Everything Is Hospitality – A Vision for Vertical Living with Philip Grace (Bob W)

00:03
Kristian Lupinski
Welcome back to Pillow Talk Sessions. I'm Kristian Lupinski joined as always by my co host Jessica Gillingham.

00:09
Jessica Gillingham
Thank you Kristian. And today on the show we have Philip Grace who is the chief development officer for Bob W, which is a hospitality brand doing some really cool things across Europe. Philip has extensive experience across hospitality, co working and also real estate. So I'm really excited to kind of delve into things with him.

00:30
Kristian Lupinski
Yeah, me as well. And I'm excited as we're going to be exploring the future of mixed use developments, how hospitality is reshaping the way we live and work and why breaking down these traditional real estate silos is key to creating smarter and more flexible urban spaces.

00:45
Jessica Gillingham
Philip, welcome to Pillow Talk Sessions. Really pleased to have you on the show. And before we sort of get into the nub of our discussion and conversation, can you give our listeners a little background about yourself? And I know you've got a really extensive impressive background that kind of covers, you know, not just the living, build to rent hospitality but also co working as well. So I'm very interested to hear about that. But also tell us a bit about Bob W as well.

01:14
Philip Grace
Thanks Jessica. So my name is Philip Grace and my current role is chief Development officer at Bob W. That involves finding sites for Bob W with an expansion team, delivering those sites until they open, then handing over to our operations team across Europe as an individual. My background is probably 35 years in real estate. I used to be corporate so I used to spend time with Abbey national, which is now Santander of course, building their corporate HQs. And then I put together with some high net worth financial support a property development company and became a developer. During that journey I was a developer, I was a GC and I built football stadia, I built residential.

01:58
Philip Grace
I discovered co working which was then called Serviced office in about 2001, 2002 and it fascinated me that as a developer you could build a building and have an end user which could be the serviced office business that you could put into that building. And those are the days where banks were more generous in their funding arrangements and I managed to build something called Digital World Centre in Manchester, close to where the BBC is today, which is something that was completed in the mid noughties. So I found co working and in 2006 I gave up on the development side and focused purely on co working and serviced office and built that business to about 25 buildings across regional cities.

02:42
Philip Grace
I exited that in 2008 and then in 2009–10 just after the global financial crisis, I put Together a business called ITWOffice which is still out there today. I founded that business and built it from scratch. And when I sold the business to OCS Group, a family owned facilities management business in 2016, we have 35 buildings, revenues of about 80 million pounds with 22 offices in London or 22 buildings in London, around 15,000 workstations. So I had a journey through corporate developments, being a gc, building a co working business. And during my spare time I bought land and built houses from a personal perspective. And I also built a property management company called Oak Hill in Milton Keynes which had about 500 properties under management.

03:36
Philip Grace
I loved the concept of co working but wanted to do something different after I sold it to office and got involved in co living and worked with a company called Quartus out of Germany, based in Germany and covered their global expansion, which really was North America and spent three weeks of every month in North America growing Co Living and also in Europe growing co Living in Europe, signing Lisa's Asset Light Structure. Unfortunately, Covid was not kind to that business and I ended up leaving in around 2020 just as Covid hit. In fact, I brought Covid back from the States. Not me personally for the whole country, but just for me as an individual. But I brought Covid back.

04:28
Philip Grace
I was quite ill with it and then got approached by a good friend of mine called Anil Kira at Node Living and spent a couple of years working with Node, slightly different to Quarters, it was investor, developer, operator. And I had two good years with Anil where we raised some money, did various things and got approached then by a company called Bob W. And my initial response was I cannot work for a company called Bob W for goodness sake. What does that company do? But I met the founders, a guy called Sebastian Emberger and Nico and I really hit it off with them. And they had around four countries operational delivering service departments with about 400 apartments and they wanted some crazy guy to jump on board and work with them to grow the business.

05:20
Philip Grace
And I brought grey hairs and experience in the real estate space as well. So I jumped on board about three years ago now. In fact almost exactly three years and the rest is history.

05:29
Jessica Gillingham
Yeah, excellent. I've stayed in a Bob W and I can attest, you know, it's an excellent concept and an excellent offering and you know, it's great to have you here, Philip, because you've got such a sort of broad experience and it kind of really fits the conversations that we like to have on Pillow talk, which is the convergence of asset classes. It is how hospitality and the living sectors and the working sectors are kind of blending as well. So thank you.

05:59
Philip Grace
I think the one thing there, Jessica, is that, and people sometimes forget this, everything is hospitality. And I don't give a damn what you're doing in life. Everything's hospitality. I was talking to somebody only yesterday who's now working for a large co working business and they wanted some advice. I often do this and I was explaining to them that their role is to deliver a hospitality experience regardless of whether somebody's renting an office, renting a hotel, in a restaurant, in a bar. Hospitality is absolutely key.

