Dive Brief:
- Cove announced that it will roll out its building operating systems across the EQ Office portfolio of properties.
- The mobile app will provide building access control, enabling tenants and building visitors to unlock entrances from their phones, and it will replace legacy systems for work orders, preventive maintenance and inspections, according to a May 29 news release. By consolidating workstreams, the building operating solution has helped EQ realize immediate savings across several of its assets, the release said.
- The initial implementation is "streamlining efficiency, enhancing the experience, and furthering the 'smart office', and we're looking forward to using it across the entire EQ portfolio," Mikki Ward, senior vice president of technology and innovation at EQ Office, said in a statement.
Dive Insight:
Founded as a coworking space provider in 2013, Cove provides building real estate products, originally created for its own tenants, to other companies in need of technology solutions. Cove reported that it has previously worked with EQ Office, a Blackstone Real Estate portfolio company, to implement integrated building management and flexible office management solutions at WIllis Tower in downtown Chicago.
That collaboration led to Blackstone Innovation Investments’ participation in Cove’s $10 million funding round in June 2022, which also included funding from Kastle Systems and Second Century Ventures. At the time, EQ reported its plans to roll out Cove’s systems across a bigger part of its portfolio, with Cove CEO and founder Adam Segal saying the partnership would help to “grow our platform, reach greater scale and continue to innovate the digital layer of what’s next in the industry.”
Implementing Cove’s building operating systems across EQ Office’s properties "has given us the ability to innovate and refine our technology alongside EQ, based on real-time data from high-quality properties," Segal said in a statement May 29. "EQ's portfolio has provided a unique environment that's helped us benchmark, simplify and evolve to meet the needs of hundreds of operators, tens of thousands of tenants, and millions of square feet."
In addition to access control, work order and preventive maintenance systems, the Cove mobile application provides mass communication capabilities and vendor and certificate-of-insurance management.
Last August, Cove announced the rollout of its tenant experience, operation and flex office platform across eight Nuveen properties in Boston and Washington, D.C.
That collaboration followed the integration of Cove’s platform with Cushman & Wakefield’s tenant experience platform in June 2023. This partnership with Cushman & Wakefield involved providing the commercial real estate services firm with its own version of the application, dubbed Presence. By implementing Cove’s white-label building operation solution, Cushman & Wakefield said it would be able to generate data-driven insights related to capital prioritization and operational investments to “drive tenant satisfaction and wellbeing at the building level.”
