Commercial Real Estate Tech: Occupier | with Nate Smoyer

Matt Giffune has been a prominent figure in the commercial real estate industry for over 17 years, bringing a wealth of experience from his roles at JLL and VTS. Now, as the co-founder of Occupier, Matt is revolutionizing lease accounting, lease administration, and deal collaboration software for commercial real estate tenants and their tenant rep brokers.

In This Episode:

Industry Background and Trends:

Matt shares his journey in the commercial real estate sector, discussing his experiences at JLL and VTS. We explore current trends in office, retail, and industrial leasing, examining significant changes and concerns in the market. Matt offers insights into the strategies national brands are adopting for their physical spaces amid recent uncertainty.

Occupier's Solutions:

We dive deep into the solutions Occupier provides, addressing the common challenges faced by commercial tenant rep brokers. Learn about the features and capabilities of Occupier's software, including lease accounting, lease administration, and deal collaboration tools, and how these products help commercial tenants overcome unique obstacles.

Looking Ahead:

Matt discusses anticipated changes in commercial leasing and provides a glimpse into Occupier's product roadmap. Get ready for some future casting as we explore the evolution of the industry and what lies ahead for Occupier.

Success Stories and Impact:

Discover how Occupier is helping companies make smarter real estate decisions. Matt shares success stories and key metrics that showcase the impact of Occupier's software on its clients, highlighting real-world examples and case studies.

About Matt Giffune:

Matt Giffune is the Co-Founder of Occupier, a comprehensive commercial lease management software. With extensive experience in commercial real estate and software sales, Matt has a deep understanding of the industry's dynamics and is dedicated to empowering businesses with innovative solutions. A Boston native, Matt currently resides in New York City.

For more information about Occupier, visit www.occupier.com

Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com

Key Takeaways:

• The commercial real estate industry, particularly the leasing process, has been slow to adopt technology and modernize workflows. Brokers often rely on manual, email-heavy processes.

• Occupier is addressing this by building a deal collaboration platform to provide a centralized, transparent system for tenant reps and their clients to manage the leasing process.

• The commercial real estate market is highly fragmented, with different trends and dynamics playing out in various sectors (office, retail) and geographic markets. Blanket statements about the overall market can be misleading.

• Private equity involvement in some legacy brands has led to neglect of the core business in favor of monetizing real estate assets.

• There is potential for AI and data analytics to revolutionize commercial real estate decision-making by quickly analyzing large amounts of data to provide valuable insights.

• Occupier is taking an end-to-end approach, also providing lease management and accounting software to give corporate tenants more control over their real estate portfolios.

About Your Host:

Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.

Episode Transcript:

0:00

Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate but don't know where to go? Series central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals. Whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level, cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www dot cre central.com. To learn more. Welcome back to the commercial real estate investor Podcast. Today we are going live with another commercial real estate tech sector with none other than the Nate Sawyer. Nate what's going on, man?

Speaker 1 0:58

Well, it's uh, I'm in. I'm in Pennsylvania, dying of this heat and humidity. That's what's up. It's terrible.

Tyler Cauble 1:04

You've gotten spoiled out west.

Speaker 1 1:06

I have been Yeah, I took three days on the motorcycle road out from South Dakota. Through standard thunderstorms, blistering heat, and then I get the turn right, right, right around and go back and it's gonna be even worse. The weather forecast is looking pretty miserable. But that's what I do for fun, so can't complain. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 1:26

good for you, man. I have not taken my motorcycle further than like, 10 minutes from my house. I won't ride on interstates. I'm like very, very, very. I don't know, I ride scared, which I think is a good way to ride a motorcycle really? Respect. Risk. Yes. Yeah. Well, that's that's the thing, right? It's because it's never gonna be you. It's gonna be somebody else. Well, look, we're not here to talk about motorcycles. As much as I would love to dive into my Indian Scout bobber, 60. And how much I love that thing. What do we got going on today?

