Jamestown’s Approach to the Innovative Building

In the September Nexus Pro member gathering, Carrie Denning Jackson, head of Innovation for Jamestown, gave a detailed run-down of the property giant’s goals and motivations behind their approach to the innovative building. 

“With the economic squeeze on assets,” she said at the outset, “I’m spending about half of my time with IT working on generative AI, data warehouses and things like that.”

She noted they’re working hard to “get to the BI layer” utilizing as much as possible from their existing building technology stack and investing where payback aligns with their objectives.

For Jamestown, the focus is on 4 big objectives, at least for the innovation department:

1. Drive NOI
2. Frictionless [tenant] experiences
3. Retain and unlock capital 
4. Use data to drive decision-making 

For some, Denning Jackson gave a detailed overview of the in-progress efforts to achieve those goals. 

Drive NOI – 

Showing some good progress in the category of “Drive NOI” is Jamestown’s roll-out of Prescriptive Data’s Nantum product. 

Being really candid with the group, Denning Jackson shared “At first it was really challenging. The building engineer at the site was very nervous about it, was worried it was going to take his job. He kind of kept turning it on and turning it off, so it took a while to get the pilot truly on.”

But now, the pilots are showing good ROI with strong ramp times and alignment with building occupancy trends that are moving in the right direction.

“Prescriptive Data has been really great as partners making things work with the current economy, pushing things from CapEx to OpEx,” Denning Jackson explained.

Other promising innovation efforts for the Jamestown portfolio in the category of Driving NOI are their solar deployments with Wunder Capital, efforts to merge OpenPath with HQO in some locations, and a side-by-side comparison of technologies for parking garages, which has shown to improve operating expenses at a site in Seattle by 48%.

For the goal of Frictionless Tenant Experiences, Denning Jackson is involved in a roll-out of the Livly platform for a multi-family site as well as HQO at public squares and office holdings. A primary effort with HQO involves adding ESG data into the platform. 

“It’s not real-time data,” she explained, “but information on certifications, etc., to get to the point where we can provide information on water consumption and emissions savings.”

Regarding the manual nature of ESG data collection and reporting, Denning Jackson noted “that would be amazing to get in a better state.”

Net zero and decarbonization plans, which are required by investors at an increasing rate, fall into the Retain and Unlock Capital goal category and the Innovation department is currently exploring their options.

The goal of using data to guide decision-making is one close to Denning Jackson’s heart. 

“If I were to start a company in this space,” she said, “I would create something that ties external foot traffic and regional data to data on site to get the full picture of who is coming, where they are going. That can tie into leasing but it can also tie into building operations.”

Along those lines, Jamestown is investing in a deeper level of customer journey tracking, trying into their video cameras.

In total, it’s a lot. Denning Jackson, while effectively a team of one, is supported by Becca Timms on the sustainability side and the two make a formidable pair. Becca spoke with the Nexus Pro Community a while back, and that recording can be found here. 

In the September event, Denning Jackson kindly left lots of time for Q&A, and even seeded the crowd with some questions of her own. It led to a rousing discussion and was much appreciated by the enthusiastic member crowd. You can catch the full recording here.

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