2022 CTIA 5G Summit | Keynote: AT&T's David Christopher & JBG SMITH's Evan Regan-Levine

Thanks everyone for having me. Really excited to be here. A little bit different than the real estate stuff I typically do, so very exciting to be here. When we think about what National Landing is, National Landing is a project that before we even started, it's an existing neighborhood. It's an existing neighborhood with an office market the size of the Austin, Texas CBD. It's home to Amazon's second headquarters and it's home to Virginia Tech's billion dollar innovation campus. JBG is the master developer of this 15 million square foot project ranging four miles and a hand that's being built top to bottom with next generation feature connectivity. Now we love acronyms in the telecom industry, but CBD—that's a new one I've had to learn some of your acronyms along the way.

Yeah, it's an amazing—it's one of the biggest developments happening in the United States. Absolutely, and it's right here.

Well, we always start when we think about a new project by thinking about what our user cares about, what the customer wants. Actually, even pre-COVID, we went out and talked to a lot of different tech and telecom executives. We wanted to figure out from folks like the people in this room: what do you care about when you make a location decision? How do we think about not only what Amazon did but what everyone else is thinking about? We know that talent was of number one importance, but second to talent was connectivity—and that surprised us honestly. We didn't really know how to think about that. We were used to building great places that had physical placemaking, and this really opened our eyes to having to build digital placemaking as well and think about that connectivity layer. When COVID happened, we saw a massive sea change in our industry. There's a move away from commuting to the office five days a week; there's a change in the way cities have to function. But we still thought at the time we were on the right path because we were ahead on the connectivity point, but we were also thinking about how do we create that 20-minute city, how do we make more people walk and bike to work, and how do we change the workplace so it's actually an appealing place to go? The connectivity layer is an important part of that, but it drives a big environmental outcome.

We achieved carbon neutrality this past year; we're very excited about that. But how do we go beyond that and say it's not just about making our buildings and our portfolio carbon neutral, but about delivering that connected 20-minute city where people can live, work, shop, and walk or bike to work? I'll tell you one example: we looked at Seattle's South Lake Union and realized very quickly that Amazon shared with us that 20% of their workforce walked or biked to work. It became our challenge to say how do we get that to be 30%, 40%, and how do we keep more workers coming into an office as a collaborative space but also having the tools they need to work from home? That's how people will make decisions about their office location, their residential location, and how those two overlap. We want to shorten that commute.

Sure. The rough math on this: if you figure Amazon's going to add about 38,000 jobs and for each Amazon job there are follow-on technology companies, as that ecosystem expands, if we say that 20% of those people aren't going to get in a car to come there—that baseline Seattle number—then you're talking about eight to ten thousand people. They're living in that neighborhood, depending on follow-on demand, not taking a car into their office. The other thing that came with Amazon: they helped bring enhancements to public transit, building a walkable pedestrian bridge to the airport, and enabling all of this with technology so that experience once you're there is better. It's all about getting people out of their cars and making that 20% go to 30%.

It is absolutely utility. My partner Adam Rashid, who helped conceptualize a lot of this build, always loves to say two things: one, real estate houses the economy, and two, this is a utility. When he says this, he means our converged network offering. That's so important because we would never build a project today without making sure there was water and power, and even making sure some of that power was solar or renewable. But we don't think about it—we ignore connectivity and we don't let it happen the right way. We let it go to the market's sort of decision, and left to its own devices, the market doesn't build the kind of connectivity stack we need. We have to find intentional partners just like we have to go out and make sure the utilities in the development function the right way and everyone has access to it. So we always start with that as the baseline, knowing that it needs to be redundant, reliable, and secure. That's how we think about it from a utility perspective. But what that unlocks isn't just the simple prosaic thing about people being able to do their Zoom calls from the park or go from their bedroom to the boardroom to the park on the same network. It also opens up an experience layer. For developers, we're always thinking back to that point: how do you get someone to come somewhere? You have to have a next generation experience, and that next generation experience really comes down to how we deliver an experience layer that runs on that network, takes advantage of that connectivity, surprises and delights, and makes people feel excited about the way they interact with their workplace and their home. I think that's where there's incredible potential for technology to unlock that—specifically the connectivity layer unlocking how we can build that.

