights from twenty twenty four in our twenty twenty four year in review. Then we'll cover twenty twenty five strategies to improve your CRE KingsleySurveys scores. And near the end, we'll share a bit about KingsleySurveys before jumping into q and a. And that reminds me if at any point during our discussion, you have a question, please just drop it in the chat or you can use Zoom's q and a function. We're more than happy to answer all of your questions at the end of our session today. Alright. We have been busy working away for you in twenty twenty four, and we have a ton of insights gained from preparing and analyzing your survey questionnaires. First, we'll talk about trends we're seeing in office attendance and remote work, a very hot topic these days. Then we'll cover property amenity and feature satisfaction over the year. Then we'll talk about trends in revenue generating categories, like future space requirements, renewal decision factors, and value for amount paid. Last, but certainly not least, we'll cover sustainability trends. And if you learn nothing else from our twenty twenty four highlights, remember these three things. First, focus on food. Second, get back to basics on property features. And third, leverage lease links and renewals. It's a bit of a tongue twister, but these should hopefully help you remember the key insights from today. We'll talk about each of them in more detail. Alright. Let's get started. Katie, everyone has been talking about how more and more tenants seem to be requiring in office work these days. Amazon, The Washington Post, JPMorgan, so many firms are making the headlines for making their employees come back into the office. So tell me, Katie, is it true that more tenants are requiring employees to be in the office? Yes. So it seems like since March twenty twenty, we've been speculating about the future of the office place. And as we've seen companies kind of slowly change their policies, I think it's kind of given some hope to the sector. And so the good news is for everyone on this call is that our own data is showing the same thing, that companies the tenant companies we're, surveying are starting to say, that they're they're having more kind of specific office attendance policies in place compared to kind of the initial approach after the pandemic or during the pandemic of allowing individuals to make that decision. Those optional attendance policies are in decline, and more and more companies are either saying full return to office around thirty percent. And then a little under half are saying, some type of mandatory but partial attendance is required. Got it. Yeah. Perfect. So I'm sure many of you are it's probably good news. So with that good news, it's the time to start thinking about what kind of, audits might you need to do of your own property and services to ensure that you're ready for this, return to office, whether it continues to be gradual or comes back in a way with a large, tenant suddenly mandating five days in the week. You know? So think about things like your janitorial services. Are they ready for that return to office? Do they have enough supplies in stock to make sure they can conserve tenants? You know, things like toilet paper, paper towels, soap for the bathrooms. So thinking about that, but also your amenities, if you have them, are those also ready for increased volume? Right. Yes. It would be awful to show it back to the office and not have enough toilet paper. Yeah. So on the topic of amenities, I'd love to hear more about what you're hearing, especially on food. I know that's a hot topic for today. Yeah. So we have a a couple of different charts here on this slide, so I'll kinda walk you through the information we're looking at. On the left side, the gray bars represent just overall satisfaction with amenities. This is kind of like a generic amenity, rating question. And the average scores here are pretty high. They're well above a four point o average score ranging from, this year in twenty twenty four from a four point one seven to a four point two four. And the scores are broken out by that office attendance policy. And so this will kinda give you a good idea about how these satisfaction kind of differs based on what tenants are saying about their own, attendance policy. And we do see that for those with their required full return to office. The scores trend a little bit lower than the other two attendance policy groups. But overall, that dark bar representing, the twenty twenty four scores is trending above twenty twenty three. So the good news is it seems like tenants are pretty happy with their overall amenities, and it's headed in the right direction. Right. Yeah. Good good news. But there's lots of different amenities available at every property, and so we do ask about nine, different types of amenities if they're applicable, for that property. And we've grouped two of them together on the right side of the screen, food related amenities. So this is food trucks and healthy food options, and these scores are quite a bit lower than that just kind of overall generic amenity question. Here you see the average scores in the the three and a half range, It's a three and a half out of five. So pretty big difference when we get down into food. And what you'll notice is that for those that aren't in the office full time, those, optional attendance policies and partial attendance policies, those scores are declining a little bit this year