Fixing Return To Office: Productivity Data & The Future of Work With Andrew Farah – RFP 62 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:06): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, the podcast where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Andrew Farah. Andrew is the CEO of Density, the leading space analytics platform for measuring and improving workspaces. On the podcast, we dive into methods for measuring office usage accurately without compromising privacy, why “butts in seats” is an outdated metric, and how to build smarter offices that adapt in real time. Andrew’s uniquely vast, data-driven insights into the return-to-office struggle make this well worth a listen for any office occupier or commercial real estate investor. Andrew, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Andrew Farah (01:00): Glad to be here.
From a Coffee Shop Line to Radar Sensors
Gordon Lamphere (01:02): We’ve wanted to have this conversation for a while, and I think it’s a very interesting subject. Before we dive into offices, can you tell me what got you started in the world of offices, productivity, and how people use space?
Andrew Farah (01:20): Sure. We build radar sensors that count people inside buildings. We started because we wanted to know how busy our favorite coffee shop was. It was really annoying that we could know the weather in Spain in real time, but we couldn’t know if there was a line at Café Kubal down the street. So we looked for technology that could do this, and we found hundreds of products that purported to count people in buildings but did a really terrible job of it, mostly on latency and accuracy, and they were invasive. We thought, “It can’t be that hard to build.” It turns out it’s extremely hard to build. For the last eleven years, I’ve been working with a really extraordinary team to design and build radar sensors that anonymously count people in buildings. That’s what led me to real estate, workplace, and a whole bunch of other really interesting industries. That’s what Density is and what Density does.
Measuring Occupancy Without Compromising Privacy
Gordon Lamphere (02:30): We’ve had conversations on this podcast with so many brokers, investors, and developers about measuring office use. How do you measure office use while also protecting privacy? That’s one of the biggest issues we hear about. People say, “We’ll just put cameras in there,” but nobody wants a camera on them eight hours a day, five days a week. So how do you go about that?
Andrew Farah (03:01): In our case, we designed a product that’s anonymous at source. The radar sensor behind me can’t tell that I’m Andrew even if it wanted to. That’s not true of most camera-based vendors, even if they anonymize the image. A bunch of providers sell what they call optical sensors, which is really just a camera. It’s marketing for “camera.” They get deployed above a person’s desk and take photographs of whether or not you’re at your desk, process those images locally on the device or a gateway, and then publish count data. Cameras are very good at counting people. But if you want to take the high road, don’t want to be invasive, and don’t want to be a legal team’s worst nightmare, you build technology that preserves privacy at source, meaning it literally can’t identify people even if it wanted to.
The value of that is that when we hit NetSec, network security, or InfoSec, information security, we breeze through, because people aren’t concerned about what the device is collecting. When an optical sensor, a.k.a. a camera, hits InfoSec, the vendor has to do a lot of work to justify how they’re preserving privacy.
I’ll give you two very practical examples. One company in the industry deployed these above a bunch of desks, an employee noticed, and they filed a lawsuit. The company actually has the right to observe you with a camera, but there’s a difference between a security camera and your reasonable expectation of privacy. A security camera is there to keep you secure. A camera that’s there just to observe whether you’re at your desk, or what you’re typing, is the kind of thing you just don’t want to do. That’s the long answer to your question.
Andrew Farah (05:27): The second story is about liability. A legal team’s responsibility is to limit an organization’s liability, and one of the biggest liabilities in any organization is its supply chain. We work with some of the largest companies in the world, with some of the most secure offices in the world. If you can compromise a third-party optical sensor vendor, you can do keystroke logging. You can see what people are typing and what IP is sitting on their desk. If I’m China, the folks I want to compromise are the sensor vendors. Forget trying to get into these large corporations directly. I can just get in through a back door.
