The Sensor Stack Powering Tomorrow’s Workplace With Bob Cicero – RFP – 78 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:04): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Bob Cicero, hybrid work and sustainability leader at Cisco. Tired of badge swipe data? Bob reveals how to turn your existing Wi-Fi, cameras, and BLE into a live x-ray of how work actually happens. He explains the platform approach that cleans and normalizes data automatically, so you design once, learn continuously, and improve from there. From PENN 1 in New York to Class A office portfolios, he shows how tech-first planning crushes meeting misery and wasted space. Bob, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Bob Cicero (01:03): Gordon, thank you for having me here.
Where Technology Meets Real Estate
Gordon Lamphere (01:06): So what got you interested in real estate and how people work?
Bob Cicero (01:11): It’s an interesting question. I’m a technologist at heart, but I’ve always loved architecture and great design. If you look at the way we’ve worked and the transformation we’ve had over the past couple of decades, more and more of our work experience was provided by technology. Now, when you think about the physical and virtual world coming together, it’s all driven by technology. Yet from a real estate point of view, technology is often not thought about. It’s always last. So if we’re really going to have a great combination of people, space, and technology, we have to think about the overlap there and how it’s all going to work together. I’ve just always found it fascinating.
A Platform Approach to Buildings
Gordon Lamphere (01:57): So how does it work together in this modern era? We’ve got so much going on. We have AI, and we have rapid technological change in terms of general processing power. How do we work with technology?
Bob Cicero (02:14): It’s a great question. In the technology world, we think about a platform approach. You have a Wi-Fi network and a wired switching network, and it’s really a horizontal platform that touches everything you do. So we thought about how to take that concept and bring it to the real estate world, to really amplify the intersection of people and space. We knew that technology is providing all these experiences, so we have to bring it forward from a design perspective.
When we think about that notion of platform, we center on four elements. How do you bring physical and virtual together? How do you drive a frictionless experience when you’re physically in person? How do you think about sustainability goals, not just the amount of energy we use, but also embodied carbon and those other elements? And how do we look at health and wellness inside the workplace, things like air quality? And then ultimately, it’s really data. Data comes together to form that foundational model, and that’s where the aha moment is for a lot of organizations: it’s the data that’s going to drive us forward. If you look at everything from an AI point of view, if you don’t have the right data, you’re not going to have the right model.
So at some point you have to get the right data elements together across the board, and we think that’s a combination of elements we provide from a technology standpoint. For example, Wi-Fi is a great sensor. We know where people are, in terms of understanding how buildings are getting loaded. We’re adding intelligence into the way we communicate now, counting people inside a room. How do we take all of that data and form models around it to drive priorities, not just for individual companies, but for building structures, in terms of how space should be built, and really understand how people are working? I think that’s the opportunity we all have collectively if we take a fresh look and bring technology forward in how we think about design and rollouts and all those other elements. But it’s really data that underpins it all.
Getting Good Data
Gordon Lamphere (04:27): So how do we get good data? There’s all sorts of data out there, right?
Bob Cicero (04:31): Out there.
Gordon Lamphere: And sometimes it can seem like boiling the ocean if you’re just gathering all the data and putting it into whatever storage you’re using to sort it. How do we get good data, and how do we actually utilize it?
Bob Cicero (04:50): It’s a great question. In the real estate industry, you often see a lot of single-point products purchased to solve a specific use case. For example, “I’m going to go buy an occupancy sensor to count people.” Okay, great. That’s the only thing the device actually does. And if you have all these disparate data sets, you’re automatically going down a path of forcing all the data together. You typically throw all that data into a data lake, and then you have to look at the data, and sometimes clean it, scrub it, and normalize it before you can do anything valuable with it.
That’s why we believe in this platform approach: let us do that as a technology company, because that’s what we do. Don’t think about discrete elements, and don’t think about technology as a massive expense that’s going to solve one little problem. Think about it as a roadmap for that platform. You’ll find that you don’t have those challenges of taking all this data and having to scrub it and normalize it. That happens automatically. And now you can really look at the data that’s going to form actual outcomes for the problem you’re trying to solve. So yes, data has to have good hygiene, and of course we have great data hygiene. But it’s really about thinking about data and mapping it out at the onset, and having a strategy around it, versus having all these silos of data and throwing them into a data lake and trying to make it all work together.