compared to twenty twenty three. And this, I would say, it kind of really rang true for me, because when I was in the office five days in the week, I really enjoyed taking advantage of all of the different food options around our building. It was kind of spoiled as in downtown Atlanta. We had a food court and then lots of restaurants nearby. And so at least once a week, I would treat myself to a salad from my favorite salad place, or this Mediterranean place that everybody in my office loved and raved about and had a line out the door every single day at lunch hour. Yeah. That really resonates with me too. I miss the sushi place that we used to go to when I was in office, and I just don't make it up there as much anymore. Not to mention, there were breakfast tacos right next door. So lots of good lots of good food options. And I know we're going to talk about food a little bit more. So let's keep on that topic. Yeah. Yeah. We could probably spend the entire webinar talking about food, but we won't. But we will talk about it for just a couple of more slides here because it really is worth calling out. So what we're looking at now in this next slide is satisfaction with those those nine amenities I mentioned earlier. Most of them are shown in gray here, and we're showing just a time trend from twenty twenty three through, year to date of twenty twenty four. And most of those gray lines are kind of bunched around that four point o average score mark I was talking about. So satisfaction does tend to be higher with the other areas such as meeting spaces and bike storage. And it's, you can see, considerably lower for those two food related amenities, healthy food options and food trucks. So those are highlighted in red, kind of at the bottom of the chart just to show their distance from the rest of the amenities listed here. So if you do have food trucks at your property, you know, something to think about, especially if you don't have KingsleySurveys and you're not exactly sure, you know, what your tenants are thinking about these, You know, think about the schedule you have arranged with these food truck vendors, the hours that they're available. You know, are they able to meet that lunchtime rush if it comes? So start thinking about some of those questions as you're evaluating your own property. Perfect. Yeah. Those are great points too. No one likes to wait in an hour long line when they only have, like, an hour for lunch anyway. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Well, that covers some of the ratings of amenities that exist at properties, but I'd love to hear more about what amenities tenants actually want at their properties. Yes. I'm I'm excited you're asking about that. Because I don't know about you, but a lot of times when I watch TV and movies and maybe the workplace is the kind of the center of the story, sometimes those workplaces don't really feel like they reflect reality, especially when you see a bunch of people hanging out in, like, some amazing game room or amazing rooftop patio. Those certainly look nice, but do they really reflect what tenants are asking for? And the good news is we have data to back that up. So, in addition to reading those, existing amenities, we also ask tenants just an open ended question to list the the top three amenities they'd like added to their property. And so, Jen, I know you used a a full new AI tool to aggregate, you know, thousands of open ended comments around this topic. And here we're just showing the top twenty five, mentions, seven of which around food. And those are all highlighted in red in the chart. And so what I think this really shows is that tenants actually have pretty down to earth, requests when it comes to amenities they want added to their properties. You know, one of the items you see listed on here is vending machines. So they really do just want more food, you know, any way they can get it. Yes. Exactly. I had a colleague who described tenants as being hangry after seeing this, which I thought was quite funny and I can definitely relate to. Yeah. Alright. We have talked about office amenities a lot now and food specifically. Let's move on and talk about property features across all different property types that we cover with KingsleySurveys. So, Katie, what are you seeing in terms of property feature satisfaction for retail, industrial, office, and medical office? Yeah. So we ask about, just kind of basic property features, for each of the property types we survey. You know, and something I've heard a lot over my time in this industry is, is, you know, someone saying, well, that's a trophy asset. Of course, they have really high scores, or, of course, those tenants are really happy. It's a a highly amenitized building, you know, of of course, they should be doing well. But, really, what I wanna emphasize is what you mentioned earlier, get back to the basics. So we're going to see that over the next couple of slides by property type. So, we're starting off with office and medical office, looking at the various property features specific to those property types, and, again, the average scores from one to five. So at the top of the list, you see appearance of lobby, appearance of common areas being the most highly rated features for these property types. So that's great news because that's someone's first impression with the building is is probably the the building lobby. So whether it's an individual that's, that's their workplace or