What People Say vs. What the Data Shows
Gordon Lamphere (06:12): That’s very true. As a J.D. who took privacy law and a number of tort law classes that relate to this, I can only imagine all the potential legal issues that come with cameras. The biggest conversation I have with occupiers, other brokers, and investors is about understanding how people actually use workspace. What we see overwhelmingly is that there’s your data, and then there’s what people tell you they’re doing in their workspace, and there’s usually a vast chasm between the two. How do you see that perceived reality compare with the data-driven reality from a very accurate system like yours?
Andrew Farah (07:21): If you ask someone how often they go to the gym, they’ll say three times a week. If you had a log, it probably wouldn’t be three times a week. It’s not because people are actively lying. It’s because humans are pretty bad at record keeping. So if you ask, “Are there available meeting rooms?” they’ll say, “There are never available meeting rooms. I can never find one.” Or, “Can you find a desk when you need one?” “No, it’s always swamped.” But when you look at the data, and we have a lot of it, the most staggering number I’ve seen is that something like 38 percent, nearly 40 percent, of all desks were untouched for 90 days after the return to office.
I was on site with that particular customer, talked to dozens of employees, and they were all walking around looking for a desk. What had happened? The teams that came back had claimed territory. They weren’t doing it in a nefarious way. They just said, “No, this area is for the ad group,” or “That’s for engineering.” So people wandered around looking for space to work. Then they were furious about the return to office: “You asked me to come back, you didn’t allocate space for us, and now I’m wasting time on my commute and wandering around looking for a desk.” And it turns out that at no point during that company’s entire return to office did they fully run out of meeting rooms. There was always a meeting room available, and always a desk available.
The problem was twofold. One was visibility. You need to give the data back to the people coming into the office. Show them which rooms and desks are available, or at least which neighborhoods might have desks.
Andrew Farah (09:41): Don’t just observe them. Give them useful data and let them self-police. The other side is: don’t book rooms you don’t use. At another group in New York, 27 percent of all meetings were ghost meetings, meaning people booked the room but never showed up. It’s crazy that we’re willing to lock up nearly 30 percent of one of our most valuable assets, the place where people gather and collaborate, simply because of the seniority of whoever reserved the room ahead of time. There is plenty of space. If you give visibility into where it is, it becomes a self-policing system, and it’s apolitical. It doesn’t have an agenda. It just shows where there’s free space and where there isn’t. Then everyone can make better decisions, instead of having political debates like, “I need this and it’s not there,” or “My team must have all this dedicated space,” even though they’re not using it.
Why Badge Data Falls Short
Gordon Lamphere (10:52): I know a lot of people who have implemented key card monitoring and access data, but that only shows that somebody entered, and in many cases it doesn’t even show whether they exited. Is that the biggest gap you see between using sensors and using key card data?
Andrew Farah (11:17): There are a couple of problems with keycard data. First, you usually don’t badge into a floor. You definitely don’t usually badge into a room, and you certainly don’t badge into a desk or a phone booth. So the question is whether building visitation is what you’re trying to measure. If you have 2,000 employees in a building and 1,800 of them tapped their badge, I can guarantee that some of those are a buddy carrying another person’s badge, plus coffee badging. I can guarantee that because we’ve literally witnessed it.
That said, we should treat adults like adults. You shouldn’t deploy sensing to police behavior. You should deploy sensing to make better use of the building and make it better for the people it was intended for. We sometimes forget that buildings are built for humans. We didn’t build them to sit there like monoliths. We built them for people to use, interact in, and do work. And that’s not happening. We have ghost towns. If you’ve ever been to an empty movie theater with one other person, you both sit perfectly equidistant from each other and the walls. That’s what happens in a ghost-town office. People don’t sit next to each other. So you either need to constrain the space or increase the number of people who show up.
Back to badging: the primary problem is that you tend to badge only into the building, not into individual spaces, so you have zero visibility into what’s actually being used, where you’re running out, and where you’re not. The other problem is that most people don’t badge out. Some buildings require it, but generally you’re not getting occupancy data. You’re getting visitation, and a five-minute visit looks no different from a five-hour visit,
Andrew Farah (13:37): unless you have badge-out on the other side. Then there’s a third category: the PII issue. All of a sudden, you’re taking personally identifiable information and trusting that it will be anonymized and not used punitively when making real estate decisions. I just think there’s a better way, and it’s inexpensive. It doesn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to install some badge reader. You can quickly understand what’s being used and what isn’t.
