HaiTian Center | Qingdao, China
Finding the story behind operational excellence

HaiTian Tower 2 is part of HaiTian Center, a landmark mixed-use development overlooking Fushan Bay in Qingdao, China. The Super Class-A property is home to the St. Regis Qingdao and international businesses, with sophisticated operations supporting a highly complex building environment.

When the property management team prepared to compete in BOMA’s International TOBY Awards, the challenge wasn’t creating a story about the building.

The story was already there. The challenge was recognizing it.

The Challenge

The Outstanding Building of the Year competition evaluates much more than the physical property. It examines the systems, practices, people and decisions behind a building’s performance—from tenant and employee relations to sustainability, emergency preparedness, personnel training and overall operational excellence.

HaiTian Center had years of development history, extensive operating practices and a property management team doing highly sophisticated work. Capturing that for an international submission required understanding not only what the team was doing, but why it mattered.

Another layer of the challenge was language.

Much of the source material was in Chinese. The documentation was extensive and highly technical, and a handful of interviews or marketing materials couldn’t convey the work behind the property.

Before I could write the submission, I had to understand the building.

Understanding the Property

At the invitation of BOMA China, I traveled to Qingdao and toured HaiTian Tower 2 with the property team. Seeing the building firsthand provided context that documents alone could not.

From there came the deep dive.

I worked through nearly ten pounds of books and extensive digital documentation, much of it written in Chinese, using translated materials and working with the property team to understand the systems, programs and operating decisions behind the building.

The goal wasn’t simply to collect information for an award entry. It was to determine which details demonstrated excellence and how they worked together to tell the property’s larger story.

That distinction matters.

Property managers live inside their operations every day. Processes that are sophisticated, innovative or unusually effective can become so familiar that they no longer seem remarkable to the people doing the work.

Part of my role was seeing those things with fresh eyes.

Once the value became clear, the submission could do more than describe the building. It could demonstrate the thinking, leadership and operational discipline behind it.

That is what makes the TOBY process valuable beyond the competition itself. The framework gives property teams an opportunity to examine their work against recognized standards, identify what distinguishes their operations and become better at articulating the value they create.

Results

HaiTian Tower 2 advanced through the TOBY competition and ultimately earned an International TOBY Award in the Over 1 Million Square Feet category.

The award recognized an exceptional property and property management team. For me, the project also reinforced something that continues to shape my work with commercial property teams today:

Operational excellence deserves to be seen.

Recognition begins by understanding the work well enough to identify what makes it exceptional.

Key Takeaway

Some of the most valuable work within a commercial property happens behind the scenes. It exists in systems, decisions, training, relationships and operating practices that tenants and visitors may never see—and that property teams themselves can begin to take for granted.

Awards and certification programs can provide more than recognition. Used intentionally, they create a framework for examining that work, benchmarking performance and developing the professionals responsible for it.

For HaiTian Center, the TOBY submission wasn’t about manufacturing an award-winning story. It was about uncovering and communicating the one that already existed.