Emerging technology in Real Estate

Why am I writing about Real Estate Tech? Well, it's kinda a funny story. Last week, I was approached to prepare a 15-minute video for Adapt Convention, a virtual event organized by Juwai IQI which began on 14th December and ends on the 17th of December 2021.

I was told that I could talk about anything under the sun but knowing that Juwai IQI is an Asian Real Estate Technology Group that empowers residents of Asia to become residents of the world, I thought it best to speak about what I love best- technology- in the real estate industry. So the research began. I had one day to prepare, edit and submit the video (the deadline was pushed forward from 4 days to 1 day!)

If you've been following me on LinkedIn, you would know that I enjoy sharing stories about innovations, artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, ecommerce so learning about what's happening in real estate was enjoyable. The 15-minute video was just enough to cover the fundamentals so here's the elaborated version of the presentation where I speak about the tech being used in Real Estate. So let's get to it.

The pandemic has provided us with a necessity, to rethink the built environment. The technologies that are now available – and others in the process of being developed – are set to radically reshape how we construct, interact with and use buildings. 

The increasing deployment of technologies, from connectivity and hardware advances enabling the mass use of sensors to machine learning and artificial intelligence, now mean that nearly every aspect of the property industry has the capacity to evolve more quickly than ever before. 

The real estate industry had been slower to integrate new technologies than other sectors, but the pandemic is taking us beyond the integration of technology solutions that help to deal with immediate challenges—such as managing remote working, health and sanitation tracking and touchless movement—as normal business practices are being upended across the industry.

Expectations from consumers and companies are rising in tandem, underpinned by demographic changes that see younger consumers and workers demanding greater technological capacity from their homes, workplaces and cities.

The next stage of proptech innovation and adoption will be driven not only by new or maturing technologies, but also by the need to respond to long-term structural challenges, ranging from continued urbanization and demographic shifts to dealing with the explosion of information through cybersecurity measures, data privacy and greater transparency. Sustainability and broader ESG considerations around health and wellbeing, in particular, are moving to the fore.

Automation and AI

Infrastructure and buildings are generating increasing volumes of data, and across the core set of technology types and tools—from ‘smart’ buildings and cities to automated workflows and even virtual reality viewings—the ability to gather, process and analyze this information in order to generate meaningful solutions is integral.

Data is also one of the main issues holding back adoption of new technologies and platforms, with siloed, partial and lagged data inhibiting the ability to utilize available technology.

Widespread issues include:

• Manual data collection and storage processes, with most data collection still carried out in Excel or legacy systems which are not connected centrally.

• Lack of company and industry data standardization, with varying types, levels and processes for collecting information even within the same company.

• Decentralized and complex data privacy systems

• Lack of integrated software solutions, with a fragmented landscape of providers offering a range of incompatible solutions for individual data types and use cases.

• Limited skills within organizations to gather data and implement new technologies.

Centralized, structured information is key to some of the most exciting applications of new technology with the greatest ability to boost efficiencies and aid decision-making, from real-time portfolio performance tracking to AI and automation. Generating trust in data and technology—particularly for AI applications where these automate processes or are public-facing—is also crucial for acceptance and adoption of new technologies. 

Automation and analytics tools for Automation

Real estate agents need to handle multiple, complicated tasks, often all at once. They have to manage diverse real estate marketing tactics, such as social media and lead generation. They also take care of contracts, complex negotiations, and more.

One way to make your real estate business more efficient is to implement automation.

Here’s a list of tools to help automate the real estate process for agents, including lead generation, referrals, customer relationship management (CRM), client follow-up, email marketing, open house planning, and content management.

1. Mailchimp helps to create and automate email campaigns. Choose from existing email templates to create newsletters, open house event emails, drip campaigns, or other marketing collateral that you can send to your customers and prospects. Schedule distribution and receive key analytics to help you refine your digital marketing efforts.
2. Hubspot can help real estate agents track their sales leads, create a log of sales activities, keep track of how deals are progressing, Access History Of Activity Per Prospect, Log And Track Emails, Schedule Meetings with Ease and much more. Download the FREE Real Estate Strategy Template.