they're a visitor or a patient, it's good to see that tenants are are pretty happy with with this part of the property features. But then to go go to the basics, at the bottom of this list, shown in red here is HVAC performance. So it is consistently the lowest scoring area, for property features for office and medical office. And, again, this kind of felt like it rang true for me. You know, being in Atlanta, it was sometimes really hard to manage HVAC performance given sometimes the the crazy weather we have. You know, oftentimes in mid November, you can still have an eighty degree day, and that's when the building system's already been switched over to heat for the winter, and it's kinda hard to switch it back. So this can really impact someone's day to day experience, especially if you're a patient and you're going to an appointment that maybe you're not looking forward to so much. And on top of that, you have a kind of inconsistent temperature in in the building. Yes. Yes. That is also so true. Living here in Austin, it's somewhat similar to Atlanta, hot and humid in the summer, and having to take a jacket to the office in July is not just doesn't make sense. So I can appreciate that. Alright. That covers office and medical office. What about retail and industrial? Yeah. So as you might expect, there is a different feature mix for these two property types. And and so, again, with both of those property types, it is kind of about going back to basics. So location is the top rated area for both retail and industrial. For industrial, you also see clear height here. So I think that's really good news that most tenants are pretty happy with one of the kind of core parts of the building functionality, that's needed just to operate their business. What might surprise some people, though, is that security, is at the very bottom of the list. And I know security services aren't necessarily consistently provided for industrial properties, but it is an area we ask about. And this didn't seem too surprising to me when I saw it because sometimes when we're digging into individual tenant portfolios, for our clients, security will come up as an area needing improvement. And that's where tenant comments can really help identify the the specific concern around security because it is going to vary from tenant to tenant, but you can better understand the perspectives and concerns of your tenants if, again, if you if you're kind of con surveying them consistently and getting this direct feedback. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. And then retail, a little bit different. Security is still kinda low on that list, but the lowest rated area is number of footfalls on the property. And, again, these results are from twenty twenty four, so this isn't, you know, twenty twenty or twenty twenty one, and it's still the the lowest rated area. You know, and this this kinda really struck me. I was reading a JLL article a couple weeks ago about luxury brands and how they're expanding their leased space, in an effort to use their brick and mortar stores as a way to kind of deepen the customer relationship with their brand. So the focus was really on, getting people just into the store to experience the brand. Yes. I've seen that quite often here as well in my hometown once again. And, personally, I love it. I love the experiential retail, movement that we've been seeing. Alright. Let's keep it moving. Speaking of industrial and retail, they have actually been very strong performers the last few years, both in total returns and with very high occupancy. There was a fantastic visualization put out by the Brookings Institute that showed this. From that, I learned a fun fact. Retail is the only product type where vacancy has declined consistently since twenty nineteen. So with that in mind, tell me, Katie, do you have any indication of whether we can expect when looking forward stable or increasing occupancy in any of these property types? Yes. So, one of the questions we ask on the survey is asking tenants to predict their future space needs. So we do have results around that. It is a single question. We ask them, give them a variety of answer options, including more space. So that's what we're looking at here, across all four property types. So, yes, it does seem to be pretty stable in twenty twenty four. The the percentage of tenants indicating they need more space is not fluctuating. It's it's really hovering around, kind of anywhere from fifteen to to twenty five ish percent depending on property type. For retail, it's been pretty consistent throughout twenty twenty four at around fifty fifteen percent, industrial a little bit higher. So despite, increased supply in that sector, there's still around twenty percent of tenants throughout this year saying that they need more space. Right. That is that's good to know. Good strengthening market there still. Yes. Yeah. And, of course, I I don't think anyone's surprised to see that office has the lowest percentage of tenants saying they need more space. But there still are some tenants saying they need more space even in office. So, so in general, you know, kind of positive trends here. Perfect. And then in contrast, another op answer option is, saying that you anticipate needing less space, in the coming year. But, really, it's a pretty small percentage of tenants saying they need less space. For three of the four property types on this slide, it's around one to two percent indicating