I think you're hitting on an interesting point. The different industries—people in our industry don't always think about that the same way. We've been educated by AT&T and others; we're learning more. For developers, it's something that somebody else does. It's like, 'Great, I want to create a conduit in a building and someone else will take care of that pesky fiber or make sure that there's a mounting point on the side of a building for a small cell.' We don't think about it, and I think that's where our industry is shifting and adapting, driven by needs for more connectivity, to think about it as a KPI and to think about it differently.

I think there are a couple ways. One—and we've talked about this a lot—is actually understanding more about how people use our buildings. We've said from the outset we're not about collecting PII or information like that; not what we do. But what we do want to know is: is a room empty? Is it full? Is it hot in here? Should I have the HVAC run because I can detect there are a lot of people in the room? So much of what we do today in our industry is antique. Think about how many people swipe their badge to come into the building. It doesn't matter if someone swiped their badge and five people followed them in. I want to know how many people are in a room at a given time so we can adjust energy utilization or even how to plan our product: are people using one amenity, are they not using another? We can shrink our footprints, make them more efficient, and create this adaptable building environment that doesn't exist today in the same way. It can happen in pockets but not across an entire city scale neighborhood enabled by the sensor network.

I think it comes down to the fact that one of the things we're known for is mixing uses. You're not going to understand everything about a city if you only understand one piece. If you look through a myopic lens at just departments or just office, it starts with understanding how people move between different uses in a neighborhood. Then it's about saying, 'I can understand how they move, and then I can adjust my sensor network and build out a case that teaches me more about the right kind of product to build.' How do I think about my investment case for building a new amenity if I don't know who's using it or why? How do I think about investing in advanced sustainability technology if I don't have a way to program that in the right sense or learn from the data we're collecting? We have a fairly unprecedented ability to look across this entire place, and because of the massive device density supported by our network, we can have a really good idea what's going on. A lot of places track it over time and apply machine learning to that so that we can start to size our project differently, shape our amenities differently, understand the urban form and the built environment differently. In a time when a lot of people here are rethinking how they use office space, it gives people a chance to say, 'This is what I'm using, this is what I'm not. How do I make the right decision? How do I pick how people interact with my space, and how do I reduce my footprint from having 500 offices to having 100, and then manage those 100 really well from a sustainability perspective?' For the CFOs of the world, having the right data to feel confident that this type of investment is actually going to pay off has been a challenge. It's chicken and egg, and you guys are actually proving it out real time. I'll give you a real life example. We were talking to a company recently that would reduce their office footprint by half. We own office, but we're not Pollyannaish about what's happening in that world and how hybrid work is changing. We don't think office is going away, but we think it's going to change. Some neighborhoods are going to win, some are going to lose. The places that win are the ones that have a better environment. The CFO at that company was looking, saying, 'Can I really cut my space in half?' They used advanced data: they put sensors throughout their space, tracked it for three years, studied how people actually use the space, and then went to their architect and said, 'I want to invest in a more expensive buildout. I want to make the space nicer, put more technology in it, and more sensors. But I'm going to cut my real estate bill in half.' That's typically the way companies look at things like this. They say, 'I'm going to pay more on a dollar per foot basis for better, smaller spaces, but I'm going to enable those spaces with the right technologies.' If you look at the relative cost of putting some sensors in versus paying a landlord in a big city a lot of money for office space, the sensors are always going to be cheaper. If the sensors unlock that ability to shrink their footprint, that has a carbon footprint impact for companies, a real estate cost impact for companies, and it can also have an employee benefit where people say, 'I know I want to come to work in a space that's different.' It's fantastic.

Thank you so much.