There is mounting pressure from all stakeholders in the real estate industry to contribute to lower-carbon and more resilient buildings and cities.

Enhanced tracking of energy performance and emissions, implementing higher-efficiency or new energy systems, and combining environmental and facilities performance data with advanced analytics and modeling to automate processes and achieve higher utility are all key areas where technology is facilitating this transition.

The arbnco building performance platform provides the tools and analytics for commercial organizations to collect, verify and bring real insight to their building energy and workplace wellness data.

The Common Carbon Metric 2.0 (CCM2.0) is a tool for measuring building energy related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy savings potential of the stock of new and existing buildings in an investment portfolio, municipality, region or country.

BrainBox AI was created in 2017 with the goal of redefining building automation through artificial intelligence to be at the forefront of a green building revolution. The startup offers real estate owners tools to optimize their buildings’ energy usage and operational efficiency.

Digitization and ‘big data’

In the world of real estate, a growing number of deals rely on data analysis. From faster, more accurate appraisals to sophisticated forecasts, the use of analytics can lead to smarter decisions about property investments. 

As networking technology continues to advance, it’s likely to create increasing amounts of data around buildings, their use, and their users. If it’s possible to systematically compile and analyze data from all relevant aspects, then entirely new applications for operating, leasing, financing, and purchasing real estate will come into being.

Source: Deloitte

Data is an essential component of tomorrow’s business foundation. But benefiting from it will require settling the question of who controls the data. Legitimately and understandably, both owner and user will claim the right to “their” data. Under those circumstances, real estate service providers have a few options. One is to own and operate the relevant technological systems themselves. However, this would be a significant investment.

The more obvious solution is to intensify the collaboration with users and owners. Digitization means integration and networking. Issues, tasks, and business models become more intertwined, requiring specific know-how and skills. If providers want to avoid handing over these services (and control over the data) to third parties, they must develop the appropriate expertise through their own employees or company partnerships. Once these are in place, they can set about establishing the infrastructure and architecture they need without losing control over the data.

Supporting healthier and more human-centric environments

The pandemic has highlighted the need for healthier, better designed and more human spaces. There is a growing recognition of the benefits presented by more healthy urban environments and workplaces, from greater mental wellbeing to increased productivity and cost savings.

A concept for a city in which citizens can access their daily necessities by foot or by bike within 15 minutes has won the Obel Award for 2021. Aptly named the 15-Minute City, the urban planning model was developed by French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno to help tackle car hegemony and create more sustainable human-centric urban environments.

When COVID-19 hit last year, it immediately caused the shuttering of schools and offices, emptied out public transport and in some cases, restricted residents to a tight perimeter around their homes.

But with the adage "never waste a good crisis" in mind, it was precisely these restrictions that have provided urban planners with a ripe opportunity to rethink how we can reorganise our cities in a more ecological, sustainable way.

Instead of cities with distinct districts for living, socialising and working, Moreno’s concept envisages the urban centre as a tapestry of neighbourhoods where all three functions co-exist.

According to Moreno, the dramatic shift towards remote working has demonstrated that the "15-minute city" is not only feasible but could also be instrumental in regenerating urban neighbourhoods.

Enter the concept of the "15-minute city," which stipulates that all of our basic needs should be met within a 15-minute walk or cycle from our home.

The idea, which was originally conceived by cities expert and Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University professor, Carlos Moreno, was not expressly borne out of the pandemic but it has given it a second wind.

The City of Melbourne has visualized the features of their 20-minute city approach, as shown in the image below.

The pandemic has highlighted the need for healthier, better designed and more human spaces. There is a growing recognition of the benefits presented by more healthy urban environments and workplaces, from greater mental wellbeing to increased productivity and cost savings.