Speaker 1 1:56

All right, well, we've got a great guest. I've talked with him in the past. And I think it's gonna be a really good show and perfect for this audience. We've got Matt Griffin, co founder of a company called occupier. And I'm gonna, you know, we're going to talk about Matt's background a little bit, we'll get into it. But you know, over 17 years experience covering multiple areas of commercial real estate, having been VP at JLL strategic sales at VTS all before starting company occupier. And of course, we're going to talk more about what that is lease administration and deal collaboration, you know, specifically focused on serving the needs of tenant rep brokers. So Matt, good to have you here, man.

Unknown Speaker 2:39

Thanks for having me, guys.

Tyler Cauble 2:40

Yeah, I'm excited to I'm excited to dive into this one, especially because I mean, do this reminds me of being a wee little broker, and going through site selection for tenants and all of the problems that we had dealing with that I mean, man it gets gets really unwieldy. So yeah, Matt, tell us tell us a little bit more about yourself. I mean, I know that was a brief background.

Speaker 2 3:03

Yeah. Thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate it. Nate, it's good to see you. Tyler, it's great to meet. Ya, I graduated from college with not a lot of like, career, like plan. But I thought real estate, in its just general kind of mode would be a good place that I could start. And I ended up taking my first job in commercial real estate at JLL as an analyst on a tenant rep team. So I basically was the spreadsheet junkie for all the brokers that were doing deals and putting the surveys and proposals together and running all the numbers on lease transactions for corporate tenants, basically office industrial lab, like you name it. So I learned the business kind of from the ground up from the numbers side of things. And then like, kind of like, you know, if you're good at that, you you move up and you become an actual broker, which I thought was just kind of like a easy transition. But it was actually kind of hard because you got to go find clients and you got to go convince people to hire you, right? You're a 23 year old dude who's just, you know, thinks you're smart. You think you know, everything, but then you're trying to convince these like seasoned CFOs to hire you to represent them on their office, like lease transaction. And that was like the hardest part of my transition into brokerage, which was, you know, how do I actually speak to executives and help them understand the value that I can bring to their business. And it probably took me at least three years to actually like, feel like I gained my footing in that world. And fast forward, I ended up spending about 10 years at JLL here in Boston, where I live where it's also 90 degrees and almost 100% humidity, but I'm sitting in my A air conditioned office which is comfortable. And through that tenure kind of experience, I did a lot I did a lot of landlord representation, I did a lot of tenant representation. I was specifically a suburban tenant rep and landlord rep broker in Greater Boston, which meant, my days were spent, like eating subs off the hood of my car out in the burbs, between touring spaces, showing spaces knocking on doors canvassing for tenant rep work. And, you know, that was an awesome learning experience. For me, it was just like, you know, you know, the market fundamentals, you know, the bricks and mortar of all these buildings, you get to meet a lot of cool people, and you get to really hone your sales chops. So I did that for a while. And then I also did a lot of corporate tenant representation work. So representing some multinational corporate entities with their, like global portfolio strategy and stuff like that. And then right around, call it like 2012 2013, I started to kind of get really interested in, like the prop tech space. And that was one, it was super nascent. And there weren't many companies that were building useful tools in those days. And I can speak from my experience at JLL is like, we had a ton of technology, but it just like, wasn't built from the user's perspective. It