so. Office is, you know, as it may be expected, the one the one, sector here, with a higher percentage. But even office, it's around six percent, of tenants saying they need less space, which is even just a little bit below what it was last year. So it seems like this is also heading in the right direction. That is such a relief to hear. I'm sure everyone on the call is happy to hear that as well. And this would have been so helpful for me to know when I was on the owner side trying to plan our investment strategies for the next year and several years. Perfect. Okay. Let's talk about renewals because for many owners and managers, we prefer to keep a tenant in place than to have to source a new one. It's usually just cheaper for both the tenant and for us and easier on everyone as well. So, Katie, what do tenants care about when they're deciding whether or not to renew their lease? Yeah. Great question. I'm glad you asked because, of course, we have data around this. So we ask tenants, to, you know, anticipate their renewal decision, and then we ask them about the factors that influenced that decision. So that's what we'll be looking at on on these slides here. And we'll look at it across all four property types, starting with office, medical office, and industrial. And, again, you know, I if we had done a poll, of the audience, they probably would have guessed price would be the most cited reason for being unsure about renewing. So, you know, probably always nice when your your gut kind of reflects the data. And, the other the other item here that's in the top five is space requirements. So, you know, we just kind of looked at some other data around that a few slides ago. Probably also not too surprising to see that on the list. And then what I found really interesting is consistently in the top five here, we see length of lease, cited. And, Jenna, I wanted to get your thoughts on seeing that here in the top five. Yes. That was not surprising to me at all. It's what I'm hearing when I'm talking with colleagues, whether they're brokers, owners, managers. Tenants just want more flexible lease terms, and usually that means shorter lease terms. And if you look at the charts, it's generally trending down in terms of just average lease term across property types, whether we're talking office, industrial, that sort of thing. But we haven't covered retail yet, so we left it off this slide. And and please tell us, Katie, what are the renewal decision factors for retail? Yeah. So so retail tenants, like like all the other tenants, are also concerned about price. So that is their their number one cited reason. Again, not surprisingly. But after that are are two other factors kind of related to price, customer foot traffic, the next most cited reason. So earlier, we saw that was the lowest rated property feature was footfalls on property. It's the second most cited reason for being unsure about renewal and then followed closely by sales performance, another, you know, very much related concept. So, yeah, so it didn't seem too surprising, for these to be the the top three for retail. Right. And this was not surprising to me either. I have an old friend who's a restaurant manager and can confidently say that these things were the most important to him also. And just in general, knowing what factors go into a renewal decision gives us a clear picture of what tenants value. Right? And our goal as owners and managers is to make sure that we're giving enough value for what the tenants are paying for us in rent, which by no coincidence is another question that we ask in our surveys. Katie, can you tell us how tenants are feeling about the value for what they're paying in rent? Yeah. So this is another reading area where we ask tenants to rate their satisfaction from one to five with the value for amount paid, for the rental price. And this area is an area that does score lower compared to some of the the other ratings we saw earlier in this slide presentation. So this is an area that, pretty much always scores below that four point o average that I've been kinda referring to. So here, it's more common to see scores in the three and a half range, three and a half out of five, and that's what you're seeing really across all these property types. What we have been seeing, just so far in q four, which, you know, we're only partially the way through, is that satisfaction with value for amount paid is rising for both office and medical office. So that trend continues through the end of this quarter. It it will be some of the kind of highest scores we've seen for value for amount paid in a couple of years. Wow. That's impressive. That's a big shift. Definitely. Well, thank you so much for that, Katie. Okay. We have our last topic for our twenty twenty four year in review. So let's talk about sustainability. Many of you implement our surveys for GRES reporting requirements or maybe LEED or Well or something like that. And as a result, we ask tenants a variety of sustainability questions. So, Katie, what were some of the highlights in sustainability for twenty twenty four? Yeah. So so something that we've been hearing a lot from, you know, practitioners in the space, especially at Bowman this year, is a big part of the conversation was all these various reporting requirements for those various organizations or for local jurisdictions, state requirements, or even EU mandates depending on, you know, where your investors are located. So, getting