Just like our bodies, buildings also require regular check-ups or physical examinations to identify problems or issues that need to be addressed. A quick health assessment can identify all potential high-touch surfaces or areas and rank them in conjunction with location priority setting. 

Based on the findings from the health assessment, sensors can be installed in high-risk areas and sensitive zones to continuously monitor air quality, as well as the thermal, visual and auditory comfort of occupants.

In addition, on-site assessments, computational modelling and simulations can quickly identify high-risk areas, such as poor ventilation. This allows operators to recognise the sources of pollution and optimises the building’s operation and management.

A digital platform like Neuron building management platform can provide a detailed real-time picture of how a building or facility is operating, and what kind of experience its occupants are having.

TK Elevator has developed a new voice recognition platform, which will allow each passenger to call the elevator when they are outside the cabin and communicate the floor number, once they are inside. The voice assistant, using WiFi or 4G, will avoid to push the buttons, which are easy to store viruses and bacteria and reduce the chances of infection.

In addition, an automatic air purifier will be installed to sanitize continuously, with an absolute HEPA filter, combined with an activated carbon membrane, which will ensure instantaneous replacement. The air, taken from the cabin, will be filtered and purified from viruses and bacteria and re-entered into the environment.

With Schindler's ElevateMe mobile application, users can call an elevator and select their destination using their own smartphone. ElevateMe app is available on both the iOS or Android operating systems.

The Mad Fixtures Toe-To-Go foot-activated elevator call button allows activation of hall & car station buttons by shoe, reducing the risk of transferring germs by creating a hands-free experience.

Property managers are tasked with making decisions on when and how to reopen amenities in the safest way possible. Opening amenities that by nature bring people in close contact with one another such as the pool and gym is a difficult challenge when trying to abide by social distancing rules. 

For multifamily communities, this means putting capacity and time limitations on residents using amenities.

Mobile Doorman is a mobile app for multifamily buildings to create a virtual community board for residents to be alerted of building-wide news, receive weekly newsletters, see upcoming events, and reserve slots for amenities. Mobile Doorman previously offered amenity booking features in its app – but since COVID-19 have rebuilt the feature entirely relaunched it as Amenity Spacing by Mobile Doorman.

Amenity Boss allows property managers to reopen, manage, and track usage of amenities that abides by social distancing rules and is fair and equal for all residents. It has features to limit capacity, hours, and party sizes for scheduling amenity reservations, provide analytics on amenity usage, and an easy-to-use app for residents called “amenity pass” to schedule a time to use amenities and get an e-pass ticket that gets them into their amenities.

PropertyApps is an all-in-one solution for creating an online multifamily portal for rent collection, tenant communication, building staff management, service requests, facility & operations management, and more.

PropertyApps for Amenity Reservations is a new feature built into the platform that allows property managers to set rules, time limits, and capacity limits on building amenities. It gives residents a self-service portal for viewing open time-slots, approved reservations, amenity waitlist, and an overall calendar view of amenities.

Enabling new ways of working and collaborating

The pandemic has advanced the digital transformation of businesses, and the workplace is now truly boundaryless, with employees expecting a safe, productive and seamless experience wherever they work. To achieve these aims, companies will need to find ways to enable hybrid work, empower and engage employees wherever they are, and manage variable and dynamic occupancy patterns.

As the company transitions to a hybrid work model, it’s important to track how many people are in your workspaces on any given day and what office areas are seeing the highest demand.

The goal is to collect enough data to anticipate how often workplaces are being used and by whom. Over time, this data can offer insights into how best to reconfigure the workspaces.

Slowly but surely, we’re moving back to to the office. At the very least partially. What remains unclear is what the split between working from home and the office will look like, how our behaviour in the office will change, and what this means for office design. To deliver the optimal employee experience and adapt to the new Hybrid Workplace norm of tomorrow, Corporate Real Estate teams need to be agile and adaptive. This means accurate utilization insights are more important than ever.