What Makes Return to Office Work: Trust
Gordon Lamphere (14:08): I want to talk about return to office, because it ties right into the badge-swipe world. So many occupiers we’ve worked with have had return-to-office problems: ghost swipes, people tag-teaming their attendance, or people stopping by in their sweats, swiping in, and leaving. We’ve even seen return-to-office strikes at a number of occupiers. What have you seen in terms of effective return-to-office policy? You’ve worked across a broad swath of industries, and I think you’d have unique insight for our listeners, many of whom are large occupiers or investors trying to understand how to make return to office work in their portfolios.
Andrew Farah (15:19): I have a number of thoughts. The thing people underestimate is that the amount of trust you can build in person is two, three, or four times more than the amount you can build distributed. It’s not that you can’t fill the gas tank of trust while distributed. You could just spend more time together. It’s that the gas tank is two or three times larger when you’re in person. I think a lot of that has to do with nonverbal communication, and with not being so limited by the calendar invite. Your digital interactions are highly structured: a 25-minute discussion, a five-minute transition, then your next 25-minute discussion. You’re an avatar the entire time. It’s easy to go off video, go on mute, and do other things. Remote creates the conditions for an absence, or reduction, of connection. That’s premise number one.
Premise number two is that in person does the opposite. So in my opinion, buildings and return to office shouldn’t be about making sure people are doing work. They should be about building high-trust teams. If you mandate an in-person return, you’re choosing to invest in building a high-trust team. Trust is upstream of conflict resolution. High-trust teams resolve conflict better and more productively. They make it about the work, not about individuals. Conflict resolution is the only way to build great products. So trust is upstream of building great products, which is upstream of building a great business. The trap people fall into is describing return to office as water cooler moments, or culture and collaboration, or “we do our best work in person.” Really, it’s pretty simple: you’ll trust each other more if you interact in person more often. That’s it.
Be Honest About Why, and Say the Word “Childcare”
Andrew Farah (17:43): The next thing is that I think leaders are pretty cowardly about explaining why they’re implementing the policy. The best leaders in the industry mention trust, and then they say something like, “For 80 percent of the policies we create, the company’s interests will align with employees’ interests. For 20 percent, they’ll deviate, and the policy will be in the best interest of the company, not the individual. In those moments, we want to be really clear, and RTO is one of them: we will always choose the company. That’s our job. We manage the company, and our job is to choose the company 100 percent of the time. But we also want to be honest that the 20 percent exists, and it sucks.” It conflicts with having flexibility in your schedule and time, particularly for childcare. Companies talk around this, but I’m convinced the biggest reason hybrid is valued is childcare.
Gordon Lamphere (18:59): As somebody who’s done a tremendous amount of economic development work in our community, in the broader Chicagoland area and at the county level, I can say that’s 100 percent true. In the surveys and all the data we’ve seen, the number one driver by far is childcare. I think companies overwhelmingly underestimate how many of their employees, married or not, with children are paying for childcare in time or money, and how substantially that cost was reduced by the flexibility of remote work. I could not agree with you more. I just had to jump in,
Andrew Farah (19:55): No, totally.
Gordon Lamphere (19:56): because it shows up over and over in the data. If companies are looking to solve remote work, the biggest solution is childcare.
Andrew Farah (20:06): Yeah. I think that’s why folks migrate to be closer to family. Ultimately, it’s a very practical thing: childcare, in both cost and time. Someone is going to figure this out, and I’m not sure who, when, or how, and I know some folks already have. But there’s a brilliant business model here: we have underutilized office buildings, so of the nine floors we have, let’s keep eight and turn one into a daycare for our employees. It would just be a perk, and I guarantee return-to-office attendance would skyrocket.
