Longfellow runs its tenant experience program, Elevate, across life science campuses in Raleigh-Durham, the Bay Area, San Diego and Cambridge in the UK. Erin Shields has led it since the founders started it in 2017, and she sat down with Cove for 35 minutes on how the program holds one standard as the portfolio grows.
The instinct when a program scales is to add events and buy an app. Longfellow went the other way. What mattered was one dedicated person per market, restraint on the calendar, and software that clears the paperwork so those people stay in the amenity space talking to members. The session was aimed at tenant experience, asset management and operations leaders at firms growing past their first flagship campus, and most of what Shields described costs less than an amenity build.
Ten years ago the work went by a different name. "What we now call tenant experience was heavily referred to as tenant relations," Shields said. It sat with property managers as a list of jobs that came back every year. There were summer barbecues, holiday parties, and gifts dropped at the suite door. And it belonged to whoever already had a full job running the building.
Longfellow now runs tenant experience teams next to property management, and Shields is blunt about what that changed for her colleagues. "It's such a relief that they don't have to focus on tenant relations or tenant experience, because as many know, it's an extra thing." Property managers keep the building. The other team takes the events, the amenity spaces and the member relationships. But both still cover for each other when a leak pulls everyone in. Owners weighing the same split should sit with that word, which is relief.
Somebody on the call asked the sharpest question of the session. Lab tenants sit in space nobody can badge into, tied to the bench all day. So what gets them out for a campus event? Shields answered in one line. "We have no issues getting them out of the lab."
Her reason is specific to the people. Health and wellness matter to scientists, and so does shutting the science off for an hour. Fitness pulls hardest, and the gym crowd across the buildings is the group she calls truly loyal. Workshops and cooking classes come next. Her test is whether somebody leaves with a skill they take home, which is a higher bar than whether the room was full. And a scientist in a life sciences building will leave the bench for something worth leaving it for. Shields credits the concierges, who spend enough time with members to hear the ideas directly. "Our tenants have great ideas," she said, and the ones worth running usually arrive in conversation rather than in a planning meeting.
The hard part of scaling was not budget or headcount. It was the pull toward more. "While it's tempting to add more and more programming, I'm guilty of that," she said. Elevate runs on quality over quantity. So the team judges an idea against what its own campus needs, rather than against what a competitor just did.
That restraint comes from something the pitch for one playbook tends to skip. An event that works at one asset can die at another. So the team spends months learning each campus and watching who shows up. No two Longfellow sites are built the same way. The newest amenity space opened in Cambridge, an ocean away from the Raleigh-Durham assets, and it will not run the calendar San Diego runs. What holds steady is the standard and the system underneath it. That is where Shields puts the consistency, rather than in a shared event calendar.
Longfellow staffs one Elevate rep per market today, focused on the larger sites with real amenity space. And the model changes as the firm buys more. Those concierges run amenity management, events, vendor work, the paperwork behind all of it, and the resource reservation system, which sits in Cove. Shields calls them the most important piece of the program. The reason is getting the word out, rather than running the event itself.
A campus can publish a perfect calendar that nobody reads. So Longfellow sends e-blasts and posts to the app, then prints posters and hangs them where a quiet tenant will walk past one. Tenant communication tools get the reach. But the turnout comes from a concierge catching somebody crossing the amenity space and asking if they're coming to the Halloween event next week. "It boils down to word of mouth as well," Shields said, "and really making people feel special and wanted."
The best evidence for that model came from a tenant who wanted a new job. They asked the concierge whether anybody in the park was hiring. As they put it, "I can't ever imagine leaving here." An employee loyal to the campus rather than to the badge is worth something at renewal. And no leasing team can manufacture it.
Mike Sensenig ran tenant experience programs before he joined Cove. He named the worry that comes up on nearly every call. Operators think moving bookings into software costs them the relationship, since the booking request is how they hear what a tenant is planning. His answer is that the request and the paperwork are two different things.
The paperwork is asking whether alcohol is coming and whether a caterer is booked. And it's collecting the certificate of insurance, or COI, from that vendor. All of it has to happen and none of it builds anything. Hand it to a tenant experience platform and the concierge gets those hours back. The relationship is what they spend them on. Longfellow runs work order management and building access through the same building operations system. So a member has one place to go for the freight elevator and the fitness class alike. Sensenig is careful about how he frames the trade. The software isn't doing the job instead of the concierge. It's clearing the part of the job that never built a relationship in the first place, which leaves the bandwidth for the part that does.
Shields puts return on investment, or ROI, at the top of any talk about measuring. Elevate reports to investors like every other part of the business. Under that sits engagement, and the questions she asks of the data are plain ones. Was this event worth running? Should it run again? Which tenants use the platform, and which ones don't?
That last question is where the data stops being a scorecard. Leases keep getting shorter, and every tenant reaches a renewal. A tenant whose people fill the gym and RSVP to the food truck gives an owner a strong read walking into that room. A tenant who has gone quiet gives the same read the other way. And it comes early enough to run a retention play before the conversation starts. Longfellow owns and operates its own buildings, so one tenant touches most of the firm's teams. Shields ties that whole run to the wins worth having, which are extensions and expansions.
After eight years of running Elevate, the lesson Shields landed on was not a tactic. "We spend so much of our lives at work, so creating an environment for people to flourish both personally and professionally is a pretty amazing superpower." Her practical advice costs nothing, unlike an AI assistant or a new amenity build. Ask your tenants what they want. They have better ideas than the calendar does.
Dedicated people and one shared system. Longfellow runs a rep per market and keeps work orders, access, bookings and messaging in one place. That is what holds the standard when no two campuses run the same calendar. Adding events without adding people gets you a busier calendar and the same turnout.
Yes, and fitness leads everything else. Scientists stayed at the bench through the years when office tenants were remote. So the draw is health, wellness and a break from the science, rather than a reason to come in at all. Workshops and cooking classes follow, because they send somebody home with a skill.
Only until the portfolio can carry someone who owns it outright. Tenant relations on a property manager's desk competes with building operations every time both need attention, and building operations wins. Splitting the roles lets each side go deep, as long as both still jump in when something breaks.
Watch turnout by tenant rather than in total. Event RSVPs, amenity bookings, app adoption and gym usage show which companies are bought in and which have drifted. That pattern appears months before a renewal. A survey catches a moment, while engagement data catches a direction.