some of that data can be a little bit challenging. That's what we've we've heard, especially when it comes to utility data, because the tenant typically is the one responsible for for that data. And so we added a question about the willingness to share utility data to the survey about, like, a year and a half ago, because it was becoming this this challenge we are hearing about. And so what I think the good news is, in general, looking at, what we're seeing in our surveys is that well over half of tenants do say they're willing to share that utility data, and seventy percent of industrial tenants are willing to share. So that seemed kind of promising to me for the the direction of meeting these reporting requirements. Absolutely. And there's a psychological principle called consistency or the consistency principle, which says that if you get someone to commit to doing a thing, usually in writing, then they're more likely to perform that act. So if you ask someone if they're going to provide you with their utility data and they say yes, there's a much greater chance that they will, in fact, actually provide you with that data. So keep that in the back of your mind. It's it's helpful to ask these things. Perfect. Well, any other sustainability highlights from the year worth mentioning, Katie? Yeah. So, you know, this willingness to share data is kind of about how your tenant's going to help you. But there's lots of ways landlords can help their tenants through providing importance of these particular sustainability initiatives. And what we see for retail and medical office is that that generic option of just having sustainable building operations, does have the the highest importance rating. And then the electric car charging stations has the lowest importance rating. And we're calling this out not so much to say, you know, don't, spend time on this. But as more and more make and models of electric vehicles, you know, become available, and that's been a big topic of the national conversation the past couple of years, just wanna give you a sense of where that sits relative to other sustainability initiatives. And it it is still the lowest area even if it's growing in importance. Right. It's helpful to know to kind of understand what we hear in the media versus what tenants are actually saying. Yeah. Perfect. Well, we haven't covered the other two property types. So what can you tell us about those? I do remember from a sneak preview, I will say something about recycling. Yeah. Yeah. So so like we've seen kind of throughout, today's session, things do differ by property type. So for office tenants, recycling program is still, the the most, kind of highly sought after or, most important sustainability initiative to provide. And this always strikes me as just a little bit funny because recycling programs have been around forever. They kind of just feel like the, you know, the OG of sustainability initiatives. But it's still the most, cited, area for office. And, you know, and again, going back to my experience in the office, it was actually really hard to find the recycling bins. You had to be really intentional about seeking them out to, you know, throw away your Coke can. So I'm actually when I think about that, you know, personal experience, it's actually not too surprising to see recycling program at the top of this list. And then electric car charging station, you know, has more importance for office tenants compared to what we saw on the previous line and compared to industrial, but still relatively lower compared to the others. And then industrial, energy efficiency, not too surprising that they're, something related to business operations is going to be the the most important sustainability initiative. Amazing. This was fantastic, Katie. Thank you so much for sharing. We covered a ton today. So as a reminder, what these top three learnings for 2024 are, number one, focus on food. Number two, get back to those basics like HVAC. And number three, leverage flexible and shorter lease links in your renewal negotiations. Right. It's finally here. If you are like me, you have been anxiously waiting for this last section, your twenty twenty five strategy on how to improve your KingsleySurveys scores. Katie, I cannot wait for you to share these results. So tell us, how can we improve? Yeah. Great question. So we covered a lot of trends so far today. Probably give you lots of information to think about in terms of your own property, what you should be looking at. But, you know, really, if you're going to come away with kind of two main things today, it's that, maintaining positive tenant relationships is easier than you think if you just kind of follow some best practices, and use some of the data I'm going to share, to inform those practices. So one of the exercises that we do across all of our urgent net projects as we look at all the reading areas on the survey, and look at their correlation to overall satisfaction. And so we're focusing on the reading areas that have that highest correlation to overall satisfaction, so the strongest relationship, to tenants' overall satisfaction. And the three rating areas you see here are all related to management, you know, which haven't appeared yet, in the slide deck. So kind of intentionally saving them for this this location. And, you know, really, when you think about management, it's service delivery, it's customer relationship management. So what are some of the kind of