didn't solve the problems that the customer was actually facing. But there was just under this underlying, understanding that like, we need to, like, bring technology, like to our client relationships. But there was almost like this disconnect between the practitioners that were on the ground that were doing it. And the people in corporate who were like, Hey, we got to push technology. So I kind of saw this gap. And I was like this, this space is needs to evolve. And you kind of compare it to like stockbrokers and like the 1980s, right? They're just doing everything on paper, they're doing trades, and then all of a sudden, Bloomberg comes around, and all the data is accessible to everybody in the industry. Like, why isn't that happening in our business? Because brokers are in the information business, right? You are gatekeepers of data, not in a bad way. You just know all the information that people need. And so you hold this information, but it doesn't exist anywhere. It doesn't exist anywhere in a system, it doesn't exist anywhere on the internet. So what if somebody needs to know how much is a TL TI allowance in downtown Boston, they gotta go through you to find that information. For that's your client now. So the business was super old school. And not to say it hasn't changed, because I still think that brokers add a ton of value to the whole like, ecosystem. But there were companies that were emerging that were starting to kind of democratize this data, or at least create workflow tools that allowed the business to happen smoother. And one of the companies that I identified was a company called VTS and VTS at the time was called view the space. And Nick and Ryan were kind of visionary founders, Nick, and Ryan was a JLL broker, just like I was, Nick was on the asset management side in New York City. And they were kind of like, this whole idea of touring office space is so old school, why don't we modernize this thing. So they created a platform where you could just visually, digitally tour an office space, and share that with people. And so my co founder now, Andrew, became their first like, full time employee, while he was still at JLL. And those guys built this business up to a point where it actually had some really good traction. And they noticed throughout that press process, that it wasn't just the marketing space that was inefficient. It was the whole communication between the asset manager of the of the building, or the portfolio and the brokers that were communicating information with them, and the tenant. So they evolved into becoming a kind of full scale, like leasing pipeline and asset management software platform. And that's when I was just like, this is gotta this this has to work. And so through a couple of connections, I got introduced to Andrew, who's my co founder at my business now. And we had a couple of cups of coffee while he was up here in Boston from New York. And I think, you know, one conversation, he was like, why don't you just come work for us? Like, it sounds like you're like very interested in this space. And I was like, You know what, you're right. So I had a little bit of trepidation leaving my brokerage career that I've spent the last 10 years building and you're starting to make good money, but the startup world seems so enticing, because you're like, Oh, we work on cool stuff. There's a huge opportunity here. I get to work with cool people. I don't have to have a corporate boss like let's go do this. So I joined VTS. And then I spent almost five years there where we scaled it from, I don't know, series A to series D, you know, maybe a million in ARR of revenue all the way up to call it 30 to 40 When I left, so that was just an awesome experience. So my background is like I spent 10 years and commercial real estate, saw an opportunity in the tech side, I joined the right company, I could have made the wrong decision, right, I could have gone and joined a company that was solving the wrong problem. But they were solving the right problem. And it just felt right and that it took off. And they're still they're crushing it now. And then I'll kind of stop there. Because in about 2018, I decided to start my own thing. Well,

