Take Me to the "Worst" Building in Your Portfolio - Reflections from our latest Experience Makers luncheon

All asset managers have favourite buildings. Like parents, I know you're never really supposed to admit it.

Nathan is permanently moody and struggling to pass his A Levels, while James is an elite rower at Cambridge who's just landed an internship at Google. Officially, though, you love them both equally.

Real estate loves trophy assets too. I get it, we all do. They’re exciting. They attract investment, publicity and awards.

The challenge is that, for most organisations, they represent a tiny fraction of the portfolio. The rest of the portfolio is where most customers actually experience your brand.

Earlier on we had gone around the room and asked everyone how they prioritise investment in assets at the long tail end of mixed portfolios.

Whether it’s investment in customer experience, sustainability or design - there is always a limited pool of capital, and tradeoffs must be made.

We asked twenty people and we got twenty different answers - in many ways they reflected the perspective of people present.

Some people said they start with the biggest pain points or low-hanging fruit other simply ask where £1 gives the biggest return, others look at reducing risk and have a longer investment horizon: If you’re only looking at the next three or five years, one decision might look perfectly sensible. Look fifteen years ahead and the picture can change completely. I loved hearing their diverse perspectives.

There is the condundrum that some investments in secondary assets can destroy value

In certain types of assets - likely those long tail assets -  you’ll never make the money back through rent or valuation, and that’s okay if you’ve made that decision consciously. In some sectors, property managers simply can’t make the numbers work anymore. Service charges are under pressure. Customers expect more. Regulation keeps increasing. Without enough scale, it’s becoming almost impossible to deliver everything that’s expected within the budget available. I suspect that’s a conversation happening in boardrooms across the country.Howvever, don't underestimate the cost of doing nothing. Or fail to properly identify the low hanging fruit properly.

What’s the minimum standard that every building carrying your brand should meet?

Look, not every building has to be exceptional or get unlimited investment, but because every asset manager has to decide what “good enough” looks like for their own company, their brand, their portfolio. Every building carries your brand. Every building tells your customers who you are.Sooner or later, someone will shine a light on the building you’d least like them to see, the one at the end of your long tail. When they do, will you be proud of what they find?

Want to join a future Experience Makers conversation?

Experience Makers exists for one reason: to create space for honest, practitioner-led conversations about customer experience in real estate - without stages, scripts, or sales pitches.

If you’d like to learn more about Experience Makers, or join us at one of our upcoming events, we’d love to see you there:To learn more visit: https://www.experiencemakers.com

Finally, thank you to MapMortar, for partnering with us on another brilliant Experience Makers luncheon.

As always, it wasn’t the presentations that made the day valuable. It was the quality of the conversation. Many thanks to our guests: Caroline Main FRICS , Guy Windsor-Lewis , James Borg , Bronny Wilson , Josephine Bromley , Ranjeet Bhalerao , John Vincent Joanne Watson , Gavin Halliday , Gabriella Dona , Louise Freethy , Lia Xinyu Zhang , Ayoola Ajisafe , Thomas CROS , Héloïse Hoare Zoe Dolan , Richard Hillyard

About RealService

At RealService, we help real estate owners and operators make better decisions by understanding what matters most to their customers. Whether it’s customer insight, benchmarking or helping clients prioritise investment across their portfolios, our aim is always the same: to help create places where people have a better experience. The RealService Customer Experience Index® is the largest independent benchmark for real estate customer experience. You can rely on it to genuinely understand where you lead, where you're falling behind and where to focus investment. If you're ready to understand how your building, portfolio or organisation compares to the market, we'd love to help.

To learn more visit: https://www.real-service.com/

About Mapmortar

We help real estate portfolios, asset managers, funds and consultants plan capital strategically across buy, hold and exit decisions — aligning financial performance with EPC compliance, physical/transition risk in the climate emergency. Our category-defining, physics-based AI-powered RetroAgents enable portfolio-scale modelling without sacrificing building-level precision. Beyond planning, MapMortar supports implementation through metering, advisory and ongoing capital and performance monitoring — helping ensure investment strategies translate into measurable delivery and long-term asset resilience. MapMortar has built the capital planning infrastructure for resilient, future-ready real estate.

To learn more visit: https://www.mapmortar.io/

Topics Covered in this Article

Customer Experience, Commercial Real Estate, Property Management, Asset Management, Portfolio Strategy, ESG, Sustainability, Mixed-Use Portfolios, Occupier Experience, Commercial Property, Real Estate Investment, Customer Insight, Experience Makers, RealService, Property Leadership, Building Operations, Asset Performance, Portfolio Optimisation, Long Tail Problem