What’s crazy is that we get so wrapped up in talking about things like inclusion and diversity, and I realize the pendulum has swung massively on that topic over the last few years. But not having good, clear policies, and not supporting things like childcare, cascades into how many women can even make it work. That’s a generalization, and there are plenty of stay-at-home dads. My point is that there are practical solutions, and there are parts an organization can play, but companies have to be willing to say the words out loud.
The last thing that’s really important is that they have to be willing to let people walk. Fear of attrition is the most corrosive thing. Fear is the mind killer, like in Dune. We’re so scared of having clear boundaries around return to office, not even strict ones, out of fear of losing top talent. The reality is that if you ask someone, “Do you want more or less freedom?” there’s a right answer, and they’ll always say more. If you ask, “Do you want more or fewer flex days, choose-your-own-adventure days?” there’s a right answer to that too. But that doesn’t mean what’s in the individual’s best interest serves the company, the team, or the mission and purpose of the organization. You can have exceptions to the guidelines, but
Density’s Own Policy: Clear Boundaries, Then Be an Adult
Andrew Farah (22:30): it can be very helpful to say, “Here are our boundaries.” In our case, we’re in the office four days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Wednesday is choose your own adventure, work from wherever, and also a no-meeting day. That doesn’t always get followed, but the goal is focus and a midweek break. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, you’re expected in the office by 10 a.m. at the latest, and you can’t leave before three. The reason is that we want to acknowledge the commute sucks on either end, so we’d like to reduce some of that pain. You don’t have to show up at nine or 8:30 during rush hour.
The second thing is: be an adult in between those times. I don’t care if you need to go home and take care of your kids, go to the dentist, or pack for a vacation. Within those constraints, be an adult. But we give you constraints so that when you schedule a two o’clock meeting, you’re not wondering whether someone’s leaving early. You have a shared understanding of the rules of the game we’re all playing together. I think if companies did something like that, they might see unexpected results. In our case, something like 44 percent of everyone in our office stays until 5:30 or 6 every day, even though we tell them they can leave at three.
I’ve said a lot, but humans in a place create gravity. They create critical mass. If you don’t have enough people in the space, you have the movie theater problem, and someone might as well be watching Netflix at home. When you have the Minecraft problem, which I don’t know if you’ve seen, those TikTok videos of people going nuts in theaters at the Minecraft movie, it’s a whole experience in the theater, even though you’re not supposed to talk.
The Cost of Missing Mentorship
Gordon Lamphere (24:31): I have Gen Z family, including a younger brother, so the Minecraft phenomenon is a whole different world I get into. But on the topic of gravity, one thing I think is very underappreciated is that so many younger people need training, whether they’re interns, young associates, or junior staff. What we saw with our occupiers is that not having them in the office was fine for the more experienced folks, and by that I mean anyone who’d been there a couple of years. My wife works for a big law firm. For associates who were four or five years in, it didn’t matter much that they weren’t in the office. But the associates in their first or second year during COVID didn’t know how to make phone calls. They hadn’t sat in on negotiations. When it came time to move up the chain to senior associate, they didn’t have the necessary skills. That comes from teams with developed cultural capital, and I think that’s really underappreciated.
The Federal Office Portfolio
Speaking of underutilized things and cultural capital, one of the most toxic discussions out there is around federal office space use, and I know you’ve done federal offices as part of your monitoring. We don’t have to get political. We’re not a political podcast. But how federal offices are used is an economic issue, not just for people looking at return to office, but for folks who invest in federal office REITs and want to know how bad it could be for their portfolios.
Andrew Farah (26:42): Sure. To your previous point about mentorship: mentorship, and even being an apprentice to something or someone, is very hard to do distributed. We talk about return to office as though everyone was previously in an office, but there’s an entire group of people coming to the office for the first time. They don’t know what it means to work in person with colleagues. They know what it’s like to log in to a screen, because they were in college right before, and they had their first job during COVID.