06:32
Jessica Gillingham
Absolutely. I was speaking to someone this week who kind of used the phrase the hotelization of everything. So sometimes we say the hotelization of real estate, but actually it's the hotelization of everything.

06:44
Philip Grace
Yeah, we've got to.

06:44
Jessica Gillingham
And I. Hospitality principles, service principles of everything.

06:49
Philip Grace
Well, there's one important thing there that we shouldn't forget is that delivering a people based hospitality experience is dead in the water from a financial perspective. You cannot these days deliver high returns if you've got lots and lots of people delivering that service. Now you need to have people interaction. And your experience at Bob is interesting because you will have seen that we don't have a reception desk. We don't have that yet. I'm hoping you'll have had a five star experience. Because our guest support, which is centralized, we will use AI, we'll use bots, but only in a limited fashion because immediately there is a need to speak to a person. You don't go into a call center environment. You speak to a real person.

07:38
Philip Grace
And so we have people on the ground, but we're able to have fewer people on the ground than you might have in a traditional hospitality environment. And this is what we need to get our heads around. We all talk about AI and everything these days and how it's taking jobs out. The key to running a successful business, whatever it is these days, is using AI but not losing that people touch, but needing fewer people to be able to do it, and knowing when to use people and when to use AI.

08:06
Jessica Gillingham
So I've just written a book, Philip, and by the time this podcast comes out, it will be published. It's called Tech Enabled Hospitality. And one of the leaders that I interviewed for the book is actually Jeremy Singer, the COO of Bob W. And he talks about this exact thing, you know, that you use technology for the bits where it really makes sense, but you still have the humans. And when I've stayed in a Bob W I actually did have a kind of a problem getting into my unit and it was late at night and I whatsapped because I'd already been what had a WhatsApp conversation already with the Bob W avatar. So I kind of. It was immediately there in my WhatsApp and I just respond, I just quickly said, I can't get in immediately. It was a human sorting it out for me.

08:59
Jessica Gillingham
And it was. It's one of those experiences of when it goes wrong, but it gets fixed really well and really quickly. You become a raving fan. And that's kind of what happened to me. So if it went wrong, could have gone really messy. It was quite late at night. If it had just been tech, I would have been stuck outside. But because it was dealt with really well and it was by a human, Although sometimes you can't tell these days. But it was. And when I spoke to Jeremy about it, he said, you know, you guys do have humans there. You become the raving fan.

09:33
Philip Grace
So, yeah, look, it is true, and I'm sorry you have that experience, but let's Remember, we've got 365 days in a year, we're renting rooms by the night. We have thousands of apartments. Stuff goes wrong. It's how you fix it and it's how you fix it. And how often have we all been in call center queues and everything, changing our mobiles or whatever we're doing? It's a nightmare. But when you've got a real problem and you're out on the street and you can't get into your apartment, what can you do? You can talk to a real human being. That's what you need.

10:08
Kristian Lupinski
No, that's, you know, it's a main point is having tech do the things that humans don't need to do to free up the humans for the things that we do need to do. You know, I want to get into today's topics. I mean, you laid the groundwork for a lot of the discussion that we're having today. And the first topic that I want to talk about is this concept of vertical villages and the future of mixed use. This concept is where spaces of where people live, work, meet, relax, all under one roof, so to say. So how do you see this model evolving and what does it reveal about the future of flexible mixed use developments in urban hospitality?

10:46
Philip Grace
I think what people have got to understand is that when somebody goes into a city, a town, they're going for a reason. And we need to recognize that People might want to stay, they might want to live, they might want to work, they might want to socialize. And it's how you create that silo, I call it a silo. But how do you create that experience? How do you provide the ability to shop in your lunch hour? There are some great examples of this. If you look at Canary Wharf now I used to hate Canary Wharf in the uk, but you go there now and what they've actually delivered is a phenomenal experience. Now it's not quite a vertical village, but you could almost describe it as one because you've got the underground shop in there which is always round. It's phenomenal.

11:41
Philip Grace
So you can eat, there are bars, you can stay there long term, you can stay there short term and you can work. And that's what people need to get them back to the office. These days I live in Milton Keynes. It takes me 30 minutes to get into London. I don't need to go into London unless there's a reason to go there. So I love having first to first meetings and hate doing things like this as we're doing online today. I'm a face to face person but if you're younger you need a reason to go. And if somebody's going to pay £15 for a ticket to go into London, they need to have an experience when they get there that they can't get in their studio or their parents accommodation or their small accommodation where they working out of.