Speaker 1 10:42

I think it's actually like, this lays the foundation really well here. And it's something that in Prop tech is always a challenge of like, Who's the person starting the business like where which side of the business you coming from come to the tech side or the real estate side? Obviously, you You went deep into the trenches of like the end user experience really lived it as to what all the pains were, you talked about it even while you had the tech at JLL. Maybe it wasn't solving the problems that you were facing, and you were looking for. I want to kind of kind of take a little bit of a different turn here. And just like let's talk about the business today, you said it hasn't changed much. But obviously the last few years, there's been a little bit of turmoil in pretty much every business connected to real estate, whether you're transactional, whether you're your retail or office, you get an opportunity to see a lot of what's happening in the leasing space, you have a very unique perspective. So if you were delivering the State of the Union, if you will, of leasing commercial leasing in America here. What what would that address sound like?

Speaker 2 11:43

Yeah, well, first, I preface it by saying I'm not an economist, I'm not in research at CBRE JLL. So I don't have access to all of the data. I can see it from my perspective. But I think it's really fragmented into a bunch of different like micro markets, right? So take office, for example. Everyone wants to shit on Office as a category right now, just because of the results of the pandemic and how it's changed the way people have worked. But like, You got to divide that up into like different types of locations and cities and suburbs, or whatever. So, you know, if you go on the Wall Street Journal, or you look at all the headlines like there's this urban office doom loop that's happening, that might be true from like a general fundamental standpoint, I think there is kind of a lot less of a correlation between call it like economic growth in demand for office space today. And that's probably a result of people realizing that they can work from home now. And maybe they're only coming to the office two to three days a week. And therefore, companies don't need as much office space. But if you look at certain parts of the office market, specifically kind of class a really well located high amenity office space, those properties are still crushing it because the companies that know they need to have an office, they're trading up. So there's a flight to quality happening in specifically Class A, like Office markets. Those could be like, sub markets within cities. But by and large yet, like the fundamentals across the board for office space, are you know, struggling a little bit? Is it cyclical? Is this a, you know, life enduring change that we're going through? I don't know. But if I were a tenant rep broker right now, I would be focusing on the same stuff that I did back in the day, which is finding quality companies that are actually like, have a good commitment to like keeping an office, and they have an opportunity right now. It's it's the best buyers market ever for tenants. So they can lease better space for better fundamentals. If you look at the retail space, also, I'm not an expert on this, but we have a lot of retail customers, it seems it seems it's evolving and growing kind of at the same time, right? Like retail. Real estate has completely changed since I don't know 1520 years ago, where like, we had the big E commerce, like boom, where everybody thought retail real estate was going to die because everyone is going to only buy things on the internet. Well, that turned out not to be true, right? Great brands are making sure that they're finding their consumers in multiple channels, right. And brick and mortar is one of those things. You're seeing some stories where big legacy retailers are shuttering stores like the big drugstores or some of the big restaurant chains. Yeah, you know, over time. No more cheddar biscuits people. Yeah, Red Lobster. Yeah, exactly. But like I mean, okay, great, but that but that might not be like a real, like real estate, the real estate market not be there might not be the reason why that's happening. Right? It could be that there's other emerging retailers, other new restaurant concepts that are coming out. So I think that like the speed with which people can test out new concepts from like a restaurant standpoint and call it sorry, someone's FaceTiming me here, I'm going to decline that.

Speaker 1 15:29

Not to interrupt but like Domino's, I'll get, like, let's talk about Domino's for a minute, like Domino's was a national brand, very well known sponsor have major sporting events and totally tanked as a company for a short period of time until they reinvented themselves. It had nothing to do with their footprint had nothing to do with their distribution actually had a lot to do with the final product of people inside. So it's easy to kind of said like, it's easy to kind of pick on things like, oh, they don't need the box anymore to put things in, or it's all going on internet. Well, that that's partly true. But also, sometimes there's literally just a product that people want. Yeah. Yeah,

Tyler Cauble 16:06

I mean, I think the other thing that we have to keep in mind, too, is that when private equity gets involved, they tend to not care about things as much as the previous ownership dead, right? I mean, Red Lobster is a great example of private equity coming in bleeding, the brand dry, and then selling off the real estate. I mean, it was it seems to me like there was maybe it's my theory, maybe other people had that theory as well, it seems to me like that was a pretty obvious case for what a private equity firm was doing, because the real estate was valued at more than the company when they bought it. But I mean, yeah, I agree. I agree with everything that you were saying that I mean, when it comes to office space, I mean, it's weird to see people talking about the asset class as a whole across the entire United States. Right, because San Francisco and Nashville are two very different markets. You can't say that, you know, office is bad in both markets, just because it's horrific in San Francisco. And it's not as great as it was a few years ago in Nashville. Right? It's, I mean, it's interesting, I actually just joined another co working space as a member a couple weeks ago, and that's something that I thought I would have done, I own my own office, but I was like, You know what, this, this group called Switch yards came to town. And it's 100 bucks a month to be, you know, drop in any desk anywhere at any of their locations, like, the all of their locations are full, you know, which to me says, the way we work is just changing offices evolving, much like retail.

