Would you walk into Starbucks and say ‘Morning, I’d like a Flat White and for you to announce to the whole coffee shop my name please‘? – Or, does this sound a little odd?

Well take a visit to Starbucks anywhere in the UK now and you’ll be asked “What drink would you like?” followed by “…and what is your (first) name please?” When your drink is ready, your name is then shouted out – even though you are likely to be stood less than a metre away. Starbucks are doing this to make the customer experience more personal – is this a step too far for the American thinking firm?

“Have you noticed how everything seems a little impersonal nowadays?”, its website asks wistfully. “We’ve all become user names, reference numbers and IP addresses…From now on, we won’t refer to you as a ‘latte’ or a ‘mocha’, but instead as your folks intended: by your name” the coffee chain claims.

I have to question this. Being honest; I don’t really like every stranger in the coffee shop knowing my name. I don’t know them and will more than likely never meet them again. I suspect for most people this is actually compromising the ‘customer experience’. The barista’s seem uncomfortable asking your name and most customers either act surprised or uncomfortable having to provide their name back. The whole ‘experience’ is a little strange and doesn’t make it feel personal in a positive way.

I wonder whether this Starbucks initiative is actually more about getting them in the news and people talking about this subject (like me!) in an attempt to raise their profile, rather than actually focussing on the customer. This could be clever marketing, but are they boosting their coffee sales from this? I strongly suspect not.

My name, next time I visit Starbucks, will be ‘Costa’! 🙂

I attended a property and investment conference yesterday at the Congress Centre in central London. The title/ focus of the conference was ‘The globalisation of Student Housing and the Future Investment market‘. As usual it was a well attended event – probably 350+, with senior representatives from UPP, Liberty Living, The Mansion Group, Campus Living Villages, Bouygues, Opal Group, Knightsbridge, Watkins Jones…to name just some! The student living property market has remained buoyant through the recession and investment/ development has continued, albeit at a much lesser level than at its peak in 2006. As well as continued development of new buildings in 2012, the property transaction market is active and large deals continue across London and the regions as new entrants seek attractive investment returns on assets and existing players restructure their property port-folios/ funding/ debt facilities.

Funding remains an obstacle in the sector, the banks are obviously risk adverse, but perhaps need to change their thinking about only backing the ‘The Times Top 20‘ – these are high profile institutes with a strong supply of purpose built housing! Are these really the best locations/ schemes to fund? The need in the market is the top 20-50+ ranked universities. Robust schemes in the right location, with the right design and realistic cost models can be achieved – and should be funded. Clearly there is much more I could say about funding, but that’s not my focus. What I would say is that both private and university deals are happening in the sector. We are involved in a number of significant transactions at present – one of which is in excess of £100m. We have also just secured a project with the University of Liverpool for circa £50m. There are many more we are working on at various stages and our experience extends to every one of our UK offices now.

Interestingly the view on the impact of student fee increases is pretty consistent from all quarters (universities, developers, operators, agents, investors, funding organisations); it wont have a significant or detrimental impact on the continued need for Student Housing.

‘Student Experience’ is a hot topic this year – the bar is being raised in the quality of accommodation from both the building fabric externally and internally, but also in how facilities are managed/ operated. Universities need to align their housing offer with the academic offer – and with higher fees comes increased expectation of quality throughout university life. New design ideas continue to emerge and this has been a big focus for us in demonstrating to clients that we continue to lead the sector in design. We have delivered in excess of 10,000 bedrooms in the last 6-8 years and we have at least 5000+ beds in design development at present.

A big theme of yesterday’s conference was on future ‘globalisation’ of student living – the UK is No. 1 globally, in terms of volume, in property and investment of purpose built student living – both on and off campus. UK universities are expanding and investing globally now, for lots of reasons. With that comes increasing opportunities to take our successful UK experience in student living to European countries, Australia, America, China, India and many others. Jones Lang LaSalle have recently published a feature on this which can be see here.

Yesterday’s conference has once again been hugely positive and useful for me and our business – we are an established and recognised architecture firm in the sector with a huge diversity of experience now. We have some excellent long-term clients in the sector, with whom we are proud to be associated with. I now have a number of meetings to progress in the coming weeks, with potential new clients, to continue to fly our flag and tell people how we can genuinely ‘add value’ to development projects through our experience and way of working.

As a member of Invest in Nottingham, I have written a guest blog for their website. I decided to focus on the importance of ‘Infrastructure’ and ‘Innovation’ to promote economic growth…You can see my blog by clicking on the image above or here.