12:21
Philip Grace
So if they can go to a destination and it might be an office destination where they can eat, where they can socialize, where they can meet friends, it's a great reason to go. And I just have this concept, it's not a new concept. I remember Gerald K, a great guy, retired now, used to run Helical Bar. He came up with something and he had this thing in Property Week, I remember it and he was talking about, I think it's number one Aldgate Street. I ended up putting a co working building in there and he was talking about this vertical village. It was a massive office development that had been occupied by a law firm. It was so big that you would get lost in there and it did something like a vertical village.

13:06
Philip Grace
You could rent a cycle, you could eat there, you could work there were gyms there were restaurants. This goes back 15 years. Things have moved ahead in the last 15 years. It's a long way to go yet people have got to get their head around the fat. It's hospitality. How do you create that experience that gets people into the building.

13:27
Jessica Gillingham
Canary Wharf is like such a great example of vertical village at scale. And I just want to talk a little bit about Canary Wharf, because you use that as an example right in the beginning and it has totally changed and transformed. I have been there quite recently at an event and it's just so impressive how you've got everything there. You've got the working, the living. Now hospitality is, you know, Vertiz has opened up with the hospitality. There is even open swimming, open water swimming now there. Now I live in Bath, which is probably the diametrically opposite type of place to live than Canary Wharf. You know, a historic town that is, you know, a little not sleepy, but quieter now.

14:20
Jessica Gillingham
It's my dream to spend six months renting in Canary Wharf, you know, pack up my house and just go and rent it and experience it, because it, you know, it does have everything that you need in that sort of, you know, place there. And they've done such a great job. But it's difficult trying to bring all those elements in to one operating system, if you like, or one place is difficult. So how do you a, keep it sort of cohesive so that for all the end users, whether they're using it for restaurants, working, sleeping, living, how do you make sure that it's a cohesive experience for them, but then also the management of it, you know, what kind of management systems you need, what kind of partnerships do you need to do a really good vertical village?

15:09
Jessica Gillingham
And obviously that's it at very large scale, it can also be within a building or within a kind of plot.

15:16
Philip Grace
Yeah, I mean, the game changer with Canary Wharf has been the Elizabeth line, because you can get there. The Jubilee line is just crazy unreliable. Elizabeth line is great. You can get there very quickly from West End. It's super. The key to this is having long term investments. Now, there's nothing wrong with buying a piece of land, developing a building, buying a building, converting it. But the vast majority of investment strategies these days are short term. So get some equity, put some debt in there, develop something, stabilize it, exit, make a profit, go on to the next one. The game changer that you had with Canary Wharf was long term investment coming in and visionary investment. So you have Brookfield coming in.

16:08
Philip Grace
It changed the dynamics completely because they were taking not a 5 or a 10 year view, they were taking a 15 or a 20 year view. Investment strategies are really important as well because dependent upon the asset class and the covenant of the tenant, the drives, the value of the assets, the view that you sometimes have to take is actually this is a new company or this is a company that's running a restaurant that might not have the covenant but boy, they've got a vision and you've got to have the financial strategy to be able to invest in that company to get these. I say unbranded but not everybody wants to have a Starbucks and a pret a manger on every corner.

16:52
Philip Grace
You need to have these more local operators and you need to have that strategy and that vision to give startups, younger businesses with different concepts that people might not have previously experienced pop ups. You need to get all this working and it only ever works if you've got a visionary leader, supported by good finances, able to take a long term view.

17:19
Kristian Lupinski
Yeah, I was going to add a little bit on to that. You're right, it's that long term view and it's, you know, the concepts behind it and how much it's changed. It's also a shift in kind of lifestyle and the way we live now and being able to recognize that. I wanted to go back a bit about the co working because you have a lot of experience in this. You know, with the rise of this remote work and decline of traditional office use, you know, we're seeing new types of spaces being created that serve both work and lifestyle. You know, how are these concepts from hospitality influencing the design of these modern work environments? And you know, what does the ideal work from anywhere setup look like in today's living spaces?

18:01
Philip Grace
I think, I mean I've done co working or serviced office since 2000, 2001. I've seen it. When I came into it there were really three operators, Regis Tog, the office Group and myself doing a company that's still out there, ubc, United Business Centers and were creating offices where people could rent 180 square feet, 18 square meters and you provide telephone services, reception services and everything. Things have developed and Covid accelerated a lot of the technology and the ability for people to no longer need telephone services in the way that they had mobile technology, et cetera. Wework came along of course and did exactly the same as were all doing anyway and they just had glass screens instead of solid screens and called it unique. The reality is it wasn't. They talked about co working, their space was quite small and they got people's attention.

19:04
Philip Grace
So they had a phenomenal auditor in Adam Neumann who was able to capture the markets with this vision that he had. But it was a vision that coincided with technology changing very quickly. So the timing was perfect. What's now happening in that space of co working is that so much of it is still being done in the way that it was done five years ago. So Covid delivered challenges when people moved out of their offices. What hasn't happened in that space? In the view that I have, and I've looked at coworking buildings in the last couple of years, technology hasn't got in there. So compare it to Bob W. You stay with Bob W. You don't have a reception, you've got technology getting you into the building, you've got the ability to do certain things in apartments.