most common or key aspects of of that customer relationship management? And it kind of boils down to two things, responsiveness, and having some kind of proactive strategic interactions with your customers. So we're going to talk about how we measure both of those in the survey. So, starting off with responsiveness, we ask, how often it typically takes management to respond to nonemergency situations, and respondents have four answer options, within two hours, two to twenty four hours, twenty four to forty eight hours, and forty eight plus hours. So they can respond with one of those answer options. And then what we do is we look at overall satisfaction based on how tenants responded to that response time question. And here we've grouped the the fastest response time that within twenty four hours. That's represented by that red bar. The dark gray bar represents those that say twenty four to forty eight hours, and the light bar gray bar represents those that say forty eight hours or more. So you can see for each property type, there is a stair step, descent from fastest response time to longest response time. And I think this is, a, it feels like common sense. Right? Like, we've all had an experience where someone got back to us really quickly with the answer we needed or, you know, taking prioritizing our issue, making us feel heard, making us feel like we're going to be taken care of. And it really made an impact in our our day and our experience. But it's also really easy to neglect this when everyone has five million other things going on and you're trying to prioritize your day. How do you figure out what's what's really the most important? And so I think when when, you know, especially property managers who are probably the busiest people on the planet, see these these results like this, you know, it really helps prioritize and understand the impact of of making this a priority. And it's true for every property type, not just the kind of high maintenance property types, but including industrial and retail, it still makes a big difference. Absolutely. Man, I couldn't agree more. And I see in the comments, yes. Absolutely. We know you're so busy. So appreciate you calling that out as well, Katie. Mhmm. Alright. So that covers responsiveness. And then one oh, yes. The color coding timing again. So on this slide, the red is and then I'm stealing your thunder, Katie, here for one minute. The red is less than twenty four hours. The dark gray is twenty four to forty eight hours, and then the light gray is forty eight plus hours response time. Perfect. Okay. Well, let's talk about that other criteria that you mentioned, Katie. Yeah. So so you might be wondering, okay. That's nice to see the impact, but really what percent of tenants are even saying they responded to in twenty four hours? And I think the answer here might be surprising for for some folks. Again, if you're a property manager that's a rock star, you might be like, oh, hundred percent of my tenants would say I get back to them in an hour or within twenty four hours. But really over two thirds of tenants across all property types say they are typically responded to within twenty four hours. It's higher for medical office and office, as you might expect, above eighty percent, in the seventy percent range for retail and industrial. And I really wanna emphasize this because some of our implementation managers, when they begin working with brand new clients that have never done a tenant survey before, when they work with them on the questionnaire, they will sometimes say, like, what is this question even doing here? You know, how could anybody say that it takes less than two days to get a response? And here's the data showing that it really is important, that it's, a, happening across a lot of your competitors if if you don't think so. But you also really need to have some type of policy or standard operating procedure, making it clear that this is an expectation. Right. Yes. And I will say, I working at Grace Hill is the first time I've actually had access to policies in an easy to use way, and it's been so helpful when I can't remember. I'm like, oh, yeah. What is our policy for whatever thing? And then I can just ask Gracie, who's our little chatbot, what I'm supposed to be doing. So that is super helpful. Okay. Responding quickly is one of the tactics that you mentioned. Let's talk about that other tactic, responsiveness. Yeah. So, so having some type of regular check-in with your customers is, you know, probably a a pretty standard business practice for many of us. And so we ask about this as well on the survey with two different questions. We ask how often, property management currently checks in, and then how often the tenant would prefer that property management check-in. And, again, here we have a a range of answer options, from weekly, monthly, quarterly, twice a year, and never. What we chose to show here is the percent of tenants that say they're they never have a check-in, from property management, shown by property type. And, you know, this, again, may or may not seem surprising. It's it's highest for industrial and retail, a little bit lower for medical office and office. But, you know, I think we can all agree that if you're not meeting with a customer at least once a year, it's probably going to be problematic for your relationship and your ability to understand their needs. And on top of that, most tenants want to be contacted more often