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Shawn Mahoney
Title: Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, GID Cos.
Age: 59
Experience: 32 years
Shawn Mahoney oversees technology planning for Boston-based General Investment & Development (GID) Cos., which owns more than 21,000 apartments and 3.8 million square feet of commercial space. Since its founding in 1960, GID has acquired and developed more than 73,000 residential units and 16 million square feet of commercial space in 24 states. In his current role, Mahoney is leading GID’s adoption of smart-home technology enabling residents and management to control building systems and security access remotely, and contributed to the National Multifamily Housing Council’s recent report on how demographics and technology are changing apartment designs.
Q: What was your first job in the real estate industry?
A: When I got out of college I thought I wanted to be an architect, so I went to work for Moshe Safdie Architects in Boston. What I learned was if you want to have control over a project, you want to become a developer because the people with the money control the design.
Q: Which tech advances are gaining traction in the multifamily industry?
A: What’s coming down the pike is the Internet of Things, which is really going to be as fundamental to real estate as the Internet was. It’s a huge thing. It’s good for residents and even better if you’re an operator. We’ve done one pilot in Cambridge and we’re getting ready to commit to doing what I would call smart-home technology, but making it operate for an entire community.
Q: What are the implications for how building systems operate?
A: For us, it’s really access control and the thermostats. The thermostat is really kind of an operational savings thing, and access control is a resident amenity. Let’s say you have an apartment in Boston and you shut the heat off in February on a trip. If the pipe breaks, it could be a $100,000 repair. We might control the (minimum temperature) so it can’t get below 50. If 50 apartments are vacant in a 40-unit building, with my console I can say, “Put all of these apartments into the vacant setting.” It impacts everything. If you’re a resident, you could make the building an extension of yourself through your phone. You could use it to reserve the club room for a party. You see it already in hotels.
Q: How do you address residents’ concerns about compromising their security?
A: Security is something everybody should be concerned about. We would make sure that it’s all secure. The company we’re partnering with has a whole security regimen. Security is a weird thing. If you look at Airbnb, a lot of the people have people staying with them in a spare room, and these are people they don’t know at all.
Q: How is the rising adoption of remote working environments affecting apartment designs?
A: That’s a big deal. If you look at a typical high-rise luxury building, 40 percent (of residents) work from home in these buildings. That was from a survey of a couple of buildings that we own in the Southwest in 2012. If you go in the lobby, those people crave socialization. If you’re working from home all the time, you want to get out and have a cup of coffee. We have golf simulators. I would tell you there is a very small but devoted group of people who use those. Real estate is a notoriously conservative business. If you make the wrong bet, it’s very expensive and you’ve got to rip it out and do it again. You’ve got to incrementally innovate, which is why Internet of Things is so big. It makes obvious sense.
Q: How has the repeal of net neutrality changed the industry’s approach to resident tech offerings?
A: Cable TV is going to change. It used to be that a lot of properties only offered a triple-play package from Comcast or Verizon. Two things have happened. They repealed the law that said ISPs could not take your information and sell it. That’s not good. And then, the repeal of net neutrality. So now these people can limit your access and charge other people for fast lane access. There’s a lot of dark fiber and technologies around to let people become their own ISP. You can hook up to dark fiber, beam high speed to your building and offer a just-Internet package. It’s very appealing to younger people who don’t really watch TV or they do time-shifted TV on Netflix or Hulu.
Mahoney’s Five off-the-Beaten-Path Favorites in Downtown Boston:
- Galleria Umberto, Hanover Street
- Custom House Dome and Tower Observation Deck
- Lobby Clock, 101 Federal St.
- Greenway Carousel
- Egyptian Revival Arch, Old Granary Burying Ground