Gordon Lamphere (06:24): I can imagine the data needs of a company vary substantially based on what that company is. If you’re a manufacturer, you’re going to care a lot more about understanding the inputs and outputs of the manufacturing process. When employees are showing up, maybe you’re looking at factors like air quality. But you have vastly different data sets for companies like tech companies. For example, one tech company I’m working with right now is really heavily focused on third spaces and gathering spaces, how their employees are gathering, and how they’re using meeting spaces. How does that map and data set change for you when you’re evaluating a company, and how does it shape how you gather the data in the first place?
Bob Cicero (07:26): It’s a really good question, because we think about the industries, the verticals, if you will, and they all have different use cases. But if you boil it back, it’s really the same data set. Take occupancy as an example. You ask most organizations how they’re working, and a lot of them say, “Well, we think our average meeting size is eight people, so we’re going to build eight-person rooms.” But they don’t have the data to substantiate that. In reality, most organizations actually work in small groups. We don’t see that bifurcated among industries. It’s really the same.
Healthcare has different use cases, right? Think about tumor boards getting together physically. There are a lot of doctors in the room, but they’re also pulling people in virtually. But from the industry standpoint, it’s the same horizontal technology approach that we’re pulling all this data out of, and then we customize it based on the industry use case. A manufacturing floor is naturally very different from an office space or a healthcare environment, but the way you grab the data is still the same. So this notion of the platform really resonates with every single vertical, because it’s a standardized approach.
The reality is that a lot of the data exists already, but the challenge is that it’s sitting in IT, and IT may not be talking to real estate leaders or plant operators. IT already has a lot of this data, because everything is already connected. There’s intelligence embedded in everything we do. We’ve added AI capabilities to our video technology for years, where we can count people, but folks don’t even know it’s there. So part of this is an aha moment of exposing it and understanding what you actually have to start with. There could be augmentation on top of that, but by and large, across all the industries we serve, it’s the same data, gathered the same way. The little permutations and use cases may differ depending on the industry.
Designing for Physical and Virtual Together
Gordon Lamphere (09:38): Speaking of serving industries, one of the biggest things I’ve seen you do is blend physical and digital experiences. We’re not going into Tron, but at the same time, we are blending with technology these days. How do you see that process going, and can you give me some case examples where the physical and digital worlds are blending for a more productive work environment?
Bob Cicero (10:13): For sure. Post-pandemic, this notion of digital equity, or video equity, has popped up. Video conferencing has been around for years, and the pandemic really thrust it to the forefront. Cameras are always on, and people are used to it now. But the complaint was that bringing physical and virtual together was always a challenge, because you couldn’t see people’s faces in the room.
So we took a fresh look at that for our own facility when we first built our New York City PENN 1 location, with this notion of being technology forward. If you look at the traditional A&D process, technology is always last on the bus. The architect does the drawings of what the room is going to look like and the physical aspects of it. Someone from workplace typically picks the furniture and chairs. And then at the last minute, it’s, “Yeah, we’ve got to talk to IT, because IT is going to have some sort of screen, they’re probably going to have some sort of wireless, and they’re going to need some ports to plug things into. What does that look like?” Most of the time we were entering the process at, say, 90% DD, and they had to issue the drawings because they had to get the place built.
We took a fresh look and said we have to flip that model. If we’re really trying to amplify the intersection of people, space, and technology, it’s about the user. So we think about the end user experience first. You’re going to brainstorm, you’re going to learn, you’re going to problem solve. You’re going to have collaborative meetings and focus work. What are the modes of work? The second choice we make is the technology that goes in the room, and that’s governed by camera angles and all the pieces the technology has to adhere to. The third choice we make is the furniture. If you walk into any one of our modern spaces, there are no square or rectangular tables. Most of the time they’re trapezoidal tables.
Gordon Lamphere (12:18): Why is that?
Bob Cicero (12:20): Why is that? When you have a trapezoidal table and a camera at the front of the room, the camera needs to see everyone. The slight angle of that table allows everyone to have a face in the meeting. And if everyone has a face in the meeting, then we’ve solved bringing physical and virtual together. If you were to visit us and put the system in self-view, you’d see what the remote participants see: the table still looks like a rectangle or a square, depending on its orientation, and yet everyone still has a face in the meeting. That’s where we think we’ve really broken down the barrier between physical and virtual.