than ever. So the little red line, here on these gray charts is representing the percent that say they prefer to never be, contacted, and it ranges from one percent to four percent. So pretty small percent. But I would say even for industrial at four percent, sure, you might have some that really like, you cannot talk to them ever, because it will make them very unhappy. But another kind of way to think about it or question to ask is, you know, how can you demonstrate to tenants that it is worthwhile checking in at least once or twice a year, even if maybe right now they don't see the value in it? How can you show them that it would be a valuable experience for them as well? Absolutely. This was so fantastic, Katie. Thank you for sharing. And to recap what Katie said, and as she mentioned at the beginning, there are two simple ways to improve your KingsleySurvey score, rapid response times and frequent follow ups. Love the alliteration, so I'm going to say it one more time. Rapid response times and frequent follow ups, these are the two tactics that will help you increase your Kingsley survey score. Amazing. Okay. Before we move on to Q&A, let me share with you a little bit more about what we do here at Grace Hill with KingsleySurveys for any of you who are not familiar with it. As part of our survey process, we provide you with the Kingsley Index, which lets you see how your property stacks up against your competition. It's basically a variation of the data that we presented to you today. We can also break down the Kingsley Index by geography and property class. All of our data is super recent covering the latest twenty four month period. You may be thinking, how can we cover so many property types and other striations while keeping your benchmark relevant? That's because we survey over two and a quarter billion square feet of properties each year. So two and a quarter billion. That is a lot of properties. KingsleySurveys is the leader in the industry with the most comprehensive benchmark available. You may wonder what all we ask in our survey. Even though we did talk about quite a lot today, I provided you with a sampling below on the screen. So we covered so much today, but there are a few things we didn't. Like, we also ask for feedback on ways that owners and managers can specifically improve. And perhaps most importantly, we ask tenants about their intent to renew and whether their space needs will change, which we did mention it's just worth calling out again because this gives you a heads up on whether you'll need to meet with your tenants earlier about the renewal or potentially plan ahead for a backfill. One last thing about KingsleySurveys, you may know that we survey tenants and residents, but did you also know that we survey clients and investors? And we provide corporate employee engagement surveys. The employee engagement survey specifically will give you a sense of whether or not your employees are satisfied with your company, their job, and other areas of workplace culture. This can help you engage employees better to increase employee retention. If you want to learn more about what we do here at Grace Hill, just type the word score, s c o r e, into the chat. Alright. That concludes our presentation. Let's answer some of your burning questions, and it looks like we just got one from Sam in the chat. He asked, how do you make sure the, quote, right persons receive the survey? Katie, can you take that? Yeah. Great question. So we recommend sending the survey to one or two individuals. We we send them directly to those individuals in our system. So usually, we'd recommend someone who's a least decision maker and someone who's, like, the day to day main contact, office manager, facility manager position. Sometimes that's the same person. Sometimes it's two different people. So Exactly. The way to provide that, data directly into, our Kingsley portal. Perfect. And you can see and slice and dice the data from that information. I know. I've seen it. So it's definitely helpful to have that question and great question, Sam. Thank you for asking. Okay. Another question that we have, do the survey results count towards GRES requirements? And I know I mentioned that earlier, but, Katie, I'll let you answer this one as well. Yes. It does. And, you know, for those that aren't sure, GRESB does cover more than just sustainability and actually management, is one of the the scoring areas on GRESB. As you saw, we we definitely cover that on the KingsleySurveys. Perfect. Amazing. K. Let me just look. Alright. What do most people do to improve their response times? Like, are they using some sort of software? Response times? Like, are they using some sort of software? So it's a great question here too. Yeah. So I've been hearing from clients that have some type of, like, robust CRM software, using that to track interactions. You know, like Salesforce is an example of something that can be integrated, and do that. That's probably not practical for everybody. So, honestly, just kind of setting up some action plans with specific goals for your teams goes a long way to reinforcing those best practices. And so, Jen, as you mentioned, getting somebody to write out what they are going to do, to, you know, regularly respond within twenty four hours, is a great way to and to kind of follow through with that behavior. And then, obviously, the survey can show whether or not tenants perceive you're actually doing that. Absolutely. That