Dear friends, colleagues and mentors,
Hope you are enjoying a great summer. For this month’s newsletter, I want to talk about something light and cheerful: the experience side of real estate.
Two buildings can have the same location, similar specifications and nearly identical rents, but still feel completely different.
One lets you settle in immediately. You know where to go. The temperature feels right. The light is comfortable. Everything you need seems to appear before you have to look for it.
The other asks you to solve a series of small problems: an entrance that is difficult to find, a delivery process no one understands, elevators that take too long, or a meeting room that never quite works.
None of these frictions looks particularly important on its own. Together, they shape how people behave inside a building - and whether they want to return willingly.
A building is a physical structure. It is also an experience.
The experience layer of real estate
I graduated from Cornell’s Hotel School, where we were trained to think about real estate through the lens of hospitality. That word can sometimes sound like smiling more, adding nicer furniture or offering better coffee.
To me, hospitality is more fundamental.
It is the discipline of helping a person achieve the highest possible return on their effort: less time spent navigating, waiting and worrying; more time resting, working, connecting or creating.
The best hospitality often goes unnoticed. The experience simply feels smooth.
This way of thinking extends far beyond hotels. Every real estate asset exists to support an activity. The building provides the physical layer; the people, movement and purpose inside it form the activity layer.
For an office, the activity is not merely showing up. It is concentrating, collaborating, exchanging ideas and making decisions. A successful office reduces the effort required to do those things well.
For retail, the activity is discovery and exchange. The experience influences whether someone enters, how long they stay, what they notice and whether they return.
For multifamily, the building supports hundreds of small daily routines: arriving home, receiving a package, cooking, resting, socializing and feeling safe. A good residential experience gives people time and energy back.
For industrial real estate, hospitality may seem like an unusual word, but the same principle applies. The user may be a truck driver, warehouse operator or logistics manager. Clear circulation, reliable power, efficient loading and fewer operational interruptions all increase the return on their time and labor.
Even within the same asset type, the activity layer can be very different. A film studio, a research lab and a traditional office may all be classified as commercial real estate, but the people inside them are trying to accomplish entirely different things.
Understanding those activities changes how we evaluate the building.
Real estate has traditionally been very good at measuring the physical and financial layers: square footage, rent, lease term, cap rate, tenant credit and replacement cost.
The activity layer is less tidy. Yet it eventually appears in the numbers through leasing velocity, tenant retention, downtime, productivity, foot traffic, operating costs and willingness to pay.
It invites a different set of questions:
What is the user trying to accomplish here?
Where do they lose time, attention or energy?
What does the building make easier?
What does it unnecessarily make harder?
A strong real estate experience does not always require grand gestures. Sometimes it is shade in the right place, a loading dock designed around actual movement, a lobby that offers clarity rather than spectacle, or technology that quietly removes ten repetitive steps.
These details may feel small. But their economic effect can compound.
What this means for Reml
At Reml, we believe real estate intelligence should understand not only what a building is, but what people are trying to accomplish inside it.
That means connecting the physical, financial and activity layers of an asset: understanding where friction is hiding, how it affects performance and where a better experience can create lasting value.
In the long run, the most useful real estate intelligence will not stop at describing buildings. It will help us understand how buildings are actually used and experienced - and how they can work better for the people inside them.
This summer, as you move through hotels, offices, airports, shops and neighborhood streets, notice the places that seem to give something back: a little calm, momentum, comfort or time.
That feeling is part of the experience.
And the experience is part of the asset.
Curious to hear your view on this.