We also have other tools on the video side, where we can frame the people who are physically in a room in their own individual frames, so the remote participants still see the Hollywood Squares view we got used to during the pandemic. So we have the tools to do that. But it’s really this melding: technology should be forward, then look at furniture, and room size and layout should actually be last if we do it right. That’s what we’ve found success with, taking that approach for all of our modern spaces.
Gordon Lamphere (13:34): What do you think this ultimately means long term for the design of future office spaces? Is it tech first and space second, or is it a blending of the two?
Bob Cicero (13:49): I think it’s a blending of the two, but technology can’t be last. We’re not saying first. We’re saying forward, forward in the process, as a governing model for how you think about design. Every customer we’ve engaged with who has done this has seen an unlocking of capability, a really effective coming together of the physical and virtual worlds.
And designing with data is also part and parcel of this whole change. How do I use the data I have about the way my specific business operates to drive what my space should look like? We have the data. We talked about that standardized data approach, how we collect it, and the technology we use to do it. That data should inform design. So we often think about a learning loop: what are the outcomes you want out of the space? Build it, grab the data, and iterate consistently for optimization, whether it’s for current sites or future sites. At the end of the day, you have to be mindful of the data. That’s the change we think needs to happen in the industry. Yes, technology needs to be brought forward, but understanding the data, and how to apply it to the spaces we’re thinking about for the future, is super critical.
Beyond Badge Swipes: Data That Changed the Design
Gordon Lamphere (15:18): Can you give me an example of when a data set was used for general office productivity and added value? I’ve got a lot of folks in our client base who are skeptical, particularly because a lot of the data they’ve used in the past is things like card swipes or computer logins, and they have very little idea of the data sets people are using to judge work productivity. What are you seeing applied, and how does that play out in terms of productivity benefits?
Bob Cicero (16:04): It’s a great question. We’ve seen it all. Think about the badge. You badge in at the front door, and maybe into a secure area, but you don’t badge into all your individual offices, quiet rooms, huddle rooms, and so on. What we’ve used, and what we’re actually doing at scale now across the globe, is the video capabilities and assets you have in the room. If it’s the right asset, like our devices, we’re actually counting people.
We looked at this in our first location, which we opened in April of 2022, though design started during the pandemic. We had the technology to look at how we were actually working, and so all of our spaces were built for three people. Everyone said, “Wait, we’ve never built spaces for three people. We’re used to six-person, twelve-person, eighteen-person rooms.” What we proved is that we actually don’t work that way. We work in small groups. So we took that data, and every huddle room we have is three-person, or four-person sometimes. That allows us to not only use space efficiently, but also have all the technology elements in every space people use, because video is everywhere. It’s going to be the coming together of the physical and virtual worlds we talked about.
We also use the data to look at what people like. People vote with their feet about the spaces they love. As we iterate and try new types of spaces, there’s one we built in New York that became almost like a luxury suite, with higher seating, lower seating, and lounge seating, and it wasn’t a traditional table. It was an experiment: are people going to like this? What we saw from the data was that it was the most highly utilized space we had. And by the way, it was in the middle of a massive floor plate with no windows. So we’d put it there for a reason. Then we did user surveys, and people said, “We love it. It fosters collaboration, it fosters brainstorming.” So we proved that by recognizing the data and trying something. Then we took it to our next site, Atlanta, and built four of them. Now it’s this constant iteration.
The video technology and the assets you have, if it’s the right technology, are available in the call or out of the call. We have NVIDIA technology inside all of our devices,
Bob Cicero (18:28): and that’s the magic that’s actually looking at that. Wi-Fi is another great example of data, and not just the Wi-Fi we have for connectivity, but Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE, and soon ultra-wideband. All of these technologies are above our heads anyway, and now we’re starting to use their data sets. We often do an exercise with our clients to understand what data they already have. We start with macro floor plate load, for example, using surveillance cameras. Surveillance cameras are going to be there for safety and security purposes. If you add a little intelligence, I can actually count people. Then we look at Wi-Fi data, then video data inside the rooms, and then desk-level data as well. We stitch those pieces together to get the view that drives the outcomes I mentioned before, whether it’s room size or what people like and how they vote with their feet, and to provide that capability at scale across the portfolio.
What Wi-Fi Data Can and Can’t Tell You
Gordon Lamphere (19:27): Can you go into greater depth on what Wi-Fi data in particular you’re looking at and how you’re using it?