makes sense. Alright. Well, last question I have. So if you guys have any other questions, please drop them in the chat. You can direct it to us or you can direct it to everyone. I'm monitoring it so I can see it. Little bit last question we have right now. Someone says, we have a really hard time getting tenants to share their utility data with us. How do you recommend we go about getting that? Yeah. That that is really challenging. You know, I think probably raising awareness about why it's important makes goes a long way. So just increasing the communication and conversations. You know, and I would say, again, if you're having some kind of regular check-in with your tenants, and, again, from the survey, you're going to know what their preferred cadence is. That creates a great opportunity to be mentioning why this is important to collect. And then I think, Jen, as you mentioned, asking about it in the survey is a great way to to kind of help people see, that it's it's something that's an expected behavior. Yep. Absolutely. Amazing. Well, thank you guys for the questions, and I just saw your comment, Linda. Thank you so much for that feedback. Oh, we've got one more question I just saw pop up as well. Does Kingsley help disseminate the information once survey results are received, or is it more a dashboard that clients are responsible for being able to navigate? That is a great question. So, Katie, I'll let you answer that one as well. Yeah. So we create reports for every property that was surveyed, and it so you can log in to a dashboard and see a lot of information dynamically. But on top of that, we do create static reports that can be downloaded directly from the portal, and it's based on user access. So the the right property manager always gets the the right report. Perfect. Yes. And we do depending on the tier. There's different tiers of surveys. Correct? So certain tiers will get a custom presentation, which is our highest tier, of course. And then the lowest tier get gets the reports that Katie mentioned. Although the highest tier gets those reports as well. So it depends on what type of survey that you engage us with. Yeah. That that's a great point, Jen. Yeah. We'll we'll do a presentation similar to what we did today. And so you're welcome to use the recording, as well after that to disseminate how you need to. Perfect. Okay. Couple more questions here. How easy is the survey? Oh, good question. So how long does it typically take to complete it? Yeah. It it takes, like, five to seven minutes. You're always going to have someone who likes to type a lot, and maybe leaves really long comments, but it is pretty easy to take. And even though for most tenant surveys, people are taking it on their their laptops, because it's going to a business email address, you could also take the survey on your your mobile phone. It's, mobile friendly as well. Perfect. Amazing. And I know for where the topic of this call is tenant surveys, but we do investor surveys as well. And sometimes those are actually phone surveys because those particular, personas prefer to have a phone call. So for tenant, it definitely makes more sense for mobile as as Katie mentioned or on their computer, but, it does vary by survey type. Okay. Another question here. Do you have tips on encouraging the tenants to participate? I have had a few remove themselves from the survey. That's great feedback. Thank you for sharing that, Sam. Yeah. So, you know, it's usually a little bit harder to get participation in the right first year that you do a survey. But it gets easier over time, especially if you are sharing the results with tenants after they're compiled. So you don't need to necessarily send them the report, but you can share with them maybe two or three high level things that you're planning on on doing or acting upon as a result of feedback. And one of the best ways to really get people to participate is to give them a good reason to. So even making small changes, but then raising awareness about those changes that you made and the reason behind it is going to show that you're using the feedback, and making changes, that the tenants actually want. So it does get easier over time if if you do those those really kind of engagement activities. And then, you know, I have a a client that always would do, like, a breakfast on the day, of survey launch. So food, is always a great motivator as well and, again, raises the awareness that it's a big deal. It's important to to you as an organization to get their feedback. Perfect. I love it. We started with food, and it sounds like we might be ending with food in case we have any other questions in the chat here. Perfect. Okay. Well, I'll give you all just a minute more. But, otherwise, it's been so fantastic to have you on, Katie, and to share all of your expertise and insights on the survey process and tips for twenty twenty five surveys. So thank you so much again. Oh, let me just check this one q and a notification. Oh, I just got another recommendation from someone who is a survey, customer who suggests that you should also thank all of the tenants whether they surveyed or not because that can generate FOMO. So to answer Sam's question again, that is a great tip as far as how you can encourage participation in the survey. FOMO is a is a great great way to do that. We love that. Perfect. Amazing. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Hope you have a fantastic rest of your week.