As for federal real estate, there are some pretty brass tacks. There’s approximately 300 million square feet of space. The goal is to reduce it by more than half, and they’ll probably settle around 200 million. This isn’t financial advice, to be clear. Who knows, with the whims of the administration and what it can actually accomplish, there’s a lot outside anyone’s control. But I’ve spent some time with the very thoughtful people behind federal real estate at the General Services Administration.
And I’m not talking about DOGE. DOGE is formerly the United States Digital Service. It isn’t a new department. It’s an old one, created by the Obama administration, that’s being repurposed for its stated goals, and some of its mandate is actually the same. The General Services Administration is a very specific group that’s been trying to consolidate unused federal space for twenty years. They were lowest on the totem pole in terms of political influence, and now they’re number one or number two, because there’s such colossal waste.
Andrew Farah (29:08): I believe the US federal government has a 1.1 billion-square-foot overall portfolio. The portion within the GSA’s control is about 300 million square feet. They have 4,000 leases expiring in the next three years, and there’s an enormous amount of deferred maintenance. The GSA’s budget for investing in literally decrepit buildings, just to make sure they won’t hurt somebody, has been raided over and over again. They don’t have the money, because Congress keeps taking it away. So it’s long overdue for a major consolidation.
To be clear, our federal deployments were pre-COVID and during COVID, and they fizzled out when everybody went home. We had some preliminary data, but it got very weird with COVID, and today it’s a very different conversation. But one thing I didn’t realize about the federal government is that when it owns a building, it needs congressionally approved dollars in a budget. When it leases a building, the GSA has full control to negotiate. It can sign and exit leases and negotiate prices at its discretion. But with appropriated dollars, you have to use them, and any changes to a building you own require congressional approval.
A practical example: five years ago, on the recommendation of the PBRB, the Public Buildings Reform Board, the GSA identified twelve federally owned buildings that could be sold.
Andrew Farah (31:17): I believe none of them sold for a long time. As I understand it, they finally got it approved, OMB rejected it, then the first Trump administration came in, approved it, and OMB approved it. Only in the last six months or so did they sell their tenth or eleventh building, and we’re talking about twelve buildings. They identified an additional 40 during the Biden administration, and zero got approved by OMB. So the incentives are to do nothing: to buy buildings and do nothing.
The reality is that leased buildings pay taxes, and owned buildings are tax exempt. When the federal government owns a building, no taxes flow from that space to the local community. When the federal government leases a building, the owner pays property taxes. There are all these benefits to leasing that I think we’ve really underinvested in.
Gordon Lamphere (32:33): We lease to the federal government in a couple of different ways, and I’ll say we’ve generally found our federal negotiations reasonable in the leasing process. We’re not typically leasing to large agencies at scale, but it’s been reasonable. What we’ve seen with government-owned properties is that they have, at the very least, not been run efficiently. That’s definitely something we’ve seen too.
The Biggest Myth: Meetings Equal Work
Speaking of effective strategies, I’d like to talk about defining where, when, and how work happens. That’s where I think you have the most insight on efficiency and designing effective workspaces, not just for efficiency of experience but for efficiency of actual work product. What’s the biggest myth about how we work versus how we think we work, and how we’re using space?
Andrew Farah (34:05): I think people think meetings equal work. A lot of remote folks would agree that meetings don’t equal work. They’ll say that coming in to be in a meeting isn’t work; it’s preparation or planning for work. The other side of that coin is that heads-down focus time is when real work happens. Meetings are mechanisms to create shared context, and if you have good shared context, the team will row in the same direction. The problem is that we think meetings mean work, so a lot of people “work” all week just by being in meetings. For some functions, that’s totally reasonable, but a lot of functions are just play-acting at work because they’re in meetings all the time.
That tends to be the strongest argument against return to office: “I’m just going to come back to sit in meetings all day.” I’d say what work means is a function of your culture, not a function of where you are. NVIDIA famously doesn’t have an in-person policy, but that’s a terrible example, because they’re such an outlier. They’re literally the baseline of an entire industry, and AMD is barely there. If you look at the most aggressive startups right now, they’re all in person. They just are, and they’re unwilling to compromise on it.