Bob Cicero (19:34): We think about Wi-Fi as a form of connectivity, certainly. For a lot of people, their first form of connectivity is Wi-Fi. And from that standpoint, I know when a device gets there. We’ve developed machine learning in the cloud, in a platform we have called Cisco Spaces, that dedupes the data. So if you and I have multiple devices, we’re not double counting people. That gives us the capability to understand what’s happening across the floor and by zone.
The challenge with Wi-Fi is that it goes through walls. RF penetrates walls. So that’s when we turn to the other data sets. Wi-Fi is really good for understanding how people are using a zone. But if you say, “I have a one-person quiet room,” Wi-Fi bleeds through the walls. So we have telemetry that gets down to zones and floors, that type of granularity. But the Wi-Fi access points above our heads now have other radio technologies in them. We’re using those same access points with radio technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE, and that’s how we’re doing wayfinding. So now we have a mix of those pieces that really drive an experience, and the data set that comes off of them, so we know how people are using the space.
Ultimately, we’re eliminating the sprawl we talked about before, where the industry grew up buying specific-use technologies and then trying to integrate them. I have a Wi-Fi access point above my head anyway. If I can use it for Bluetooth Low Energy, I can now drive wayfinding and asset tracking solutions. If I want super granular asset tracking, ultra-wideband is in that access point as well. So it’s really the blend of those. It’s not just about Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi data, yes, is zone and floor, as I said, and in aggregate it could be an entire building. That’s where we start in understanding the data.
There are other technologies out there now as well, like something called OpenRoaming,
Bob Cicero (21:48): where roaming agreements have been struck with carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile, so I can jump on the Wi-Fi automatically without the end user touching anything. It can be another form of connectivity to get people onto the infrastructure seamlessly, potentially eliminating the cost of distributed antenna systems inside a space. So yes, to your question, the Wi-Fi data set is really good for floors and zones. But because of the challenge of going through walls, that’s when we turn to an optical camera, because there’s going to be a video endpoint in the room, and if it’s the right video endpoint, which we think is Cisco, we can look at what’s actually happening inside the room.
How the Workplace Has Changed Since the Pandemic
Gordon Lamphere (22:26): One of the big things we saw post-pandemic with our clients is that CEOs, COOs, and down the list of C-suite executives started caring maybe five to ten times more about how their employees were using workspace, because they had the before and after of COVID. What are you seeing as the biggest changes going on in the workplace, and how has it evolved over these last five years in particular?
Bob Cicero (23:09): Post-pandemic, I think the jury was still out on RTO, return to office. Are we coming back to the office? Some organizations mandated five days a week, and others said come back whenever you’d like. I think we’ve settled now, five years out. The biggest difference, and we still see this, is that the spaces people have are still inadequate. They’re inadequate for how we work now, across this physical and virtual medium, and also in terms of getting prepared for the impact of AI and the opportunities to leverage it.
By and large, what we see is more collaborative space for our customers. At Cisco, for example, we start with seventy percent collaborative space and thirty percent focus work, or “me” space. So our “we” is seventy percent, and our “me” is thirty percent. We see that permeating through multiple industries in how people think about space constructs.
We also see that it’s really about the people. If you think about space and real estate, a lot of times it was a CFO or COO function inside organizations. We’re seeing it move more and more into the HR world. For example, our real estate leader works for our chief people, policy, and purpose officer, our CHRO, because space really is about the people. Once we’ve figured out how much collaborative space, the mix of space, and the space types, a lot of it not dedicated, like free address space, we can layer in the well-being aspect, which matters. How do I maximize natural daylight? How do I support circadian rhythm? How do I think about air quality?
That’s why you see us, as a company, putting sensors into everything we produce for the world. Sensors not for IT purposes, but for understanding temperature, humidity, VOCs, and ambient noise, aligning with some of the principles out there from a WELL perspective. So well-being is now front and center, making sure the space is appropriate based on biology, what’s best for us as human beings to do our best work.
Bob Cicero (25:36): It also helps the space become a magnet, so people want to be there. It’s very clear in the data, in our own spaces and our customers’ spaces, that people want to be in these types of spaces. It’s not just a new shiny object that’s going to lose its luster after a year. We’re now almost four years out, and the spaces that are built, designed, and operated this way, and that care about well-being, are the ones people want to be in.
What Makes a Building Smart
Gordon Lamphere (26:08): One of the biggest buzzwords I hear from clients is smart buildings. Can you give an example of a smart building project you’ve worked on, and some of the technology that drives what a smart building is?
