PremiseHQ: Bespoke Solutions for Real Estate Management

PremiseHQ

Rafi Dowla, Founder & CEO, PremiseHQRafi Dowla, Founder & CEO
From Smart City and the Sharing Economy to Co-working and E-Commerce, the commercial real estate (CRE) industry is undergoing a dynamic transformation owing to digitalization. At the forefront of this transformation are PropTech companies that envision maximizing efficiency while minimizing the costs and resources required to perform various transactions in the real estate market. In addition to the use of most advanced technology such as AR and VR, PropTech companies are experimenting with blockchain, chatbots, and AI in an attempt to make real estate operations and portfolio management more efficient. One such firm, PremiseHQ—an Ontario-based SaaS company — goes beyond Proptech to digitize commercial real estate firms, not just their building operations.

Founded by Rafi Dowla—a serial entrepreneur with 15 years of international experience in innovation, technology, and cloud strategy—PremiseHQ is on a mission to enable CRE firms realize their broader digital transformations without the multi-million dollar price tag and multi-year lag in realizing ROI. As the CEO of the company, Dowla shares his valuable insights with CIO Applications about his company’s technology and the vision to empower CRE firms capitalize on data driven decision making.

Please give us a quick overview of your company?

PremiseHQ empowers real estate owners, managers, and vendors to digitize and connect with each other. We understand that the key to managing real estate successfully is to provide agility, adaptability, and insight. For that reason, PremiseHQ offers a cloud-based SaaS platform that is designed to unlock the value inherent in collaboration between these unique stakeholders. The software is customizable for any and all business processes in the real estate.

What are some of the trends and challenges that you see in the PropTech space how does PremiseHQ address the same?

Industries all over the world are experiencing a massive sea change; commercial real estate is no exception. As data drives this dynamic change, it is essential to manage and utilize it efficiently. However, siloed data structures prevent organizations from maximizing efficiency. Solutions available in the market today fail to address this challenge.

For instance, many CRE’s employ large networks of vendors to manage occupancy, operations, and maintenance (HVAC, Cleaning, Security, etc.). As such, even if the CRE were to digitize 100 percent of their operations, a lion’s share of the data would be unavailable to them due to their outsourcing of these operations. Additionally, the Premise platform acts as the connective tissue between the current CRM and ERP systems deployed by these CRE’s, eliminating the need to replace these current systems and introduce added complexity and cost.

We understand that the key to managing real estate successfully is to provide agility, adaptability, and insight


For the most part, these 3rd party vendors are not digitized and, therefore, do not collect any of the data they generate in the normal course of business. The Premise platform and microservices enable the CRE’s access to this data by digitizing the vendors themselves. Not only is this necessary for the CRE’s to fully realize the power of data driven decision making but, this is also a distribution strategy for Premise. We are seeing our CRE clients push the potential of our platform to their vendors as somewhat of a requirement for engagement.

What are some of the benefits that your solutions offer?

At Premise, we enable our customers to execute a ‘barbell’ strategy. By providing short term ROI and optimization through our microservices we keep the long-term goal of digital transformation directly in our sights. We group our microservices into three buckets: Leasing, Operations and Administrative.

A few examples of these would be:

• Leasing – Our Lease Abstractor can extract unstructured data from leases and populate a database with cleansed data. This data can then be used to populate other forms, optimize operations and for compliance purposes.

• Operations – Our Work Order microservice can be tied into any CRE’s IoT environment and can automatically generate work orders according to sensor data ie. Leak detection.

• Administrative – Our tenant Certificate of Insurance microservice powers one employee to do the work of 6 or 7 when tasked with ensuring that CRE tenant’s insurance policies carry the appropriate coverage and are up to date.

Again, the PremiseHQ platform fills the current gaps that exist in data gathering, optimizes building operations and serves as the connective tissue between all current ERP and CRM systems.

Could you please cite a case study on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes with your solutions?

One of our CRE clients, who is digitizing their operations with PremiseHQ, is well on their way to deploy an IoT net in their flagship properties in downtown Toronto. This client already employs a number of software systems that monitor and control this buildings’ operations. Their idea was to tie these disparate systems together using Premise, deploy an IoT net and create a seamless communications network that can automate tenant and building operator interaction.

For the purposes of a pilot, we connected to their software that controls monitors their water systems. Using our platform, we were able to assign a sensor to a particular wet room (washroom in this case) and simulate a water leak. Through our AI powered chat bot, Premise notified the tenant of the issue and that measure were being taken to remedy the issue. The system then created a work order using or Work Order microservice and notified building operations via the AI to the leak. Building operations staff were able to respond to the alert, fix the issue and complete the work order without leaving the platform. Once the work order was marked completed, the tenant was notified that the leak was fixed and operations were normalized.

PremiseHQ is powering the drive towards truly Smart Buildings, including operational automation and unparalleled tenant experience.

What makes PremiseHQ different from the rest?

PremiseHQ has a combined experience of 15 years in the industry and over 30 years combined experience in building tech companies. The biggest game-changer we bring to the commercial real estate industry is our patent pending technology. Our technology allows users to automatically create relationships between disparate systems, assets and data siloes without the need for additional coding.

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