20:00
Philip Grace
You can work there, you can live there, you can stay there, you've got recommendations on the app where you can eat, how you can do this. We're all looking after guests and we're doing it because people might be going to, I don't know, Amsterdam or Madrid or wherever people are going for the first time. So they need guidance, they need help. But compare that with where people are on service, office space or co working. They haven't got there yet. They're still focused on somebody's going to rent a desk and they're going to rent it for a day, a week, a month, a year. That's what they're going to do. We're going to have a reception if they've got a problem and they're going to come into the building and, oh, it's really trendy these days to provide food.

20:43
Philip Grace
So let's put some breakfast on so people can have breakfast when they get there. And they forget that all this costs money. And then they worry why their gross operating profit is so low to compare with what they expected it to be. They're just giving it away by having too many people, too many services, too many facilities. If you are of a generation, and I'll link in younger millennials and zeds, you want to be fluid in the way that you do everything. You want to rock up when you rock up. You might not want to turn up at 8 in the morning, but you might want to be there at 10 at night. You might be dealing with America or Asia or what?

21:22
Philip Grace
You just want to have an environment where you can get in 24, 7 and it doesn't matter what time you're there, it still feels the same. You want to be able to grab something to eat. You might want an area that needs to be quiet, a library type of area. You want to make calls. You might want somewhere where it's really busy and active. You know, why do serviced office, co working providers feel the need to put a gym in their buildings. I mean, they're useless at it, for goodness sake. You've got, I don't know, Equinox Pure Gym. You've got all the different gyms on every street corner in most cities now. So why do you need to put it in your office building?

22:02
Philip Grace
What you need to do is activate the ability to use that gym through your relationship in that building, which is exactly what Bob W. Do. So you can get picked up from the airport with Bob W. You can go to the gym, you can go for breakfast, you can do all these things, but you don't have to be delivering it in the building itself. And I just think there needs to be vision applied to a space that's got stuck. And as wework changed it with their glass screens and the great auditor of Adam Newman, there needs to be a new vision.

22:41
Philip Grace
And the barriers to entry are not tremendously high these days because a lot of these properties, the best properties of course, are owned by long term landlords and they need to have that vision to be able to create an environment that is different to what the current providers are delivering.

22:59
Jessica Gillingham
So in a way, operators like Bob W. Your facilitators, you know, if you're saying that you don't necessarily have to have the amenity like a gym in your building, but you can facilitate for your customers, your guests to make sure they get the best of where they are by using, you know, other resources. Philip, I know that Bob W. In Amsterdam, you have CO working within your Amsterdam Nord. How does that work? How is it working? You know, is it good?

23:34
Philip Grace
Well, there's two things here. I mean, the building in Amsterdam, it's in a difficult location, Amsterdam, but one of my favorite locations, you're five minutes by River Taxi into the center of Amsterdam. But you're not in that core. So you've got to make it attractive for people to be there. We have 126 apartments there. We've got some duplex, we've got some studios, great space. When we looked at it with the developer, they were very keen that Bob W. Take on the co working space. And we sat with them and said, look, we don't really want to do that because it's not our sphere of expertise. We don't want to take operation of the rooftop pool or the yoga studios that you're planning to build and the restaurant upstairs. It's not our sphere of expertise.

24:24
Philip Grace
But why don't we work with parties who are really good at that and why don't we create an environment which is a small vertical village if you like, where you have co working, you have the ability to stay. You're very close to some residential apartments where you can do long term stay. You can actually buy that if you wish. And then you've got the yoga studios and an outdoor pool up on the roof. And it's that cooperation with operators that is the way forward. Don't try to be an expert at everything you're doing. And this is why our technology that our proprietary systems that we built, we own, we've got 30 engineers constantly evolving and developing our tech working out of Tallinn in Estonia. We're constantly developing that guest experience and because we own that tech, we're able to add things into it.

25:19
Philip Grace
So one of the things that we added a few months ago was the ability to get picked up from the airport. Super easy to do people if they're. 40% of our people are on corporate travel. If guests are on corporate travel, if they want to book everything on their room, they can do that by just booking it through our application that allows that to happen and we can monitor the progress and guarantee that success. Again, an interesting one, it's just a small story in Athens. We acquired a couple of hotels in Athens a few years ago. One of the hotels really nice in the Golden Triangle, it had a restaurant on the ground floor and it was. The hotelier was trying to operate the restaurant. He got 24 hour reception there. He was trying to do the restaurant.

