The World’s Smartest Cities and the Applications That Got Them There

While the Internet of Things has permeated many aspects of our daily lives and created a torrent of useful data, when implemented on a city-wide level, that’s where things get interesting for real estate. For the property industry, the biggest opportunities within the smart city revolution lie with smart buildings, which have the potential to improve efficiency levels by 15%–20% in the first year. Connected, smart buildings can reduce energy use, lower operating costs, prompt preventative maintenance and provide more […]

Sensatives take: Everyone starts somewhere. Usually, you start with a proof-of-concept vertical solution solving a specific need. The important thing is to avoid creating a silo where everything is locked-in. The real benefits come when you can re-use data and investments in hardware, communication, and platforms. When the new innovative services can operate across organizations and departments, and when those services generate real value to the citizens.

That’s when you start creating the real smart city.

January 20, 2020

Smart Building buzz Smart Home buzz

5 Ways Multifamily Design Will Have to Change

Developers putting shovels in the ground today will need to anticipate what renters want a couple of years from now, notes Rick Haughey of the National Multifamily Housing Council.

Smart apartments in smart buildings are the way forward to meet the modern tenant expectation.

January 7, 2020

Smart Building buzz

Next-gen smart building solutions market worth $2 billion

The smart building market has begun to grow and evolve away from the traditional areas of HVAC, lighting, access control and safety to more advanced needs.

Sensative take: The next-gen smart building puts new requirements on the technology platforms. The traditional siloed verticals of Building Automation Systems must be integrated into a whole, providing full data availability to control and optimize.

With the right horizontal integration platform, you get new capabilities, new cost savings, and new business opportunities. Your buildings need an operating system covering all technologies, all properties in the portfolio, all suppliers, all legacy and new technologies, as well as providing interfaces to analytics, operation & maintenance, billing, customer services, and so on. That is, you need our Yggio platform.

January 6, 2020

Smart Building buzz

Is PropTech About To Have Its ‘Man On The Moon’ Moment?

Global real estate is the largest single asset class in the world, valued at around $230 trillion. That level of capital makes it a no-brainer that PropTech innovation holds a key stake in the world’s future, as it has the clear potential to impact billions of people.

Much like with the Space Race of the 20th century, there’s no going back for the proptech industry, as summarised by James Dearsley, the cofounder of global property and proptech platform for business Unissu: “No other industry that has gone through a digital transformation has ever gone back. Just like the music and automobile industries, real estate is changing forever.”

January 2, 2020

IoT Sensative Smart Building buzz Yggio

Hur är det med julstämningen i Grands matsal?

Julkalender med sensorer – Ett klassiskt ställe att fira julen i Lund på är på Grand Hotel, som etablerades 1899. Ett mått på hur livat det kan vara är såklart ljudnivån, som faktiskt mäts med sensorer. Tänk om Lunds akademiska kör skulle äta julbord, till vilken db-nivå kan de ta julsångerna?

Hur roligt är det med julfest?

Viktiga frågor som denna kan mätas med IoT-teknik. Vi gör ett försök med Grand Hotel att mäta ljudnivåerna runt julbordet.

Och en riktigt God Jul till er alla!

December 20, 2019

Smart Building buzz Smart City buzz

Boston municipal buildings target carbon neutrality

Following an executive order, building construction must be low-energy and fossil-fuel-free, while meeting annual energy needs from a mix of on- and off-site renewable energy assets.

Boston clearly shows that the success of a (smart) city requires smart buildings that generate and share IoT data. They put the requirements on utility companies and real estate owners to share and report between each other to enable optimization and investments in carbon-free technologies.

In 2019, BERDO (Building Energy Reporting and Disclosure Ordinance require the following portfolios to report their annual energy and water usage for January 1, 2018 – December 31, 2018:

Nonresidential buildings that are 35,000 square feet or larger.
Residential buildings that are 35,000 square feet or larger, or have 35 or more units.
Any parcel with multiple buildings that sum to 100,000 square feet or 100 units.