Too Much Space or Not Enough People
Sometimes it’s a simpler problem than people make it out to be. They think it’s about space design, and it can be. Is it a flywheel setup or a dog-bone setup? Six-person meeting rooms? Twenty-five phone booths? Dual booths? We’ve overintellectualized the problem. The problem is that we have too much space or not enough people. That’s kind of it. You can play with either lever. You can decrease the amount of space you have and shut off floors, which will
Andrew Farah (36:30): naturally increase the critical mass on the remaining floors with your existing population. Or you can keep the total square footage and increase the assigned headcount. To be clear, the number of people assigned to a building should always exceed its capacity. Always, even without desk sharing, because people are traveling, out sick, or in meetings elsewhere. You’re never at 100 percent. People say their vacancy rate is 3 or 4 percent because they’ve assigned everyone a desk, but actual vacancy should be determined by utilization. Your real vacancy rate is 41 percent, or 38 percent. These are colossal wastes of space. So all you have to do is shrink the space or increase the assigned headcount, and humans will naturally become communities. They create norms and culture and do everything you need from a productive team to build a great business.
A recent example I heard about is the company behind MyChart. It’s essentially a monopoly. It was founded by a woman who was an engineer before there really were software engineers, in the middle of the country. That’s right, Epic Systems, probably one of the most successful privately owned companies in the world. They built their own campus with crazy, Wonderland-like
Gordon Lamphere (38:04): Right.
Andrew Farah (38:17): structures, Alice in Wonderland stuff, and you’re required to be there. It’s wild. But that’s a culture happening to itself and reinforcing itself. I think we deluded ourselves into thinking distributed work is the equivalent. It’s not zero, but it’s not the same. It’s different, and we should accept it for its strengths and not assume it’s the same.
Gordon Lamphere (38:40): It’s hard for me to argue with that, having seen it over and over with the occupiers we work with, and your point that the size of the space is probably the most important factor is something I’ve seen play out. There’s one occupier we work with, and I won’t name them because it doesn’t reflect well on them, that had a local executive. Because we’re honest with people and not just trying to earn a commission, we advised them that they probably needed only about 65 percent of their current space, maybe 70 percent, and that they should scale back to about two-thirds. The executive responded, “I really don’t want to decrease space, because my office might get a little smaller, and I love my big corner office and the space and freedom.” We said it would probably save them money. He said, “No, we’re going to go to corporate and say we need to keep this space.” And when we looked out at their space, it was exactly what you described: individuals spread apart, not teams operating together. A couple of people, maybe a pair of friends here or there, but not a fully utilized space. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
The Final Four: Self-Driving Offices and Cities as a Model
When we’re looking for truth on this podcast, one of the things we love to do is our final four. It’s always a fun way to learn a little more about you and where you see the world going, and to get a couple of recommendations. The first question we always ask is where you see workspace going ten years out.
Andrew Farah (40:45): I think a lot of people will benefit from self-driving vehicles, and private offices, or spaces to work, will show up in weirdly configured self-driving machines where you face each other instead of the road and work while traveling from California to New Hampshire. That checks the remote work box. But I think we’ve assumed that the digitization of tools means humans will ultimately work together differently, and I just don’t buy it. That’s not out of bias, although we do have a bias toward measuring humans in space. The tools and technologies we have today, like this one, let us do quite a bit more with folks who aren’t immediately nearby. But I don’t think that changes the fundamental value of being in the same place with another human.
A good example is cities. When we invented the car, and by the way, in Ford’s time you could throw a rock and hit a car company, everybody and their mother had one, we started building roads. Roads created secondary and tertiary cities. There’s a great essay about how the car created the suburbs. What people fail to wrestle with is that they thought cities would suffer, but they didn’t.
