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Taking the digital leap

Before the crisis, the real estate industry had been moving toward digitizing processes and creating digitally enabled services for tenants and users. Practically overnight, physical distancing and the lockdown of physical spaces have magnified the importance of digitization, particularly by measures such as tenant and customer experience.

Within residential real estate, players that have invested in digital sales and leasing processes—using virtual open houses and showings; augmented and virtual reality; and omnichannel, targeted, ad personalized sales—will more quickly allow their residents to find the right space for themselves.

When an operator may have to keep its amenity spaces closed for months, creating a differentiated experience will necessarily involve a suite of digital-first products and experiences: telehealth, on-demand delivery and concierge services, virtual communities, contactless access for residents, guests, and maintenance staff, and much more.

As more users adopt these digital-first products and services, users’ expectations will be raised, and players that provide a differentiated post-crisis experience will stay ahead of the curve. These digital offerings will pay dividends in the form of superior loyalty and the ability to create brand new revenue streams while better meeting the needs of tenants and end-users.

Sensative comment: Most of these digital-first products involve the efficient use of IoT technologies, well-integrated with legacy systems into a seamless stream of data. A challenge though can be the multiple incompatible environments caused by vendor lock-ins and different technologies of different ages in the multi-property portfolio. This is the reason behind Yggio, our IoT integration middleware platform, or operating system for Smart Buildings.

Tenant engagement has recently taken the commercial real estate industry by storm, grabbing headlines, deploying customer pilots, and raising large amounts of capital to bring the tenant-landlord relationship to the 21st century. They seem to have caught on first with office buildings, places where tenants demand a lot of their surroundings and have had the least amount of control over historically. The story behind tenant engagement technology is quite inspirational: giving a way for tenants to communicate with their landlords, […]

Sensative take: adding new technologies should not be regarded as adding new features. New technologies can and will change your whole business, how your customers will perceive you and your product (building), and what they will be willing to pay for. It is about what your vision is as a company, not just developing new apps.

Buildings themselves will start to become massive data creators, just like your computer or router. Starting from construction to demolition, buildings continuously create data. There are sensors that can monitor concrete (yes concrete) strength, temperature, and relative humidity. There are sensors available that can cost effectively measure heat, air quality, traffic, occupancy, you name it. This comes at a cost but it can answer important nagging questions for every building such as “which stairs and elevators are used most?” Or, “which pumps get overheated during peak times?”

Sensative take: The data economy is happening. Slowly and step by step. First, it’s the low hanging use cases like optimizing, automation and reducing cost. Then comes the innovations that exploit the value of the data in new services and business models that will transform the world as we know it. When should you jump on the train? Because it will soon leave the station.

This report is the successor of the 2017 report PropTech 3.0: the Future of Real Estate, by The Oxford Future of Real Estate Initiative at the Saïd Business School.

The report is almost like a whitepaper about our platform Yggio. Some highly interesting quotes:

p53:

p61:

“The importance of data has been stressed throughout this report, in particular with regards to improved analytics using machine learning models and the resulting disruptive business models. Any true disruption to the commercial real estate industry will only come once there is the availability of standardized, accurate, real-time, digital data and whoever is the first to reach critical mass will hold a very powerful market position.”

... enabled by Sensative…

Smart building technology seems inevitable. More and more the idea of having a connected, intelligent building has been gaining attention from owners who seek to drive greater asset value, respond to expectations from tenants, and address a general desire to optimize and automate manual processes.  The benefits are pretty obvious. Smart buildings can have improved financial performance while also differentiating the assets.

But, it has become clear that not all real estate firms are making progress and adopting smart building technology at the pace you would expect. The reason is that many are unsure of where to start and how to establish a strategy to deploy these modern technologies.  […]

At Sensative we couldn’t agree more with this article and it’s conclusions. Smart Buildings represents a big change in how you manage a property. It will also change how you build your business.

Our platforms and tech are all designed in accordance with our philosophy: “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast”. This enables a real estate owner to start with a pilot, for instance, measure something specific in all properties, like the temperature. Or, on the other hand, test a lot of new services and technologies in a specific building.

What the first step should be is highly dependant on the owner and the portfolio. How to recommission? How to add new IoT, instead of replacing legacy and maybe aging systems? What are my operational pain-points?

This makes our offering so appetizing. Whatever the starting point for going into Smart Buildings, and vision where it will take you, our solutions provide the necessary flexibility for a successful digitalization.