Kylie Davis

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Kylie Davis

Welcome to the Proptech podcast. It's Kylie Davis here and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology, real estate, property ownership, design and construction all collide. It's so great to have you here and to share stories with you of innovation, opportunity and challenges. The aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a proptech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible across how we design, build, buy, sell, rent and invest in property and all of the associated behaviors and activities around that. And there's a lot now, none of this would be possible without our sponsors.

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So a very big shout out to Hid digital identification and building access solutions easypay making collecting payments easy for proptex dynamic methods, the innovators behind forms live, REI forms live, and Realworks direct connect making moving easy and the Proptech association of Australia thank you for your support of the podcast.

Kylie Davis

So buckle up for a niche, but super fascinating proptech in this episode with my guest Sean Lucas from Ascensus Asensus deliver end to end solutions for digital access for flex spaces including connectivity, access control and network infrastructure. Now that sounds simple, but you know what they say, simple at the front means a lot of complication out the back. And the nature of shared office space with all the different types of computers and systems plugging in exponentially increases that complication. And with hybrid working changing so many of our office spaces today and flexible working space growing by a huge 30% globally, the services that ascensis offer are in strong demand from commercial office owners.

Sean Lucas

So here to tell us all about.

Kylie Davis

It, Sean Lucas, welcome to the Proctech podcast.

Sean Lucas

Thank you Carly. Thank you very much for having me. Great to be on the podcast.

Kylie Davis

Now for our listeners out there, Sean and I have been trying to get together to do this interview for a couple of months now, but both people being sick and travel and all of that, this is about our fifth attempt to finally catch up so great to finally have you on the show. I'm really looking forward to hearing about census. I know it's a little bit of a niche kind of space, but I think there's lots to unpack. So first question is always the hardest. Sean, what is the elevator pitch for census?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, sure thing. So, census, we support landlords and leading flexible workspace operators to efficiently control and manage their digital services across flex spaces, but also their broader portfolios. And really, that's all in an effort to enable seamless occupier experiences and drive some operational efficiencies.

Kylie Davis

Okay, fantastic. And well done. Nice shot, nice shot. Elevate pitch. So I just want to get really clear. So this is a commercial prop tech. You're a commercial prop tech, right?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, correct. Yeah, primarily commercial real estate within that as well. Sort of flexible real estate or flexible workspaces as part of that space.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so help me understand the flexible workspace industry or the shape and size of that. How big is that in Australia, and what are some of the issues that the industry is facing?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, sure. It's a very sort of pertinent question given the current machinations in the industry.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

But give or take, you could say sort of global penetration of flex used in its broadest sort of terms. So I think JLL put out a statistic around three years ago now, that flexible workspace would rise to about 30% of all commercial real estate by 2030. And at the time, it was sort of about two or 3%. So it's quite a huge in front of it.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

But you'd say across Australia, blended, there'd probably be around that three to 5% of total commercial real estate, again, depending on how you define it. But in some of the more mature markets globally, such as London, where asensus is headquartered, for instance, that's up around sort of 9% to 10% of the total market already. So I think years ago, 30% was seen as quite a bullish forecast by JLL. But I think given where we're at and sort of where things are moving towards, I dare say that's probably bang on, maybe even a little bit sort of undercooked a little bit.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so I'm going to extrapolate some numbers here, because we know the commercial asset class in Australia is about a trillion dollar asset class. So basically, flex workspace or flex commercial is what, about 300? But my math is terrible.

Sean Lucas

Three to 500 million.

Kylie Davis

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

Sean Lucas

It's interesting, right? Because globally, you've really got two different cohorts, and that's the types of clients that we support at a census. You've got the landlords and their broader portfolios and then the flex workspace operators. And so that's evolved really significantly over the last couple of decades. So with the rise of weWork, I think, in particular. But prior to that, you had serve Corp, which is an australian based serviced office company, and IWG and the like. So that evolution. So you had that real hypergrowth phase post GFC all the way up and through until Covid. And I think we're really hitting this sort of second phase of the industry whereby landlords and operators, either in combination or sort of working fairly collaboratively, are going to drive that next adoption rate moving forward.

Kylie Davis

Because this is really tied into, isn't it, to that kind of post Covid working life, right? So like that whole idea of going into the office, sitting in traffic for 45 minutes, sitting at a cubicle and then going to maybe a meeting, that's not really doing it for knowledge workers any longer, is it? And that's why sort of flexible space is becoming post Covid so important as part of the office mix.

