When the novel coronavirus pandemic forced all two dozen workers at David Eyzenberg’s eponymous real estate investment bank to work remotely, its founder and president was quietly pleased—at least at first.
Work was getting done. Technology—email, Microsoft Teams and omnipresent, omniscient Zoom—meant that communication was happening, too. And then there were the intangibles: more time with family and less time commuting, not to mention the bottomline savings when no one’s going into the office.
“As a business owner, the prospect of not having to have rent as an overhead was just lovely,” Eyzenberg said from his Miami home. “And I felt that in at least the first few weeks that we were really functioning well.”
Then those first few weeks turned into months, and remote work lost its luster. What happened with Eyzenberg & Company highlights what’s happened across much of commercial real estate in terms of how professionals and their firms actually got the job done, and what they’ve learned from the experience.
Much has been made about the sudden shift to working remotely—and to whether that will become the new norm in some form—but little attention has been paid to the day-to-day of what has and hasn’t worked in terms of work.
What worked
Not everybody can have one, but a home office certainly helps when working from home. The same goes for prior experience with the setup. And that’s not just anecdotal. Cushman & Wakefield surveyed 40,000 office workers from myriad industries worldwide about their COVID-era practices. The results from “The Future of Workplace” came out in late June.
“People who both had experience working from home prior and people who had a dedicated place to do their work were having better experiences,” said Rachel Casanova, Cushman & Wakefield’s senior managing director of workplace innovation.
Beyond having this ideal physical setup and work-from-home background, everyone in commercial real estate seems to agree on one thing: “Too much communication is better than not enough.”
That was one of the pieces of advice on an online rundown that Newmark Knight Frank’s workplace strategy and human experience team put together to confront what it described as the “new normal with COVID-19.” Regular virtual communication came up repeatedly in Commercial Observer’s interviews with commercial real estate professionals. It was something they adopted very early on and without question.
For Jerrod Delaine, real estate asset management and construction director for Manhattan-based Carthage Real Estate Advisors, communication while working remotely has meant daily phone calls with field staff, including standing weekly phone calls at set times with contractors and lenders. Then there’s the daily staff call at 9:30 a.m. every weekday morning. “It allows us to touch base,” Delaine said over email. “And also the nuances of projects can be discussed.”