Speaker 2 17:29

Yeah, it's totally evolving. And I think cities are in developed, evolving your traditional CBD, which used to be the place where people went to work. So it had the lunch spots, it had the after work bars that had the dinner spots, and those were open Monday through Friday from, you know, lunchtime to like, you know, 9pm is totally different dynamic now, so, and because there's going to be a lot of vacant space cities are going to have to grapple with, okay, like, how do we get people back here? Do we convert office buildings to residential use? Do we make this more of a live work play environment? And that, like you said, varies city by city that don't, that already might exist in Nashville, or Phoenix or something like that, where, you know, people are used to the kind of like that suburban sprawl of like, Hey, I have my neighborhood center where I can get everything that I want. Well, let's create that. And like a Boston where it's like a traditional like financial district that was just built for like people that work in banks coming into the office and then leaving at the end of the day to go back to their suburbs. So the cities are struggling because they're not having as many people come in spending money, and then the values of these office properties have dropped precipitously. And that's not only because of the vacancy, but also because the interest rate environment that we're in right now doesn't allow developers to come in and like spend the money that they normally would so just needs to flush itself out. I don't know how long that's going to take. That could be a five 710 year process. But the cities have to react and they have to adapt to like this new dynamic. I can tell you, I live in the city and I come to work every day. So maybe I'm an anomaly. But not everybody. Does that, like people are working from anywhere? Yeah.

Speaker 1 19:18

Man, I want to I want to shift a little bit. And obviously I want to talk a little bit more on the tech side here, because it's one of the things that we focus on the show, like when we talk about what's happening, commercial real estate, but we'll also dive into the tech a little bit. Maybe you kind of alluded to some of the problems that 10 rep broker might have in the day to day and the lack of solutions that they're facing. Obviously, this is something you guys have been focused on building for. So maybe you could talk a bit about like today's environment, what are the common problems brokers are experiencing and how you guys are addressing those problems? leveraging the technology you've been building?

Speaker 2 19:51

Yeah, I think like you need to separate the problems that brokers are having from like the macro environment. And from like the actual job to do, and where we come in is more of the job to do. The amount of manual work that goes into compiling information, and communicating with your client as a broker is just, it's just way too high. And so that's when I kind of realized like this business is going to get disrupted when I don't use the word disruption in the sense of brokers are going to be deceased or not making as much money, but the way it's done is going to change. So I think that like, the perspective that we take it as how do we make your job easier, so that you could focus on the things that are like most money making to you from a broker perspective? So the things I'm talking about are prospecting, how do I track all the prospects? I'm talking to? How do I track all of these conversations? Not from like a CRM standpoint, but from an opportunity standpoint, like, Okay, I had this conversation with this company, and they have a lease expiring in three years, like, how do I make sure that I'm tracking that data, and I'm staying in front of those people properly? The deal cycle, when I actually get hired to represent a tenant, the first thing that they're going to ask me about is like, Okay, what spaces are available? How do I actually give them that information? Is it a two week, hey, I'll call you in two weeks, because it's gonna take me two weeks to put together a survey and pretty it up and put it in a format that I can email to you. And then we're going to iterate through that. And it's going to be a 40 email chain before we even go on a tour. That's just like, time wasted. And I think people tenants today think that they can just go on the internet and figure this out on their own, but they can't. But like, how can you get closer to that experience, as a tenant rep broker, in the way we've built it is that we've built a deal collaboration platform for tenants and tenant reps. So if you get hired by me, Mr. tenant, I'm going to deploy occupier on your behalf, you're going to have a single source of truth to see every transaction that we're working on, I'm going to put every update in there, all the data is going to be organized in a way that you can report it, you can pull it out, you can interact with maps, you can interact with site plans, you can interact with proposals, we're going to track everything in this one place, it sounds so like simple and obvious. But if you look at the actual workflow of a tenant rep broker, today, they're working out of their email inbox. And if they're working out of the email inbox, that means they're sending files back and forth, which means they're making these files of building these fact sheets, they're putting these surveys together on their own. And they should just be like, writing an address of a building, and then boom, it goes on a map, and it populates a spread a survey that the tenant could get notified and be like, hey, Matt's added another building your survey, and they could log in, they can look at that, and they can comment on it. And they can schedule a tour. And so like all of these things that are just like little micro steps of the life of a broker, and I'm sure maybe some of this stuff even rings true to people that might be viewing now, that could be residential brokers to like, they're further ahead of the innovation curve than commercial, commercial has always been a space where it's just like, hey, tenant, trust me, I got this, I'll get back to you. But like the tenants are demanding, like, I need to see this shit in real time. Or like, I don't even trust you anymore, I'm gonna go off and do it on my own. So the idea is like, especially for these tenant rep teams that have multimarket clients that are running a ton of transactions in different places, they want to be able to log in and be like, Where are all my deals at. So that was the first product we released, which was our deal tracker. And that allowed the tenant rep team and the client and all the people at the client to see everything, like one thing that I think has changed since I was back in the real estate days was way more people within the business need access to real estate information. It used to just be like the head of real estate, or the CFO, and they're making the decision. And everybody else was just like, hey, this is where our offices now it's like we want employees to care about it, we need like it, we need