Sean Lucas

Definitely. And I think that exact intersection between flexibility technology and what the end user demands look like is exactly where we sort of look to support our clients. And those trends are already happening pre Covid. But the acceleration post Covid is really quite incredible. That exact end user journey. Right, of when do I need to go into the office? For what purpose? And how does that sort of mix eventuate throughout any given work week for knowledge workers is really putting the accelerator on the flexible workspace industry.

Kylie Davis

Sure. So let's dive down into exactly what census does tell us. Sort of give us a user case or give us a story about that.

Sean Lucas

Yeah, definitely. So we're both a technology and a software provider, and what we really deliver to our end clients, Kylie, is a number of different products, but our software is purpose built to manage exactly what we've just discussed there. Sort of anything from across a portfolio, multi tenanted spaces, flexible spaces, amenity space through an entire asset and seamlessly enable those end user journeys. So onboarding the tenants and provisioning them digital services as they enter into the building and then obviously at scale, that becomes quite complex and you want to ensure there's those digital experiences. I think one of your previous episodes you mentioned sort of that either losing.

Kylie Davis

Your key card or entering in the HID guys HID.

Sean Lucas

They're not able to find sort of the network access or any of those just pain points, right? It's just really removing the friction from that day to day experience for the end users and how we facilitate that. So we've got the purpose built software that both operators and landlords and building managers are using, and then we've got a private cloud infrastructure that we power globally. And so that's really allowing our clients to plug into that infrastructure and create smarter buildings and smarter spaces.

Kylie Davis

Okay, fantastic. Why does flexible working spaces need a specific tech solution? What do you guys do that is different to like a standard facilities management or property management for commercial real estate?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, sure. It's really, again, there's just those changing patterns into what the sort of tenant and user expectations are. So I think you said in years gone by, right. It was a blank box, gray box on a ten or twelve or 15 year lease commitment. And the tenants were really expected to sort of engage with their preferred providers in a fairly sort of complex ecosystem, fit out the space, get the technology ready for that space, and then manage all of that in house. So that completely decouples from a more flexible environment where you can take the space on demand. Right, on a matter of hours or days purpose shorter term commitments for some of these medium sized and larger sized corporate users as well.

Sean Lucas

And so it's really managing the complexity and the velocity of then those tenants and how you sort of provision those services. So again, everything was sort of long term, fairly fixed annuity in the good.

Kylie Davis

Old days in stone, nice long lead times to actually need to do anything.

Sean Lucas

We'll do the fit out over a nice four, five, six month period, not sort of stand the stuff matter of weeks. And that changing dynamic is just adding complexity. And I think there's so many parallels across other industries to draw.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

It's sort of that driving force that is more b to c and end user demand driven is really sort of accelerating those changes. And in an industry that oftentimes, again, sort of pines for long term security and very fixed process and way of doing things, it and these digital services really sort of start to become quite complex to manage.

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned before that your clients are landlords and then also tenants that are using the system or like the short term.

Sean Lucas

Yeah, both landlords. It's really sort of the supplier side of the industry, I guess. So our clients, end clients are tenants and the end users within these spaces. But our main clientele are really large scale landlords with sort of quite large portfolios and then flexible workspace operators. Similarly, with sort of quite a large either number of locations or quite large sort offerings within a particular asset.

Kylie Davis

Right. And so those flexible operators, they're using the system to manage their tenants because they've got lots of tenants sort of coming and going for short periods or booking spaces and things like that.

Sean Lucas

Exactly right. And with all fairly ever changing and sort of fairly demanding it requirements as well. Right. The cake and the ability to eat it hasn't gone anywhere. It's just sort of shifting that onus back onto our clients. As far as the end users, the tenants that need these services provisioned, again, they probably still do it themselves as far as the corporate and the larger enterprise users. But there's an expectation that everything just works seamlessly, highly secure, it's all enterprise grade. And so that starts to sort of again become a fairly large, complex landscape to manage. Definitely at scale as well.

Kylie Davis

Okay, so your system is pulling in different services that landlords or the flexible operators are telling you they want to offer or do you build them natively? Just give me a better understanding of that.

Sean Lucas

Yeah, sure, that's a really good question. So the digital services can be built bespokely on behalf of our end clients. And so I think everything basically that a modern office environment needs to sort of work efficiently in. Right, so all of your digital services, your connectivity, your access, having that unified. So again, there's very little friction in anyone's day to day experience. And so I guess in an ideal world, whether it's your home office or you're visiting someone interstate, you enter into a space you don't have, as you mentioned, that sort of I've forgot something or I don't know what my credentials are, or I need to get someone give me access into the space.

