NAS Invest + Primefold XI/RI

The Challenge

Nobody calls to say the building is fine.

NAS Invest manages seven commercial assets with Primefold XI&RI, among them the largest office tower in Eschborn and a Frankfurt headquarters building. Commercial leases run ten years with a five-year option, and the option is the tenant's alone to take, so the relationships worth the most are settled by people an asset manager rarely speaks to. Meanwhile the phone only rings when a lift is out or the air conditioning has failed. The picture they held of their tenants was assembled entirely from things that had gone wrong.

The one survey Ammar had run before this went through an agency, years earlier, and it was "a huge pain". This time he designed it himself. The only outside party was a print shop, because a premium office tower is not somewhere you tape up a paper sign.

Managing a building is supposed to mean knowing what it is like to work in it. For a team whose only channel was the complaint, that knowledge stopped at whatever had already gone wrong.

The Solution

The first answers rolled in before he got back to his desk.

The survey went up as stickers inside the lifts, set so the sticker is what you look at once the doors close, and went out by email at the same time. One tower runs in German, the other in English, because the tenants differ. NAS ran a prize draw to increase response rates. By the time Ammar had walked back from the first tower, the answers had already started rolling in in real-time. In three weeks, 150 of roughly 600 people in the building had taken part, with high completion rates. The free-text answers ran ten to twenty lines.

One straight line from a tenant answer to a work order.

Surveys run quarterly. The answers land in SharePoint, where Real Estate Intelligence reads them where they sit. Every finding keeps the evidence behind it, so a line in a report traces back to the person who wrote it. Findings split in two: pain points like lifts, cooling and the canteen, which the team usually knows about already and which take time, and quick fixes nobody would ever write an email about. Results then go back out to tenants by newsletter, naming what was fixed and what is still open. Because the same survey repeats every quarter, an asset can be compared against itself over time and against the other six, so portfolio performance and tenant sentiment sit in one place instead of seven.

Hear it directly from NAS Invest.
Ammar Tahirovic on what changed once the tenants could answer.

What surprised NAS

Three things the complaints never said.