Creating technological workspaces for people & the environment

At Charter Hall, we craft workplaces that are responsive to the needs of our tenants. Technology is an increasing feature of our approach. We use two apps – Charli and Comfy – to build community and promote wellbeing.

Our Charli app was the first of its kind to market in Australia. It allows our customers to activate spaces and host engaging events. Created in collaboration with CBRE and with input from our tenants, it was launched in November 2018 in our offices at 1 Martin Place, Sydney and 570 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

Since its launch, Charli has been used to host a range of TED-style talk events, with a focus on wellbeing. Speakers have included Australian surf world champion Layne Beachley and NRL CEO Todd Greenberg. It has also been used for tenant engagement in trivia and wine nights and a knock-out table tennis tournament between tenants, coinciding with the 2019 Australian Open.

The app has also been used successfully as an organising platform for wellbeing activities, such as yoga – the most popular event for registrations to date, and as a sustainability communications platform. In FY20 Charli will kick off monthly sustainability initiatives and programs, which commenced with plastic-free July.

In November 2018, the Charli app won a Game Changer of the Year award in REA Group’s annual AREA Awards, for Commercial Real Estate.

Comfy is another app we use to improve wellbeing within our assets. Comfy allows individuals to personalise the temperature of their work zone. In 2017 we oversaw the first Australian deployment of Comfy in our 1 Martin Place, Sydney office to test and learn, and then rolled it out to four buildings in 2018 and continued expansion to 26 assets by the end of 2019.

In aggregate, Comfy receives 500 requests per week for temperature adjustments, bringing the total to 40,000 personalised requests since it was deployed. The data provides insights for us to draw on in tailoring our spaces and helps improve the experience of our employees and our tenant customers alike.

Overall we have had positive feedback from our employee and tenant customers on their experience with Comfy and seen cumulative energy savings of 14% across the four buildings, equating to 250 tonnes of CO2e.

Comfy use is currently expanding to one other asset and we are looking at additional opportunities.

Through our Charli and Comfy apps, we’re making new connections possible and – in a very literal sense – putting wellbeing into our tenants’ hands. Both initiatives are part of our evolving journey with technology, which has both our tenants and us engaged by the results.