Bob Cicero (26:28): I’ll use our own space as the example, since it was really our first flagship. We as an organization have been in the smart buildings world forever, but it was really around what could happen in the core and shell of a structure: converging all those disparate infrastructures on one network. That’s fantastic, and then we get the data together. But we saw an opportunity, as the IT industry modernized and we added capabilities to our products, to take that data and drive smart building outcomes. For our PENN 1 space, we had a fundamental thesis that if we could turn everything into data, we could prepare for the world of AI we’re now entering.
We also wanted to solve for the fact that when you look at smart building projects around the globe, they became integration projects: taking a bunch of disparate technologies, threading them together, making them work with customized software, and then having to care and feed for that over many years. So our approach was, one, the platform we talked about, and two, how do you make all these things just work together, literally out of the box? But it has to be built on a technology-first mindset, that technology-forward approach.
We didn’t start with design, and we didn’t start with the technology stack. Yes, we started with the user experience, but we also started with the data. What do we actually want to do from a data standpoint? For example, we wanted to sense air quality. The natural thing would be to go put in an air quality system. We took a step back and asked, what’s everything above our heads in the space? I have lighting up there, mechanicals, but how does it all connect? What’s the data set, and how can I make it open and not stuck in a silo?
So, for example, we moved our entire ceiling to low voltage. That’s the energy side. But low voltage happens to be what our industry has used forever to power a telephone: Power over Ethernet. Power over Ethernet now can carry a lot of energy on that cable, but the key is that there’s also data on it. So everything
Bob Cicero (28:55): above our heads became data, which was a key strategic priority for us, because we needed to stand the test of time and be able to plug anything in in the future without it being a project. Underpinning that are the four design imperatives we talked about before: the mixed-presence experience, frictionless when you get there; sustainability, reducing embodied carbon but also looking at operational carbon, with that fundamental Power over Ethernet, low-voltage ceiling; then the wellness side, adding sensors into everything we do that’s going to be there anyway, not a specific technology set for a specific use case, but blended into everything already in the environment; and the fourth was that data element, to prepare for the future we now see from an AI perspective.
When you walk into our space, the space starts by understanding people, not who you are, but the number of people, with our surveillance cameras. To us, that was a natural one. Start with surveillance cameras, because they’re going to be there, and do people counting on them, on what we call our MV line of cameras, adding that intelligence there. We’re deploying Wi-Fi at a density of about one AP for every thousand square feet, not for Wi-Fi, but for BLE and the ultra-wideband we talked about. The network became extensible everywhere above your head, because the lights, the shades, and the mechanical controls all became low voltage and data based. The network is now servicing not just data but also power. And then we ground ourselves in the data that comes out of our collaboration and video technology in the room.
All of this just works together. It rolls up into the cloud, into a cloud service called Spaces, and it literally works out of the box. That was our big idea: not to have a smart building that was a bunch of Legos you had to put together, but to have it out of the box. If you subscribe to this, with our partner technologies, not just Cisco technologies, you’re going to have success from a smart building standpoint. So you walk inside the space, and the space comes alive. Of course, there are lighting zones everywhere. Your devices automatically jump onto the infrastructure, and you walk into a room, and the room says, “Hello, Bob,” as an example.
Bob Cicero (31:19): From a temperature standpoint, we’re taking the people count in the room and using it to influence thermal comfort inside the space. Everything is automated. The shades go up and down based on radiometers on the roof of the building and lux level sensors, but it’s all one system that works together. And there’s no integration of all the custom software packages that have been out there forever for driving smart buildings.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere (31:45): So the future will likely be smart, at least to some degree. I’d love to get into our Final Four and talk about where you see the future of commercial real estate. One of the first questions we always ask is: where do you think the modern workspace is headed, and what do you think will change the most about how we work, if you’re forecasting five or ten years out?
Bob Cicero (32:14): I think what we’re going to see is that small groups are here to stay. If you look at agile software development models, it’s small groups that come together. Small groups are here to stay for sure. When we look at future capabilities, I think we’re at a point where we see that technology needs to be forward, but not everyone’s doing it. The industry absolutely has to adapt and adopt to that, because technology is not going away.