HubStar launched Portfolio Insights, which highlights peak utilization and resulting consolidation opportunities per building. With this functionality, it’s easy to compare these numbers to last month’s or last years metrics to get a more comprehensive picture of the current situation. A consolidation statement section helps gather ideas for how to consolidate portfolios.

A Patterns report allows building managers to understand a building’s pattern of utilization for the average work week. Insights such as the set of core hours of use and ideal operating times for building services, staffing and cleaning hours for service areas are derived from this report. More alerting functionality is available keep your planning in sync with what’s going on in your buildings in realtime.

Automation and AI for dynamic portfolio management

Improvements in automation and AI analytics offer significant scope for transforming portfolio strategy and management for both investors and occupiers.

New analytics capabilities and technologies also offer significant potential for portfolio space management in other sectors such as retail. Footfall analysis and space usage mapping can be used to adjust pricing and tenant mix by location within a retail building or portfolio, while in-store tools like customer and inventory tracking can help to optimize shop layouts and even lead to automated experiences such as in Amazon Go stores.

Lease management tools such as VTS are being used to extract information and speed up and automate the leasing process.

Smart Contracts

With the growth of blockchain and amid rising interest in technology applications for real estate, or “proptech,” more property professionals are hearing about smart contracts, but the meaning of the term is not always clear.

There are many definitions, but generally, a smart contract is an agreement that needs no external action to execute the terms of the contract. Once the conditions for its execution have been met, the smart contract completes the agreed actions automatically.

To not require external action, the terms by which the contract is executed, including the consideration to be paid and when that payment is due, must all be digital so that a computer program can follow through on the agreement without outside help.

For example, you and I could make a contract, under the terms of which, I agree to pay you $100 if the temperature today goes beyond 100 degrees Celsius. For that contract to be executed, there must be a digital feed of the temperature that the program can access, and my $100 must be in a form that can be transferred without further interaction.

In addition to purchase and sale agreements for properties, other examples in the real estate industry where smart contracts could increase the certainty of execution, streamline processes and reduce costs include rental agreements; service agreements involving multiple activities, complex levels of service or service credits; commission agreements where the certainty of payment is required; as well as service guarantees and warranties.

Hybrid smart contracts–smart contracts that leverage both the security of blockchain networks and the richness of real-world data inputs–give holders the ability to use their tokenized real estate assets on blockchains in unique ways, such as trading them against reliable benchmarks or supplying them as collateral for a loan. Additionally, exotic derivatives products can be created and settled on-chain using an external data feed, allowing stakeholders to hedge against various real estate industry trends.

Each of these hybrid applications requires access to existing APIs like premium real estate data providers and payment gateways, which Chainlink makes easily available on-chain for both developers and businesses eager to explore the possibilities of blockchain-based real estate applications.

3D Modeling

Building design and construction lies at the center of several of the key factors shaping changes to the built environment, including:

• Climate change and resilience. With building materials and construction contributing around 11% of global carbon emissions, pressure is growing for the industry to contribute to lower-emission buildings and cities which are more resilient to anticipated climate impacts, with governments from the EU to Japan pushing for all new construction to be net-zero carbon by 2030.

• Health, social sustainability and wellbeing, with the pandemic highlighting the need for healthier, better designed and more human spaces.

• Demographic changes, as population aging in many advanced economies and continued urbanization lead to shifts in the amount and types of buildings and amenities needed.

Advances in design software including Building information modeling (BIM) —creating digital replicas of buildings including 3D floorplans and utility infrastructure—or digital twins, which integrate real-time monitoring of conditions from sensors and other devices, enhance the ability to design more efficient buildings, reduce waste and increase resilience.

These tools can be used to simulate building operations, fine-tune design features, check that construction meets design standards, and track performance even after the building is completed.

