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In February, Bisnow sat down with Dean Hopkins, newly installed chief operations officer of Oxford Properties, on the 29th floor of the Cheesegrater skyscraper in the City of London, to talk about how the company planned to overhaul the way it runs its business. Since then, things have changed pretty fast. And the time frame for that overhaul has accelerated faster than Hopkins could have anticipated.
“It might have taken us and our colleagues in the industry three to five years to believe in and implement that digital transformation, but it’s happening now,” he said in an interview about the impact of the coronavirus on tech adoption and changed working processes, this time on a video call from his home in Toronto. “One of the silver linings is this is the best change story imaginable.”
Hopkins, whose background is in tech rather than real estate, was brought in to help Oxford, the Canadian pension fund with $45B of property assets under management, change its processes and adopt technology, so it could double those assets in the next seven years, deploying capital intelligently, efficiently and quickly without hiring a huge number of new staff.
Hopkins outlined where the way Oxford works has changed rapidly in the past few months or where the uptake of digital tools has been accelerated, as well as where tech adoption has been slower than anticipated or where real estate needs to catch up to…
Read the full story here.
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