26:03
Philip Grace
The restaurant it was costing more in the employment of people than the revenue that they were earning. It was just losing money. The first thing that we did was automate the reception experience and sublet the restaurant to a restaurante. Restaurant business is tough. It really and it's seasonal, it's really difficult. That restaurant now is super popular and it just works so well. It's complementary to what we deliver in Bob W. We don't have the, I say hassle factor only because we're not a restaurateur, but we don't have that need to operate it. It's done by others. So we've now got a successful building.

26:45
Jessica Gillingham
That's profitable and it's so vital to pick the right partners for that because if they don't have the same level of providing and experience to their customers, it can reflect on Bob W or you know, on your brand. So picking those must be maybe a challenge but definitely important to pick the right ones.

27:06
Philip Grace
It is so important. But if you get it wrong and Sometimes you get it wrong, you can change it and bring a different branding, do something else more difficult. If you've got bad example, Starbucks, if you're signing a 15 year lease with Starbucks or something there, very difficult to change. But if you work with a partner and construct a transaction with that partner, that means you are constantly reviewing the experience. Our guests at Bob W have breakfast in that restaurant. It's super important we get it right and so we work with the restaurateur to be able to do that.

27:44
Kristian Lupinski
I just want to say not all traditional real estate things like you guys at Bob W, you know, we, they often, you know, treat their assets like hotels, office, residential spaces, you know, all in isolation, you know, from your view, what's holding the industry back from this more integrated, flexible use approach. And you know, how can these operators start really rethinking their portfolios?

28:07
Philip Grace
What I would say there, Kristian, is that it's a box and we should get our head around the fact that box needs to be deployed to whatever is required at the time and it needs to be flexible. The problem we have is, and I've been in real estate a long time, we have these silos, we have logistics, we have office, we have hospitality and we have specialisms. And people who are specializing in office can't talk about hospitality. And if we look at the top four CBREs and JLL Savos, they're all the same, they've got these silos within their industry. But what they've got to understand is that actually it's delivering in that box what is required and what would deliver the greatest return for the investment that needs to be deployed at that time.

29:00
Philip Grace
One of the challenges that we often have is that, okay, this box is big, we can't make it all hotel. We don't want 500 rooms in one location. But how can we mix it up? And then you really get a complicated conversation going. Well, we can't really put retail on the ground floor because the returns on the retail is going to be this. And can we put a conference facility in there? Well, actually we can't do this because of that or the use class. You know, the planners can be the bane of our life because they only have retrospective vision. They don't have vision of what something might create and what it becomes. They'll only look back, you know, one of the greatest. I'll give a shout out here to the City of London.

29:44
Philip Grace
The City of London have been so proactive in allowing officers to be converted to hospitality in the last Couple of years. They realize that in the city they've got some phenomenal buildings. Everybody wants to be in the best building now with hospitality or office or whatever. They don't want to be in secondary buildings that can't heat, can't cool, have leaks, have problems. They want to be in the best buildings. So what the city have done is actively allow the buildings that don't fit in that call it esg, silo bracket, allow them to be converted. Because once you move it to a different use class, you're going to spend capital. When you spend in that capital, you can improve the environmental impact of that particular building.

30:37
Philip Grace
So you can now rip out the gas fired or refrigerant powered air conditioning system and put something in there that's more environmentally friendly. You can actually activate that space. And what it brings is people into that environment that are going to be there maybe on a weekend when if you've just got officers, you won't have anybody in the city or you wouldn't have had on a weekend. Canary Wharf back to that, Jessica, and what you were saying there, that's exactly what's happened there. That's why you've now got a theater going in there and you've got so much happening. Because there's been that vision. Let's not just have offices as it used to be with all the banks and the law firms. Let's create a space where people now want to go for the weekend. And that's what I hear.

31:25
Philip Grace
Now people are going there for a weekend. They're not just going there to work.

31:30
Jessica Gillingham
It's really saving the city, isn't it? Especially it was also doom and gloom five years ago, the end of our downtowns. But this is changing everything.

31:41
Philip Grace
Really well, it is serving our cities, but you've got to have vision to do it. And I think you've got a lot of investment able to be deployed. But the roadblock time and time again is the local authority. And that drills right down to a counselor level when you come to Bath or somewhere like that. No councillor in Bath is going to vote for something that's not popular with the people that put them into the local authority. Because the next time they're not going to get elected. And we've got to get away from this. We've got to have vision. As I said earlier, I live in Milton Keynes. Look at the vision that we had with the development corporation some 50 years ago in Milton Keynes.

32:27
Philip Grace
If it hadn't been for that vision, we wouldn't have had now 270,000 people living in what I still think is one of the best new town developments that there is in the uk. It's a phenomenal place to live in.

