How JLL and OpenSpace Are Partnering to Transform Commercial Real Estate with New Technology
November 5, 2019
This August, we were thrilled to announce strategic partnerships with some of the world’s leading builders and developers, including Tishman Speyer and JLL. Along with these partnerships came significant investment in our future success in the form of a Series A round—funding we’re using to develop new computer vision-powered products for the construction industry and to scale our operations.
While it’s always terrific to have people invest capital in our vision, the thing we were most excited about with this round is the fact that the majority of our new investor partners began their relationship with OpenSpace as customers. We’re still a young company, and having customers who immediately grasped the value of what we were bringing to market and who wanted to partner with us in the most literal sense is incredibly energizing. Simply put, the knowledge that our technology is already in people’s hands, saving them time, money, and stress on job sites, makes us eager to come to work in the morning.
In this post, we’ll focus on one new partner in particular: JLL, which is a Fortune 500 company with operations in over 80 countries and nearly 92,000 employees. Its JLL Spark division invested in OpenSpace as part of a broader commitment to transforming commercial real estate with new technology.
We began working with JLL as a customer in September 2018 and are incredibly proud of the results our technology has delivered for the firm—and its potential to transform the way the company runs all of its commercial real estate projects in the future.
Image: Lee Kennedy
In one instance, OpenSpace was adopted by a VP-Project Management who was concerned about inefficiencies when he managed projects remotely. Manual on-site documentation wasn’t a viable option; it simply took too long, and he was overly reliant on pictures sent by contractors.
By implementing OpenSpace, JLL:
- Reduced the time to capture, upload, and map imagery from job sites by 90%,
- Slashed travel costs (since project managers in most cases could monitor progress via virtual walkthroughs), and
- Saved thousands of dollars in rework costs and changes through improved workflows.
These results are being replicated across other projects and teams, but we believe they’re the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can build in partnership with companies like JLL. Their market insights, feedback, and data will be critical as OpenSpace continues to innovate in areas like computer vision and 3D modeling.
To learn more about how JLL is already using OpenSpace to improve project delivery through faster, more complete documentation, download the case study.