Andrew Farah (43:04): Cities didn’t empty out. Manhattan isn’t empty. San Francisco isn’t empty. There are times when it rubber-bands in different directions and gets quiet, and prices fluctuate, but demand for being in a city has always remained, regardless of the suburbs. You can think of being in an office with other people as the city, and improvements in Zoom and other technology as the invention of the car and roads. They let us do secondary and tertiary things, like extending the network of people we interact with, but they’re not a replacement for being in the same room, yelling over a whiteboard. Does that make sense?
Gordon Lamphere (43:51): Yeah. I think technology is in many ways a good bandage for some of the gaps in community and interpersonal interaction, but I agree wholeheartedly. There are members of our team where we’ll be fighting over price on a deal, and having that conversation over Zoom or a video platform wouldn’t do it justice. I feel like we couldn’t have some of the tough conversations we have, particularly in the daily interactions where we run into each other. I couldn’t agree more.
AI and the Rise of Revenue per Employee
We always like to go forward, and we also like to go back. One question I love to ask: if you could have given yourself a bit of advice when you were starting out in your career, what would it be?
Andrew Farah (44:50): There are so many things I’d tell my younger self. Actually, one thing I wanted to add on the previous question first.
Gordon Lamphere (44:58): Totally fine.
Andrew Farah (45:00): In ten years, I think company size relative to revenue will be dramatically different. We’re already starting to see 20-person teams generating a hundred million dollars in revenue within their first two years of operation, like Cursor and others. Revenue ramp
Andrew Farah (45:19): and revenue per employee are going to go way up. That will reduce the demand for space, because you can build big businesses without a lot of people. However, I think we’ll see way more businesses get built, so it may not change the overall thrust. The other thing is that people will be talking to their computers all the time. You’ll have really high-quality large language models sitting on your laptop, working with or without the internet, and dozens of them doing tasks that would normally require a human. All of that ends with smaller teams, or bigger teams, doing 10 or 100 times more work than they can today. That’s probably the biggest impact. Buildings will be affected in some way, but work is going to change fundamentally. Some people believe work won’t exist ten years out. I’m not one of them. But it’s a wonderful, weird, and fascinating time, and it’s only ever going to happen once. We’re starting to interact with an intelligence that isn’t us. As someone once told me, we were born too late to explore the earth and too early to explore the stars, but we get to experience AI.
Gordon Lamphere (46:55): It’s always funny to see Marc Andreessen and Bill Gates saying things like, “Well, there will still be venture capital.” Everyone seems to think they won’t be replaced by AI, but everyone else will. I think it’s going to absolutely transform the way we work, and it already does for us. On the early end of a lot of our processes, we’re already using AI agents to magnify the value we provide. Teams are shrinking. To be a really competent brokerage, you used to need a vast team of agents. Now you really need about five very good agents, and you can do any deal. Quality is vastly important, and as you mentioned, team size shrinks. In the 1980s and ’90s, economists would look at headcount when valuing businesses. I think that’s totally going to change. Just as you said, instead of headcount, people will look at total value per
Andrew Farah (48:18): Profit per head. That’s right.
Gordon Lamphere (48:23): We’re already starting to see that in some businesses. We have a number of data center companies coming on the podcast, where four employees run a multibillion-dollar data center. That’s not how people would have perceived a large facility back in the 1980s or ’90s.
Advice for Young Professionals: Read What You Love Until You Love to Read
Let me go back and follow up on the question I asked earlier. For individuals listening to this podcast who are young, what advice would you give someone starting their career?
Andrew Farah (49:08): I’d encourage you to read what you love until you love to read. The percentage of people in this world who read regularly, not just for entertainment but as omnivorous readers, is pretty small. There’s another side to it: if all you ever do is read and encounter new ideas, that has its downside too. But if you’re trying to meaningfully change the difference between you and the next competing person, I’d say don’t try to compete. Just go read. Explore your own curiosities and the curiosities of other people. Books are one of the very few things that let you literally put yourself in the author’s mindset at the time they had those ideas. It’s like a cheat code. That’s a really practical one. It’s also easy for me to say, and people won’t take this advice, but I strongly recommend it.