32:40
Jessica Gillingham
Bath actually. We've got so much new build happening, like phenomenal amounts just down the road from me. And I'm excited, you know, to see what they're going to do to the riverside there. But it's not just London because I know that you guys just converted or just signed a deal for a police station or police offices in Copenhagen to turn that into a hospitality offering.

33:03
Philip Grace
Yeah. So we're in 13 different countries now. We will do everything from ground up developments to acquiring hotels and converting those hotels into Bob W.s. To taking office buildings and converting those office buildings into service departments. This particular building we just done in Copenhagen, it's going to be a 165 apartments. We don't buy the assets, we lease the assets. So we are asset light, but we work with partners. This particular developer and investor that's doing this one is a company called Slato and they're out of Sweden and it's our third building with them. So they acquired a building in Helsinki a couple of years ago, which we opened. It was an office that they converted for Bob W. We opened it a couple of months ago and we've also. They also acquired the Rivoli Hotel in Helsinki which they converted to Bob W.

34:00
Philip Grace
So this is the first one in Denmark that they've done and it was a police station and it's right in the center of Copenhagen. And we're doing similar things with other partners in Dortmund, in Frankfurt we're doing stuff in the uk, we're doing stuff throughout Europe as we're working with developers. But the biggest challenges developers have is the planning regime in whatever city. We're working in the municipalities and moving it into a different use class and then convincing the debt that they need to put within the asset that the use class is sustainable and it's the right way forward. So vision is there, but there are lots and lots of roadblocks, or should I say bumps in the road that you have to get over to be able to deliver it. Yeah, we're delighted with the Copenhagen one.

34:55
Jessica Gillingham
Wondering who gets the jail cells?

34:59
Kristian Lupinski
That's what I was going to ask. What are you guys doing with that?

35:01
Philip Grace
Well, you say that, but it does work. I mean, I forget the name of the hotel in Oxford now, but Fantastic. Yeah. And you actually paid to stay in your cell.

35:10
Kristian Lupinski
Yeah, I'd be interested. I'd Be interested in that, seeing what that would be like, you know, to do it that way, not the other way of actually being put in a jail cell. Let's we got a couple more topics today. The second to last one, we're talking about reimagining space for the next generation. You know, being a younger generation maybe wanting to stay in a jail cell. But you know, these younger generations are really redefining how they work and how they live and how they travel. You know, what role should operators and developers play in meeting these expectations? And you know, there's no crystal ball, but how do you future proof spaces for generations that value this fluidity over fixed routines?

35:53
Philip Grace
Well, I think you said that one of the words, there is fluidity. You need to be super flexible in the way that you deliver this space now. And don't underestimate the value of technology. I've got young kids, or not so young now, but they were brought up with iPhones with technology. I'm a luddite when it comes to tech, but the way that everybody now is comfortable using tech and people will often say to me, well, there's nobody on reception, how am I going to check in? Well, I'm sorry, but what is on your phone? Your flight tickets, everything is on your phone when you go to check out, to fly, to rent a car or whatever you do these days. So why would you not check into a hotel that way?

36:39
Philip Grace
But the key here is realizing that the generation that we now deal with, and I've got a lot of confidence by the way, in Gen Z, I think they are going to do super well. They're so creative and have to be so creative and recognize the challenges that we have as a world right now and think so differently out of the box. But you've got to go with it. And you know, if my kids come up with an idea, I don't put it down. I very much listen and I learn. And I love most of the people. Well, everybody at Bob W. Is younger than me, but most of the people in Bob W. Are in their twenties. You mentioned Jeremy earlier, in his thirties. They're all young.

37:22
Philip Grace
But some of the people in their 30s, Jeremy, for example, he's learning from the even younger people coming through because they just think differently. They don't think about going out of an evening until 10:30, 11:00 clock at night and coming back at 4. They don't want to start work at 9, they'll start at 1. And you've just got to have this flexibility in the way that you work and people stereotype often Gen Z, they can't get out of bed, they don't want to work, they don't want to go to the office. The reality is they do, they will, they can. They just need to have that fluidity to be able to work when they need to work and work as they want to work and use technology to the advantage of everybody. And that is absolutely what we should be doing.

38:11
Philip Grace
Don't hide from it and put it down, embrace it and make it work.

38:16
Jessica Gillingham
I've got children probably I think about the same age as yours and I agree they're hard working. No different really than I guess any other generation except for in their approach of things is different. I was at a conference yesterday about AI and one of the speakers was talking about how it wasn't that long ago that were really keen on younger, you know, younger people coming into the workforce because they were digitally native and they could bring, you know, all of that now and it won't be long, two, three years, the workforce will be AI native. And imagine that thinking, coming into business and the working environment, having kind of brought up intuitively using AI as a thought partner, as a strategic partner, you know, in a way that maybe us older ones.