Sean Lucas

So, right, starting at the very entry of the building, right, and then working your way into a given office space or a meeting room, the ability to seamlessly and securely connect into aa network, not have that, is there a postit note with sort of password one, two, three scribbled down on it somewhere? A very long complex network naming convention to try to enter into. And then from there you can get, you can go really quite technical and granular, but lots of different things about how we then support our clients to manage really the security and the resilience and uptime of those digital services. So nothing worse. I like to say that if you're on a level 20 or 21 of a building in the CBD and the ac goes out, you probably take your jacket off and continue on.

Sean Lucas

If the lifts conked out, you'd be annoyed, but you'd take the fire stairs at the end of the day, where if the Internet's gone, I think you probably do maybe 20 minutes on a team's call, tethering off your phone and then you're out for the day. Right. It is now really sort of part and parcel, which is, as plenty of Australians experienced two weeks ago, with one of the major telcos modern day amenity that we can't live without. Right. So that's really sort of where we can step in and help our clients deliver something super powerful and resilient.

Kylie Davis

Okay, fantastic. So I want to just understand too, are you a resident experience? Like are you pulling in other residential experiences or are you just handling that tech side?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, primarily tech and sort of digital infrastructure within a given space. And then we work with, so we offer our clients sort of white labeled app and booking and access control and the likes, but we can also work, I guess, to your point, we can work with that broader ecosystem of say the building app and sort of whatever else might be in a fairly complex tech stack. We can work with those other vendors to deliver something again that the end user doesn't know who's at the back, sort of pulling.

Kylie Davis

How amazing is pulling all the strings?

Sean Lucas

When I walk into a building, I don't walk and first thing I say is, how resilient is your infrastructure? I just sort of want to get in and start working. Right. So yeah, we can work with a variety of those partners to deliver.

Kylie Davis

Fantastic. What's your business model, Sean? Are you subscription based or do you consulting or what's the model around that?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, so the platform itself is a SaaS based model. So monthly subscription, which includes sort of everything we've discussed, and we've got two sort of core separate service offerings. So there's the ascensus platform and then the Asensus cloud, which is that highly resilient and secure cloud infrastructure that our clients can again plug into and take advantage of. So subscription model over sort of whatever term defined. And then we also can support with sort of activating the spaces right down to the actual install and testing of the network hardware for a greenfield site, for instance, we'll go in and if there's five floors that you need to sort offer connectivity to, or a couple of spec suites which you'd like to turn into fully plug and play options, we can go in and support on that as well.

Kylie Davis

So just so that I'm clear on what that means, so if I'm a flexible office operator and I've got an office in the office that I'm subletting out of, like, renting out the office. Are you saying that business inside that second space would have its own.

Sean Lucas

Yeah. Well, we'll do it. All right. The two primary use cases, you'd have a landlord, say, cutting up a floor into four spec suites. We offer a unified digital solution and have our offering across all of those spaces. So the tenant literally walks in and signs day one works day two. And for the flex operator, it's two or three or four floors, depending on the scale of the location. And we offer that across the entire space, including the shared amenities, the meeting rooms, the lounges. So then again, users can come in, speak about or request what they need from a digital services standpoint, and a couple of clicks of a button that's all automated at the back end, and they can start working straight away.

Kylie Davis

Fantastic. Because I guess the last couple of weeks with the outage bioptis really has shown how important this stuff is. When it doesn't work, nothing works.

Sean Lucas

Your small business that your POS is out of action or. Sorry, could you just hear my dog barking?

Kylie Davis

That's all right. It's a dog friendly podcast.

Sean Lucas

I'll start over. Yeah, exactly right. I think if you're a small retail business where your point of sale was out of action for that period, or very large scale corporates, right, that didn't have sufficient redundancy and resiliency built in, and that stuff is catastrophic, right? Even if it only lasts for a day, it truly is just so unbelievably important in the world we live in now. So that, again, is the way we help our clients deploy the infrastructure. We've got sort of every layer down that you go. We've got dual redundancy and resiliency from a data center level to dual circuits to sort of 24/7 monitoring and sort of lots of orchestration automation at the back end.

Sean Lucas

It's all to just make sure someone having a bad day somewhere doesn't accidentally hit one button instead of another, and the whole world collapses in on itself. Right?

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Kylie Davis

So tell me how you got involved. Like tell me the origin story of a census, Sean, and how did you get involved?

Sean Lucas

Yeah, so I've been with the census now for two years. Company is coming up, I think it's 17 years this year. So our founder Mark Finesse and the co founders founded in London 2007 and started off again sort of really organically looking to meet the needs of, at the time, serviced office operators.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

And it's just probably the most fortunate timing, I guess. Like lots of tech startups, it was in that era that industry was evolving very rapidly into something sort of far more appealing, I guess, to a broader audience as it took that shift from serviced office or sort of corporate offices into co working. And wework definitely helped accelerate that trend. And now we're across multiple regions here in APAC. We've got an office based here in Sydney with a regional office in New York and Paris, and our headquarters still remain in you.