Speaker 1 24:22

marketing, all kinds of up in arms about everything, you guys don't want us a part of anything.

Speaker 2 24:29

Now, everyone actually has a voice in this, which is great, but like that actually, like creates more access to the data. So like it's an open platform, and you can add as many people as you want into it. And, you know, it would be like logging, it would be like going to the bank to try to figure out what your bank balances. You know what I mean? Rather than logging into something and seeing Okay, here's my accounts is how much money I have. Like it should be that experience. Right? This is my real estate portfolio. I want to log into it. I want to know everything that's going run with it.

Tyler Cauble 25:00

And it's funny how that's how commercial real estate as a whole operates almost across the board to this day, right? I mean, I always say, you know, it's stuck in the 1980s. It's kind of wild that we're having this conversation, I had a team meeting with my brokerage earlier today, diving into this exact same problem, because I've got a couple of guys, I mean, we have, we have a CRM, and I noticed some guys haven't been logging into the CRM. I'm like, Guys, what are y'all doing? If you're not tracking all this stuff? Where is it? So we're just, you know, operating out of our inbox, my man, that is a horrible way to do it, everything's gonna get lost, something's gonna go to spam. You know, the nice thing about what you guys are doing is it creates transparency and accountability. Right? It's you're keeping an honest broker honest.

Speaker 2 25:44

Well, yeah, I mean, I've experienced that before. And, you know, half the office isn't using the CRM, but the other half is, all of a sudden, a bunch of questions have to be asked, Is there a reason why people aren't logging into the CRM? Is it because they're just boomers, and they're old? And they don't know how to use technology? I could understand that. But is it because they don't want people to know what they're working on? Because they don't, you know, trust the other people around them. So like, it like introduces this whole dynamic of like, how like businesses should be run. But it really takes a like, team or like a buy in to, like, get this stuff, right. Because if like, the way we sell our software is I wish I could tell you I could go to CBRE and JLL and Cushman and Wakefield and sell them this massive seven figure contract that's going to be like they're going to force everybody to use occupier. But that's not really how it works. How it works is these brokerages have teams in in markets that are their own businesses. So we target the people that are looking for a better way to do things. And you might get a five person team from a brokerage company that says, hey, we're buying into doing this in a transparent collaborative way. And, you know, that's just going to make our business better. So you see them start to crush it. Whereas if you leave it in the hands of like the corporate overlords of technology, they're always going to try to optimize for every little button and widget here and there, because they think that's what people want. Right? But at the end of the day, like someone who's going to adopt technology is somebody who is looking for the edge, basically.

