IRVINE, CA—Property-management teams are being asked to do so much more with less money, making cost- and time-efficient cloud-based software even more of a priority, Genea's CEO Michael Wong tells GlobeSt.com. The locally based firm recently added two commercial real estate industry icons to its advisory board—Mike Latham, president of ABM Facility Services, and Brenna Walraven, president and CEO at Corporate Sustainability Strategies—and its client portfolio has reached the 100-million-square-foot mark. We spoke exclusively with Wong about the company's direction, its accelerated growth trajectory and trends he's seeing in property management.

GlobeSt.com: Tell us about the accelerated growth your company is currently experiencing and the reasons behind it.

Wong: I took over this business in November 2011. Genea had been around for a while, but it hadn't developed the right business model. Now, with the right team, there's a much better marketing strategy in place. What we're most proud of is not that we've grown, but that any building we've implemented since 2012 we've retained. That tells me we're doing something right, from a financial and a customer-service perspective.

GlobeSt.com: What will the recent additions to your advisory board do for your firm?

Wong: Brenna and Mike are absolute icons in their individual fields. They are thought leaders and very well-respected people. Mike employs a ton of engineers, and since we cater to the owners of the building, our property-management teams and the engineers have to be comfortable with each other. Having Mike on our advisory board gives us a lot of credibility in the engineering world and that whole side of the property.

Brenna, who's a former head of BOMA, has a tremendous amount of credibility and visibility on the property-management side. We see the impact of what she brings to the organization, and she has so many speaking engagements. These two people have enormous talent and a great reputation, and with the demands on their time, we're extremely honored that they have carved out some time to be a part of Genea. That means a lot to us.

What Brenna and Mike are going to bring is not just lending their name and counsel, but they will also help us see a lot of different parts of the business from a product-development standpoint as we grow our suite of products. It will be very helpful to get their feedback on what the industry needs, and we will be leveraging our relationship with them for ideas on the product-development side.

GlobeSt.com: What trends and changes are you seeing in commercial real estate and in property management?

Wong: I have a private-equity background, and I tend to think pretty financially, but in this industry, property teams are being asked to do so much more with less. There are cost pressures and demands to keep on growing, so sometimes the rubber has to meet the road, and property teams need more-efficient process or they will not succeed. We fit in with that.

Property management used to be a very manual process with the work-order system. Automation takes work off the shoulders of the property team and makes the tenant experience a lot better. Through the old work-order system, tenants would have to let us know by Friday at noon if they were planning to use the office over the weekend so the HVAC system would be up and running properly, but now they can control it through their iPhone app. Part of the reason we've retained 100% of our clients is that we are able to provide value for tenants and property owners.

For a fair amount of time, owners made money not necessarily focusing on the operations of the building, but more on the buy and sell in a rising market. Sometimes operations became less of a focus because they felt that's not where you move the needle in making money. But the downturn made a lot of larger owners more focused on the internal aspects of owning buildings and has benefited companies like ours who have provided ways to add value. As the market has improved, there have been a lot more transactions, but the focus on operations hasn't really gone away. That's been a benefit to us.

GlobeSt.com: What is the most significant way that technology has changed the commercial real estate industry?

Wong: It goes to the point of what we try to do as a company. Technology is only good if it makes people's lives easier. Some technical applications for commercial office haven't been well adopted because it puts more work on the building staff to execute. If there's not a way to automate the workflow, they're not getting the value out of it because they don't have the time. When tenants can turn on their own HVAC services, there's an energy-efficient byproduct. You just have to keep it simple—the better technologies the world has adopted are the ones that keep things simple. It's not by accident that Apple has created such popular devices because any child can pick them up and figure them out relatively quickly. That's when technology is particularly powerful.

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