39:11
Jessica Gillingham
I'm gonna sort of say that I don't know when I became the oldest person in the room. But anyway, it does happen, doesn't it? Kind of, you know, it's just. Anyway, it's exciting to see what might happen because it's often very doom and gloom about Gen Z, you know, out for the next generation. But actually they've got such an opportunity to think, to help the rest of us think differently.

39:34
Philip Grace
I think you've got to look at who is worrying about this. You're worried about it, I'm worried about it. They're not. And there's some stuff in the Times or Telegraph this weekend talking about how difficult it is to get internships right now, those first rung of the ladder jobs, because AI has replaced it. Of course it has. But that's not a reason for Gen Z to say I'm not going to get out of bed and get a job. They'll find a way around it. And that's what I mean about these people are talented, these kids are talented and they've always had it. And for them AI is not new, AI is just something that's come along, let's get on with it. And they will take AI and whereas they used to spend a couple of years learning to code and do things like that.

40:20
Philip Grace
They'll use AI to code, to build a bot to do something so they will circumnavigate this challenge. The problem is people who cannot evolve, people who cannot embrace it. I mean, if I'm looking at a legal document, if I'm reading a legal document these days, or if I'm, I can get AI to read it for me. Now I've got to have experience and knowledge to be able to check that everything's right. But I can short circuit so many things so I can do my job quick, more quickly than I could have done previously. If I'm researching Bath and want to understand hospitality in Bath, I can go into AI and I can tell you the stats within seconds.

41:03
Philip Grace
Now I need to check it, of course, but I don't need somebody to do that for me or do I need to spend a lot of time looking@booking.com and looking at all the, you don't need to do it. So it's using it to the advantage, which makes your job easier, which allows you to do more and potentially work for fewer hours. And I think this is something that we are going to see whether we like it or not. I've always never had a work life balance. I don't think ever I will have a work life balance, but I think generations coming through will have a better opportunity to have more of a work life balance because technology will allow them to do the same quantum of work and achieve the same by using ChatGPT or whatever format they're using for their AI.

41:53
Kristian Lupinski
Yeah, I think the differentiator that people are going to have is in creativity. I think all these tools that can help us with these manual tasks, ultimately this is our vision and creativeness is what's going to set us apart in the future. Our last topic that I want to talk about and AI is a good segue into it, is tech and smarter spaces. You know, from smart automation to usage analytics. Technology's opening up as we're discussing new ways to design, operate and optimize these living spaces. How should operators be thinking about tech as a strategic tool and not just, you know, nice to have for convenience, but, you know, unlocking this real value in improving the resident or guest experience?

42:39
Philip Grace
Good question. I mean, we're clearly a tech company or we're actually a real estate company delivering hospitality, but we do that with the use of technology. It's so important for us to understand what happens with a guest. So what times do they check in, what do they do when they get into the building, what happens in the rooms that they're in, when are they leaving the rooms, and how we can use that technology to be able to optimize the stay. So how many of our guests are using a particular breakfast partner or using a gym? Speaking with our guests and understanding how they might want to have additional facilities provided.

43:21
Philip Grace
Now, this doesn't just apply to Bob W. And the way that we use tech, but we're looking, everybody needs to be looking where their guests are coming from, whether it's office or whether it's hospitality. Where are people coming from? How can we attract more people? How can we make their journey easier? How can we use technology? Data. But it's no good having a pool of data if you're not using it to better improve what you're delivering as a service to that guest. So it's so important that you are taking the data, implementing it and use it. So when we look at Bob W. Our stats, we're not just selling hotel rooms, serviced apartments, and then selling it again and selling it again.

44:09
Philip Grace
We, every single week, every month, we're actually looking at the people that are staying with us, the profile of the people staying with us, where are they coming from? How long are they staying? You know, the average length of stay with Bob W. Right now is around four nights. So what does that mean? We don't clean rooms every night. Why? Because environmentally, it's not right. If you want to have rooms cleaned every night, you can do so, 25, 30 Euro, whatever the price is, but it focuses people. So if we can better understand how long people are staying and then customize that cleaning to reflect that, we can financially improve our performance, which ultimately will lead to lower prices. So all of these different tech solutions are so important.

44:58
Philip Grace
When you walk into a building, it should be at a temperature, but the building should know you're going to arrive. So if you're in a hot environment, and we've not been able to do this yet, but imagine the situation that Jessica, you are going to arrive at a particular place, you arrive, it already knows you're there, you're tracking information on your phone is there. It's not Big Brother, it happens. I mean, Apple, whoever, they probably all listen to what we're doing anyway as we talk about, but it knows you've arrived. And then the room is customized to what you expect, so the lighting is configured to what you like.