Maturing construction techniques include modular or prefabricated construction which improve efficiency and drive cost savings by standardizing and producing building components off-site (in climate controlled environments) and then fitting them together on-site.

Prescient in the U.S., for example, is able to translate 3D BIM drawings into automated assembly instructions and produce structural components such as exterior wall panels and elevator shafts off-site. While modular construction is one of the more advanced construction innovations, a range of others are at an early stage of development including 3D printing, in which components or entire buildings can be created using large concrete printers, and the use of robotics for repetitive tasks like bricklaying or transporting equipment on-site.

The use of ‘smart materials’ like self-healing concrete or climate-adaptive ‘smart glass’, which changes opacity to control the level of light and heat passing through, can also reduce emissions and capital expenditure requirements over the building life cycle. Leveraging the latest technologies in sustainable materials is an important component of responsible procurement, with methods of sequestering carbon in construction materials, for example, gaining in prominence.

Robotic and digital fabrication on building sites could revolutionize the construction industry, enabling for materials to be produced on-site, which could reduce delivery time on materials, facilitate shorter project lengths, reduce material costs and allow for more consistent product quality

Drones for Design and Mapping

Drones ease the burden of property design, especially when it comes to views. It’s nearly impossible to see what a view would be from the ground, so drones can help decide placements of sitting areas, windows, and overall design structure of properties.

Drones can also help identify any unseen issues and give in-depth looks into dense regions. This technology can also view traffic patterns, which is crucial for retailers thinking about building a new location. Drones make gathering this information quicker and more reliable, which is a massive help for architects and investors

Leasing and marketing

Commercial real estate for-sale and leasing marketplaces have been slower to develop than residential listings platforms, with the added complexity of large commercial buildings and transactions holding back progress. Many existing platforms are focused on smaller, less complex transactions or specific asset classes, with significant changes needed to meet the requirements of large institutional clients.

Juwai.com is gradually replacing classifieds portals and traditional agency models. Their new model integrates the super application, IQI Global agent network, and the online property marketplaces, Juwai.com and Juwai.asia. This gives real estate marketers an end-to-end marketing and sales solution.

Digital marketing tools are also decreasing the time and effort needed to market commercial properties. Advanced CRM tools like Hubspot and analytics now allow sellers and brokers to more accurately identify and target potentially interested investors or tenants in real time for more focused marketing campaigns. Once deals are in process, online data rooms permit relevant information to be shared privately, while virtual viewings based on immersive AR/VR and drone technologies let interested parties assess buildings remotely.

Lease management tools can significantly streamline the listing and leasing process, as brokers and agents increasingly shift from paper and manual to digital approaches to shorten deal times. The market for these solutions is currently dominated by a few major providers, but owners and tenants still face issues ranging from lengthy deal times and fragmented back-office processes to limited tools for tenant relationship management or insights into the effectiveness of marketing in driving leads.

There are still few solutions covering the entire leasing management process; however, a number of providers are now offering services such as ‘crowdsourced’ leasing data provision or AI-enabled contract execution tools, while tools like Azara gather and centralize leasing information across cities around the world, allowing firms to proactively manage lease events and transactions.

Increasing demand for flex space has also required specialized software to deal with high frequency tenant turnover and real-time space tracking and booking. Several of the larger flex space providers have developed their own in-house management tools, while specialists such as Essensys provide dedicated flex space and lease management software allowing landlords to quickly establish and manage flex space offerings.

Self Cleaning Materials

Self-cleaning surfaces are a class of materials with the inherent ability to remove any debris or bacteria from their surfaces in a variety of ways. The self-cleaning functionality of these surfaces is commonly inspired by natural phenomena observed in lotus leaves, gecko feet and water striders to name a few. Self-cleaning materials allow for a reduction in operational costs as the buildings can essentially clean themselves.

So if you've been thinking about what PropTech to venture in, hope the above can spark some ideas!