Book Recommendations From Density’s Conference Rooms
Gordon Lamphere (50:31): I’m an avid reader. Admittedly, I’m not always physically reading, although I do, and a lot of it is audiobooks. If you could recommend one book someone could pick up, what would it be?
Andrew Farah (50:51): Our conference rooms are named after books, so I’ll tell you the names of the conference rooms. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is phenomenal. He’s a physicist, but he writes like a poet, and he talks about time and how time, in a sense, doesn’t exist. It’s a really wild book, and it’s really short. I recommend reading it. It’s a wonderful book. Another is Endurance, about Ernest Shackleton, and especially his navigator. It’s a real story, and it’s insane. Read that book. It reads like an adventure novel, and it’s all real. Shackleton gets all the credit, but Worsley, his navigator, is the reason they’re all alive. It’s an amazing story.
Gordon Lamphere (51:44): As a sailor who took celestial navigation, his ability to actually hit the island they were targeting at the end is incredible. We’re talking slight percentages that he’d get it right, and in high seas, he was able to get accurate readings. Holy moly.
Andrew Farah (52:19): Just awesome. So that’s a great one. Contact by Carl Sagan is a novel. There’s a film with Jodie Foster, but the book is awesome. Read the book. Unreasonable Hospitality is about Eleven Madison Park and what it took to make that restaurant work, and it’s one of our conference rooms. There are some incredible lessons in it. And the room I’m sitting in right now is The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. That one is super narrow, but it’s probably one of the best-written books I’ve ever come across. Again, read as much as you can from as many people as possible. It doesn’t have to be educational. Read stuff you love, and eventually you’ll love reading.
Who Should Be Our Next Guest?
Gordon Lamphere (53:09): That’s a totally acceptable answer. But there’s one question we won’t let you out of, the final one of our final four. We always say the men and women in the arena know the other men and women in the arena we should talk to next. Who should we talk to next?
Andrew Farah (53:35): The world of real estate is going through quite a bit of change, and there are some very good thinkers I’d encourage you to talk to. One is a guy named Phil Kirschner. Do you know him?
Gordon Lamphere (53:51): I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know Phil.
Andrew Farah (53:53): He’s former McKinsey and former WeWork, and he does a lot on his own now. He’s the right mix of provocative and clear, so I’d encourage you to talk to Phil. Phil’s awesome. I also think a lot of people in real estate haven’t been given agency. Real estate is the second-largest expense after payroll, and yet we don’t give real estate leaders the same control and agency over building decisions that we give HR and finance over people and recruiting, where enormous amounts of capital and agency go. As a result, real estate becomes a service function for the business. The business decides the building needs, not the building professionals. I don’t know that it’ll flip everywhere, but I think at the companies that really know what they’re doing, it will, and they’ll give agency to their real estate heads. Phil Kirschner is a really good avatar for that. He’s lived it and supported it. He’s excellent.
How to Reach Andrew Farah
Gordon Lamphere (55:10): We’ll definitely reach out to Phil. Before we go, if somebody wants to reach you or Density, what’s the best way to get in contact?
Andrew Farah (55:21): Just email me at [email protected]. You can also find me on X at @andrewfarah, or on LinkedIn, and density.io is a good place to go. This is our self-installable radar sensor: you can buy it and deploy it in about five minutes. We care a lot about this problem of humans in buildings. People are extraordinarily weird and do a lot of strange things in physical buildings. Preserving privacy feels like something the future needs, rather than something we’ll later have to unwind from surveillance, and technology ought to respect that.
Gordon Lamphere (56:09): We respect having you on the podcast, we respect your time, and we’re so grateful you came on today. Thank you so much for hopping on the podcast.
Andrew Farah (56:18): Thanks, Gordon. Anytime.
Gordon Lamphere (56:20): Thanks again to Andrew. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like and a five-star review. Any interaction, whether comments or subscriptions, truly matters and helps us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere of The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.