45:36
Philip Grace
Because we learned from your last stay, we also understand that you like the temperature to be here and you like this and you're like so it's how you can use technology to provide that wow factor. And how did people know that? And I think that's what we need to be looking at, really understanding what resonates with people so that the experience that they have is an experience that they want to come back to. Now, you know, Bob W. 75% of people that stay with Bob W. The second time around, they're coming direct to us and booking direct. So, yes, we love the OTAs. We love the OTAs, but it's an expensive medium, but we love it because it's far more cost effective than employing lots of people in that environment.

46:26
Philip Grace
But what we want to do is have that relationship with you, Jessica, because you stay with us. So we know that next time you come, you're probably going to book direct. And you're going to book direct because you'll be part of our inner circle and we start to understand you better as a customer, as a guest, and then we can customize that experience for you more and more the more times you stay with us.

46:49
Jessica Gillingham
I think that's one of the most. And obviously I've just written a book about this, you know, all of tech and part of it is marketing as well. Guest experience, guest communication. We've got chapters across all of those. And I. It feels just like we're sort of on the cusp of that real. Maybe not even quite on the cusp, but that we sort of, kind of, we can see the vision of that personalization that a brand can have with a customer in that hospitality space, you know, right from search all the way to post day to repeat stay. And that really does take the guest experience to the next level and that personalization journey and that ability to kind of really connect with the brand. And you know, Bob W. Is a brand as much as it is as a hospitality provider.

47:41
Jessica Gillingham
It is a brand.

47:43
Philip Grace
Do you not think Jessica, as well, Sorry to jump in, but a lot of people, I don't do social media other than LinkedIn and things, but a lot of people measure their lives on the number of likes they get on various platforms. They want people to like what they're saying. They want people to like and to understand. Is that not something that we're doing by having that relationship with people? We're subliminally liking people to encourage them to be with us. And does that then not make people feel really good about what they're doing, which is encouraging people to come back and stay with, in our case, Bob W. In other locations, I think it's.

48:24
Jessica Gillingham
Making Them feel valued and you know, if we feel valued, we want more of it. And I guess that's the same with social media likes as it is with the man that takes care of us well and feels like it's invested in us. So. Yeah, so it's really interesting.

48:43
Philip Grace
I think it's fascinating. I, you know, I, I'm at a point in my career now where I won't see the next 15 or 20 years from a working perspective. But I wish I could because I, I see the change that I've seen in the last, well, probably the last 20 years is unbelievable. You know, I can remember when I was with Santander Abbey national going on a course to learn to use a computer. I can remember being shown a mouse with a cable that was on it and how to clean it. Even you won't remember this. That's how it was. I remember thinking, is it worth me doing this? You know, is it really going to take off? Well, look at us now and look at how we jump forward after Covid.

49:29
Philip Grace
And I think that the point here is that we should not fear what's coming. We should embrace what's coming, learn to work with it. Whether it's AI or whatever the next thing is. Because AI is reinventing the Internet. I use for my searches now AI, ChatGPT, Gemini more than I would use Google search or Safari search or something like that. So I've adopted it straight away. I think it gives you better information and that's what we've got to do. Don't fight it, don't switch it off. Use it, try it, experience it. It's pretty simple really.

50:09
Kristian Lupinski
I gotta say. I think this is a good place to leave this conversation because it's just a nice note to end on. But I do have one more question for you, Philip. If people are interested in Bob W anything coming up for you guys, where should people go if they want to find out more?

50:22
Philip Grace
Yeah, look, we've got about 5,000 apartments, 75 buildings of which 43 buildings are operational now, 13 countries. We're well funded. We're very much about growth. European growth is what we're doing. We do toy with the idea elsewhere, but European growth is our focus and we're looking to sign leases, we're looking to sign long term leases with developers and work with developers to be able to deliver greater hospitality experiences. Returns are good. We know that because we've done 43 buildings already. So we're there. BobW.co is the web address and you know, happy that people reach out to me directly. LinkedIn. However, it doesn't matter. We use technology, we embrace technology. We'll certainly like to have a conversation.

51:13
Jessica Gillingham
Brilliant. Philip. Thank you so much for being a guest. It's been a really interesting conversation and I can't wait to see where Bob W. Goes next. So thank you.

51:22
Philip Grace
I can't either. Exciting times. Very exciting times.

51:26
Kristian Lupinski
And that wraps it up for today's episode of Pillow Talk Sessions. Thank you so much for joining us. And to stay connected and never miss a conversation, head over to pillow talksessions.com to subscribe. You can also follow us on LinkedIn for more insights and interviews with leaders shaping the future of hospitality, multifamily living and community driven spaces. Pillow Talk Sessions is brought to you by Abode Worldwide, the strategic public relations agency for tech brands and tech enabled operators transforming the way we work, play and stay. Abode Worldwide creates category leaders and builds brand value across hospitality in modern rental living. Thanks again for tuning in and we'll see you next time on Pillow Talk Sessions.