Kylie Davis

And what made you get involved? What's your background?

Sean Lucas

Sure. So I'm definitely not a technologist by trade.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

I'm not sure if I've made that abundantly clear on this podcast or not.

Kylie Davis

That's okay. Many of us aren't. The industry needs all sorts to work, more the merrier.

Sean Lucas

So I joined the census, as I said, two years ago, and previous to that I only joined the commercial real estate industry in late 2017. And so I worked for a large global workspace operator in IWG and then I worked for Knight Frank on the sort of consultancy side for a brief period as well. And it's one of those interesting things, I think I'd always sort of had an interest, I guess, in sort of technology and the software industry as a whole, but was never really prepared to make that leap into something that was so far out of my realm of understanding.

Kylie Davis

Right.

Sean Lucas

So it sort of neatly converged, I guess, in a certain sense, of what Ascensus offered, what I think the industry is sort of increasingly going to need to be supported on as far as technology solutions. And then my background as far as the sort of flex side of the industry is concerned.

Kylie Davis

Cool.

Kylie Davis

And so what do you love about it the most? What have been the biggest challenges for you?

Sean Lucas

Well, it's just been just such an interesting. So putting all the macro aside, it's just such a fascinating time in the industry. You've got all of these key themes really converging simultaneously. And I think where the industry is at the moment is there's plenty of great solutions out there. I think, again, the large swath of sort of institutional owners in particular have always wanted to support their tenants, but it's never had to go to that extra sort of level as far as the service orientation, getting right down to that end user experience and the provisioning of those services that we've talked about right. It's sort of, you make the space amazing. You build a great $1 billion premium, great asset. You have sort of the best, or you reposition an old asset.

Sean Lucas

But then again, a lot of that responsibility was left for the tenant and the tenant's sort of team and for them to sort of manage some of this stuff themselves. So I think it's just such a great time to be part of that sort of intersection between real estate and technology. And again, prior to joining the industry, I was in logistics and I saw a lot of those trends as well. Right. I think everyone, when Amazon came along, sort of way back when everyone went, oh, this is interesting. And then sure enough, within a five to seven year period, they just completely reshaped that landscape. And I think really that's what sort of the industry as far as commercial real estate, is going through a similar sort of metamorphosis.

Kylie Davis

Yeah. Because in the last five years we have really seen like, as a landlord, your obligation was to provide to make sure that the building had connection to, I guess, power, water. They were the two essential services. But now we've gone from this idea that Internet is or access and digital security services are utility. Yeah, that's a utility and it's an essential service.

Sean Lucas

Right.

Kylie Davis

We saw that last week with Optus. It is absolutely critical to functioning. That's really interesting question for you. The whole thing around WeWork, has that impacted you guys at all or how has that affected the space that you're in?

Sean Lucas

Yeah. So it has impacted sort of us and the broader industry, I guess, in the sense that it sort of, again, probably accelerated some of those conversations whereby landlords, particularly in regions where there was a huge amount of Wework locations, right. Oftentimes in quite sort of dense core CBD geographies. So full transparency here. WeWork isn't an existing client of ours, but what I think, and they were incredible for the industry. I joined at a time where really that hyper acceleration, not just of WeWork and their sort of marketing genius was delivering, but it sort of lifted all boats with that tide. Right.

Sean Lucas

And I'm pretty adamant, I hold the opinion that if not for WeWork or someone else that would have come along to sort of deliver that disruption, that there probably wouldn't have been the necessary sort of step change in, I think, the broader industry that was required. I almost sort of draw the parallel between Tesla, right, it's sort of the current oems, but for Tesla coming along and saying, okay, we're going to deliver evs in 2008 and Ford and GM and Toyota sort of went, oh yeah, sure, good luck with that. We'll see how you go. And then suddenly we're here, right, where suddenly there's a bit of a scramble to get on board the electric vehicle transition. So that's all to say, I think that they were amazing for the industry.

Sean Lucas

They helped educate lots of the demand side, so lots of corporate and enterprise users suddenly started incorporating that into their broader portfolios. Right, what's happened now in the last, sort of call it six months, I guess, since some of the liquidity and sort of bankruptcy concerns have entered into the picture has meant that landlords are taking a keener interest and sort of more responsibility now. They can do that themselves. Plenty of landlords globally now have very strong and operationally efficient flex offerings themselves that they run and manage and sort of deploy across their assets, or they can do that in partnership. So plenty of our clients are coming into spaces, for instance, and taking over either an empire or a portion of any weworks that might have been handed back.