Who is Provada for?

The real estate industry hasn't met its customer yet.

Next week the Dutch real estate industry walks onto its own floor. Provada. Three days at the RAI in Amsterdam, every player in the country, half of Europe in the corridors. At Stand 12.26 I'll be there with Liven World. And in the weeks leading up to it I keep coming back to the same thought.

Real estate in 2030 is going to look like retail in 2015. The industries are not the same. But the patterns are, the blind spots are, and so are the consequences.

Fourteen years ago I was twenty-five and responsible for customer experience at Jumbo. I remember exactly what "customer experience" meant inside a Dutch supermarket chain in 2012. It meant we did one customer satisfaction check per year. That check was sacred. The score it produced was the score we lived by. And separately, almost reluctantly, there was a customer service department. Everyone inside the company knew it was really the complaint department. Two systems, both managed at arm's length from the actual operation. Both designed to manage the customer's voice rather than to listen to it.

That is precisely how the largest residential property owners in this country check whether their residents are happy today. Once a year. A satisfaction survey lands in the inbox. A 7.3 comes back. The score gets reported up. We are proud of it. And meanwhile, the property manager is a complaints function. The place residents turn when something breaks. The place that exists to absorb friction rather than understand its source.

The parallels keep extending.

In supermarket land in 2012 the conversation of the day was the price war. Whoever undercut whom by half a cent on the rotisserie chicken made the front page of the trade journals. Today in real estate the equivalent is Paris Proof. Important, real, binding. And the topic that absorbs almost all the strategic conversation in the industry, just as the price war did in mine. Both real. Neither the actual problem.

Digitalization in retail in 2012 was painfully slow, and worse, it was mostly about digitalizing the existing, frequently questionable process. Without ever talking to the user about whether the process was worth digitalizing in the first place. We built CRM systems that asked the same wrong questions, faster. We installed beacons that were going to be the light of the next decade. None of it was. Today the equivalent conversation is PropTech. It is a category that includes some genuinely good work and a lot of digitalizing the wrong things faster. The average social housing apartment still has a paper information box on the wall and a WhatsApp group where residents share complaints and information leaks out into nothing. We are buying property management software and ignoring that the residents have no system at all.

ESG and CSR have, technically, an S in them. We do not touch that S. When the conversation turns to the resident, to the user, to the lived experience of the people the building is being built for, we look away. The plinth, the place where the building meets the city and the people who live in it, remains a strangely abstract topic that we collectively find exciting precisely because we keep it abstract.

So. What did retail learn?

The companies that didn't put the customer central disappeared. That is not a slogan. Ask V&D. It is gone. Ask the owners who tried to keep Blokker upright through the last decade. That is the empirical record. The retailers and hospitality groups that survived the last decade did so by reinventing themselves around the user, often radically. The major hotel groups are going asset-light, with service as the business model. They figured out that owning the building wasn't the moat. Running the experience inside it was.

When I was a store manager at Suitsupply during my studies, I received an email every morning at seven. Yesterday's customer feedback. By name, by interaction, by store. I could act on it that day. A good hotel will have customer feedback in its operating dashboard within a week. In real estate, that feedback loop barely exists. The cost of that absence for the resident, and slowly but predictably for the operator's portfolio, is genuinely difficult to overstate.

The crisis that's coming will not show up outside the home. It will show up inside it. The numbers on loneliness, depression, sleep, on the slow withdrawal of older neighbours from their own buildings, are already loud enough to read clearly if you want to. The home is the device we use most. We have not bothered to ask anyone how it actually works.

I have paid rent for eight years to the largest housing owner in my city. I do not exist to them. No one has ever asked me how it's going. No one has ever asked me what's broken. Property managers control rather than coach. The relationship is unidirectional and one-purpose: the rent leaves my account, the building stays standing, and the relationship is what we both pretend it isn't.

I'm not interested in further empty terms. Hybrid hospitality is the latest. An empty shell wrapped around an old office or student building, with an app that doesn't work and a logo that shouts to be believed. And suddenly we are a category that the whole industry is supposed to look up to. Concepts are not the issue. Concepts we have in abundance. An empty building with a logo and a vision is not worth a category. What we need are systems built for the user. So you can go to work and feel understood. So you live somewhere and you get helped.

It is not, in the end, very complicated.

Three years ago, after a decade working with global hotel brands on the experience their guests have, I made the move into real estate. Not because of the strategy decks or the press releases. Because the home is the largest device we live inside and the one where we spend the most time. If we actually want to take on the S in CSR and ESG, the place to start is the dialogue with the resident. Understanding the person you're doing it for is the foundation of everything else.

The most useful analogy I know is with real life. The people you care about, you ask them, with some regularity, how they're doing. And you use what they say to make things better, to be better yourself. That isn't a methodology. That's a relationship. And the absence of that relationship in residential real estate, at scale, is the gap we need to close.

The people now making the decisions in this industry will, in ten years, be retired in southern Spain. The generation that follows is Generation Alpha, currently thirteen. About to enter the housing market. They will not call four times to get a boiler fixed. They will need help, and they will not tolerate not being heard.

The radical reinvention that saved the retailers and the hospitality groups is sitting available to whoever in real estate moves first.

Next week at Provada I'll be at Stand 12.26 with Liven World. 9, 10 and 11 June. On 9 June at 11:00 we're at the table with Altuïtion on exactly this. Come find me.

In 2030 you don't want to be re-reading this as a warning.