‘Inbuilt flexibility is the key to meeting the demands of future tenants’

Rikke Lykke, Senior Managing Director, European Head of Asset Management at PATRIZIA AG

People in the real estate industry need to think differently and be up to speed with technological changes and innovation, Rikke Lykke, Senior Managing Director, European Head of Asset Management at PATRIZIA AG, tells the Real Asset Day.

‘When we built residential assets five years ago we were aware of connectivity being important, but now it’s become the ultimate thing,’ she said. ‘It’s what people are looking at when they move out of their parents’ home’.

Buildings need to be flexible to accommodate future changes. 

‘In our developments we now need to make sure that whatever infrastructure we have it is easily replaceable with something else,’ Lykke said. ‘There are so many things going on that we need to be aware of, for example think of Li-Fi, a wireless communication technology which uses light instead of waves to transmit data. So our asset need to be easily adaptable to whatever the future will bring’. 

The nature of the job has changed and now it is the asset that has to fit the tenant and not the other way round.

‘As an industry we need to start thinking differently,’ she said. ‘In the past we basically had an asset, we needed to find some tenants and then we needed to sort of match that and make sure that the tenant would fit the asset as well as possible’. 

There was a need to think about fit-outs and renovations and refurbishment and everything else, but now ‘we need to understand our tenants and what they want first, and the asset comes second’. 

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