And then there’s AI. To have really good AI and really good models, you need the data. And it can’t be six months of data. It needs to be years of data to inform these models for us to get to this AI future. We’re using AI more and more internally. We’re even using AI for visioning of projects. And AI is going to be applied not only to the human worker. We believe in an agentic future. When we look at this agentic world, we think about an agent for us as humans, our digital counterpart, an agent for every space, an agent for every place, and an agent for operations, whether it’s the IT side or the OT side of the house. That agentic world is going to be here.
There’s also a lot of discussion, and I’m sure you see it at industry shows, around humanoids and what’s going to happen there. At the end of the day, they’re going to need some form of connectivity, which is why you need robust infrastructure under the covers. So from where we are today: small groups staying, technology forward, AI enabled, then we get to agentic, and after that, it’s going to be super interesting to watch.
Gordon Lamphere (34:16): We always love to travel to the future, but one of the things we get a lot of value from, particularly for our younger audience, is taking a step back. If you could travel back to the start of your career and give yourself one bit of advice, what would it be?
Bob Cicero (34:35): It’s a great question. The person who hired me twenty-five years ago, his name was Jim, gave me one piece of advice: take risks. I took that to heart. I’ve always tried to figure out where an industry is going, to skate where the puck is going, as you always hear. But it takes risk to go there.
I wish I had started building my network earlier in my career. Maybe it’s because of the rise of social media and LinkedIn and those tools, but it was a very different world, so I could say we didn’t have the tools to do that. It was a very small microcosm. But building a network of individuals you can learn from and get advice from, and, oftentimes, you run into someone you haven’t seen in twenty years, it’s really that network of folks I wish I had started building earlier. For folks who are early in their careers now, there’s no excuse. They have the tools. Be super visible on LinkedIn, but put out thoughtful ideas about how to move your particular industry forward.
Gordon Lamphere (35:57): One of the ways we like to move this podcast and our audience members’ brains forward is by looking at sources, particularly books, as alternatives to conversations in the podcast world, and particularly recommendations from the experts we have on. If you had a book recommendation, what would it be?
Bob Cicero (36:33): Some of these books are dated, and some are about leadership, but I thought one of the most impactful books about leadership is Team of Teams, by General Stanley McChrystal. That was a while ago, right?
Gordon Lamphere (36:50): It’s still a great book. I’m not going to poo-poo it.
Bob Cicero (36:55): It is a great book. Now I just read Cisco blogs. No. But think about leadership, being steadfast in your commitment, and being super highly focused. When you think about what Sully did landing that plane, I happened to live there, and I saw it. Reading Highest Duty was also impactful for me, because it shows the nerves of steel that had to be there. Oftentimes, especially when you’re trying to change an industry, and I think this industry is undergoing rapid change, obviously COVID forced some of it, but with this notion of technology coming in, you have to have the commitment and conviction that this is one hundred percent going to happen.
Gordon Lamphere (37:50): We’ve had a lot of change in the industry, and a lot of it’s overdue. One of the ways we try to change the minds of those who listen to the podcast, and I think we’ve been very successful at moving the industry forward, even within our own little bubble, is to get some of the best and brightest voices on and hear their perspective on the real estate world in general. If you could give us one voice who should come on the podcast next, who would it be?
Bob Cicero (38:26): In the real estate world?
Gordon Lamphere (38:29): Yeah, or just somebody who affects the real estate world broadly.
Bob Cicero (38:33): I spent a lot of time in New York from a real estate standpoint, working on iconic projects like Hudson Yards and Manhattan West, and building stadiums like Yankee Stadium. When you look at thought leaders in the industry, there’s a vice chairman who comes to mind. His name is Scott Panzer. Scott is front and center not just in real estate, but also in technology. He has that unique blend. He’s represented agency for Sheldon Solow’s properties, when he was still alive, and some of the most prominent addresses in New York, and he blends that with technology. Again, as we talked about, I’m a technologist first in my career, and technology is front and center in my heart. So that’s who would come to mind.
Gordon Lamphere (39:29): We’ll have to reach out. There’s one final question we always like to ask on the podcast, and it’s simply: if somebody wants to get in touch, what’s the best way to reach out to you, Bob?
Bob Cicero (39:42): LinkedIn is the best way. I’m out on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/bobcicero. I’m happy to connect with others, and in my travels I often like to meet folks in the cities if I have the time. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Gordon Lamphere (40:00): Bob, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Bob Cicero (40:05): Gordon, thank you. This was fantastic. Appreciate the opportunity.
Gordon Lamphere (40:08): Thanks again to Bob. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with 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.