Nestled into cozy nooks of Newmark Knight Frank in its Los Angeles and Orange County offices resides the dream team of real estate workplace strategists. As kids, Regan Donoghue and Annie Harrison were the outliers, showing up to school with mismatched clothes and an equally unique outlook on life. Today, that creativity is what makes their service to the workplace design market extraordinary.
Donoghue and Harrison, both regional workplace managers for Newmark Knight Frank, liken their partnership to the Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of the real estate world. With a background in the furniture industry and a keen business sense augmented by the Executive Master's program from Notre Dame, Donoghue is the business mind of the equation. Harrison's time spent in Singapore after winning the first Christopher Guy-BritWeek Design Award and education in interior design makes her the artistic vision of workplace strategy. Together, the duo is helping Newmark Knight Frank change the way we view real estate design and proving the next major wave to rock the industry directly will correlate to revisioning the process of workplace planning.
Cultivating rich broker relationships
When it comes to execution, Newmark Knight Frank has taken a unique approach to pulling in furniture partners. “We are working on the front end to shape and mold the clients' overall intentions,” Donoghue says. “Coming from a furniture background, I know that, traditionally, no one thought of design or furniture before real estate. They picked a spot and then tried to fit a square peg into a round hole to make the space work for their needs. We set out to help clients think about their best-case scenario and select real estate that will work with their design vision and furniture needs — not the other way around. We understand that furniture is what makes a space unique to a company, and we plan accordingly.”
Donoghue adds brokers are the most important piece of the puzzle. “Our relationship is built on trust,” she says. “Because of our strong relationships we have built with the broker who is often the client's first point of contact, we come to the table already understanding much about the client. By the time we are brought in, the brokers have developed an incredible amount of trust and understanding around their clients' needs. We help translate those relationships to spatial needs.”
Marrying human empathy with an artistic lens
So what makes their artistic approach so unique? For starters, they create a human experience by identifying the culture of the organizations they work for. “We rip up the pages of the cookie cutter approach and become active listeners and observants to the company's culture,” explains Donoghue. “Through an empathic approach, we understand that people want to be heard, and they want to work with people who can understand their situation.”
But it's not just empathy that makes this team successful. Recognizing personalization starts at the very beginning, the team helps companies carefully select their building. They consider metrics like location statistics, labor analytics and local cost of living to help companies transition away from selecting the “most shiny object” to a strategy that considers their client's complete lifestyle picture. They then curate a presentation that is a lot less slide clicking and lot more workshop strategy session. People get out of their seats and become an active part of the planning and vision, creating a more direct connection to the end design. Perhaps Donoghue says it best: “People make decisions with their hearts. The mind is 20 percent, but the rest is the heart. That's our secret sauce.”
Evolving workPLACE to workEXPERIENCE
By taking this humanistic approach that rocks the core of the traditional planning process, the team has delivered real estate designs and spaces that resonate with the mindsets of their occupants. And in doing so, they've identified the key to creating this new “un-workplace” is evolving physical space to recognize the value of the employee experience. Harrison says “people are going to make the decision on how they will interact in a space. They are going to work how they want and when they want, so it's going to come down to the services. Companies that offer workspaces as a service are coming on strong and fast — offering the addition of workplace design as a service, so it's super critical to understand that the future of real estate is going to become more service-based.”
Service is imperative not just to the physical space, but to the industry when thinking about the process of developing workspaces, according to Harrison. “RFPs are exhausting,” she says. “We're seeing more and more that clients go through the whole process and then decide not to change because it's too overwhelming — to be exact, 57 percent of clients don't change. We need to simplify the process for the client, they just want to get the job done, and the reality is, the last thing on their mind is picking the team to do it. With all of the challenges clients go through in their day-to-day work, they need this part to be effortless and that comes from our ability to synchronize a collective partnership with other vendors to offer our clients the luxury of knowing that experts in every field are focused on their solutions. In other words, we want to partner with design firms, AV firms, furniture, acoustics, etc. We know that trying to be the jack-of-all-trades means being a master of none, so we partner to deliver it all to our clients.”
Fast-paced companies need experts who can, of course, deliver results, but perhaps even more importantly make the process easy on them. For example, when checking into a hotel after a long business trip, you just want to give them your credit card and go to bed because you're tired. You don't want to have to make many additional decisions such as selecting your room number, your view, your breakfast menu or deciding on a floor. “We need to simplify the experience for the client,” Harrison says. “We need to be the single point of contact. Specifically, with clients in the tech world who don't stay in one place for long, a long-term, intensive investment in design and furniture may not make sense.”
Newmark Knight Frank has revolutionized the process of real estate selection and design. Taking a service-based approach, the company is enhancing the human experience, which, in the age of artificial intelligence, is becoming more important than ever. “We view real estate through the lens of an artist,” Harrison says.
by Amanda Schneider