Speaker 1 27:31

Yeah. Yeah. We got about just a few minutes here, but I wanted to give an opportunity of like, you know, obviously, it's changed a little bit since you've been, you're working as a broker in the trenches. Obviously, you guys are progressing, the industry moving, creating a platform that offers that transparency. I like what Tyler said, keeping an honest broker honest. What's the future cash look like? How are you guys thinking about building for the evolution? We talked about? Some, you know, there is growth, but there's also evolution in the space? How are you guys thinking about that? And how is that informing and shaping your product roadmap?

Speaker 2 28:08

Well, I mean, the the broker side of our platform is only like one thing that we do, we have three major kind of like pillars to our product. One is the deal tracking, which is the broker collaboration tool, we have a lease management software platform, which is essentially, here's my existing portfolio, how do I glean insights out of this or just more kind of day to day, how do I report to my CFO on how much money I'm spending on my portfolio. And then we also have a lease accounting module, which allows the CFOs office to close the books in accordance with the lease accounting standards that have changed over the last couple of years. So we have an end to end lease lifecycle management platform, which allows a corporate tenant or retail tenant medical Tennant, anybody to just like, basically have full control over their real estate portfolio, whereas a lot of times, they're outsourcing a lot of this work. So we can help a lot of these companies a save money on all that outsourcing work. And be like gain efficiencies and all these processes that they do so that their employees that they pay good money to, can be freed up to, like do actually value at work, where I see it going is, you know, making it even easier and smoother. And I don't want to sound like everybody else on the internet right now. But like AI is eventually going to come for this industry. It's going to create a place where these mass amounts of data, you can talk to it and ask questions. So we're already in the process of testing a lot of these things out and like building some of these things where I might be the head of global real estate for ABC company that has hundreds of locations around the world. And I'm asking the same questions you're asking me like what is the market doing? Should I have this much office space? What are my employees doing? If you could talk to all these datasets? And ask it a question, and actually come out with an analysis that gives you an answer in a couple of minutes, which normally would have taken maybe like a McKinsey consultant to come in, and try to tell you what to do, or somebody from CBRE or J LLS, like workplace dynamics group to tell you, Hey, this is what you need to do over the next five years in our portfolio. What if I could figure that out in a couple of minutes if I had all the data, or I had large language models that were pulling data from other places, too. So you know, maybe commercial real estate isn't the first industry that's going to adopt AI as its like, main way of doing things, but it's going to happen because there's just so much. There's just so much data that people need to pour over to like, make decisions.

Speaker 1 30:53

We got this close to almost getting through the conversation without AI but I think it's unnecessary. It's all good.

Tyler Cauble 31:04

Awesome. Well, Matt, thanks so much for joining us, man. That was an incredible conversation for those y'all that are listening that want to learn more about occupier they somehow managed to get the domain name go to occupier.com. Matt, is there anywhere else that people should follow you guys on?

Speaker 2 31:19

Yeah, you could check out our Instagram page. You can find me at Matra foon. On LinkedIn. We have a Twitter handle, which is occupier HQ. And I actually host a podcast called The fully occupied show which you guys should come on Sunday. You could check that out on Spotify, Apple podcasts wherever you find your podcasts.

Tyler Cauble 31:39

Yeah, we'd love to make it happen. Nate, thanks for setting this up. Man. As always, appreciate you guys being here. And we'll see y'all in the next one. Cheers, guys. Are you looking to take the next step toward investing in commercial real estate but don't know where to go? Series central offers a comprehensive education and coaching platform designed to help you get started. Our online courses cover a wide range of topics from the fundamentals to advanced strategies, ensuring you have the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in this competitive industry. As a member, you'll gain access to our exclusive online community and monthly group coaching calls, providing you with valuable networking opportunities and personalized guidance from experienced professionals. Whether you're a beginner or looking to take your career to the next level. Cre Central has the resources you need. Visit www.cre central.com To learn more