The ambitious target:

100 percent reduction in annual carbon emissions from large buildings in 2050
100 percent of covered buildings reach their carbon targets or complete alternative compliance payment

December 17, 2019

Smart Building buzz Smart Home buzz

Smart Apartment Firm SmartRent Gains Momentum

“Alexa, my sink is leaking.” To date, the voice assistant wouldn’t be able to come up with a helpful response to such a query. That could change for some users, who could have such a sentence trigger a maintenance call.

This is where we see the next wave of Smart Home technology. When it’s no more a debate about technology, and not a DIY market anymore. When it’s just there and it just works, like electricity and water. The debate on what AC to use, or how to find a way to connect your house to running water is long gone.

Companies like SmartRent realizes this, that Smart Home is about convenience and premium offerings for their customer’s tenants, without the need for DIY. It’s like water or electricity, it’s a utility that just works, making the tenant’s life more convenient. For a landlord, Smart Home is about driving down operational costs, while adding premium offerings to increase profitability. Not technology and gadgets.

November 27, 2019

Smart Building buzz Smart Home buzz

The Smart Home Market Continues to Lack a ‘Killer App’

Though the smart home market is far from mature, it is gaining momentum. Based on Strategy Analytics’ data presented at Smart Home Summit in Burlingame, California, some 46% of U.S. broadband households have at least one smart home device today. That works out to some 47 million households.

This is like asking for the killer app for smartphones before iPhone. The answer is that there isn’t ONE killer app, the killer is in that there are plenty of competing apps that solve a multitude of tasks seamlessly, in full co-operation with the installed systems and hardware in the homes.

The DIY smart home enthusiast market is very much a pioneer market. But the bulk of the homeowners or tenants aren’t home hackers. They just want things to work, seamlessly and without being in their way.

So, as with the smartphone explosion, it is about a standardized platform that works on any underlying technology (iOS or Android) with apps from 3rd parties, easily downloadable. No installation, no configuration, just new smart features to simplify their lives or entertain.

This is also the reason for landlords to add smart home technologies to the apartments they rent out. It’s about convenience and premium offerings for their tenants, without the need for DIY. It’s like water or electricity, it’s a utility that just works, making the tenant’s life more convenient. For them, the killer app is driving down operational costs, while adding premium offerings to increase profitability.

November 27, 2019

Smart Building buzz Yggio

Smart building trends: Predictions for what’s to come – Smart Cities World

Franco Castaldini, ThoughtWire, rounds up the smart building trends to look out for.

Harbor Research has noted four critical needs for IoT platforms as they evolve in 2019 and beyond, including:

Enablement of real-time temporal, spatial and state-based contextual processing
Providing tools for development of real-time, stateful applications
Simultaneous and asynchronous action on any type of information from any device, storage or streaming source
Configurable software platform architecture enabling both peer-to-peer and client-server distribution of service

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If you want to see all these abilities in action, and more, take a look at Sensative’s Yggio platform.

November 11, 2019

Smart Building buzz

Technology Is Turning Facilities Management From Boring to Bespoke

Technology and changing attitudes to the workplace are driving a transformation of commercial real estate. FM is coming of age, as it seeks to blend empathy, strategic thinking, commercial expertise and an eye for innovation. Tenant work-life harmony is becoming a key focus for building owners and space is being seen as an experience, rather than as a commodity. Passive and siloed data is being analyzed for actionable insights in real-time. Digital technology is emerging as a key tool to manage buildings. The stage is set for unified, enterprise-level management of buildings to emerge as the next big thing in commercial real estate.

November 4, 2019

IoT Smart Building buzz

Retrofitting old buildings for smart HVAC systems

Connected smart sensors play a significant role in establishing smart HVAC systems in old buildings. By having sensors in the existing system, components and back-end software providing data analytics, old buildings can also receive benefits from smart HVAC systems.

Upgrading HVAC to a smart system is a good start, as long as you don’t paint yourself into a corner. While investing in sensors and IoT gateways you should consider if the data could be re-used. For instance, a temperature sensor/thermostat is needed to control the heating/cooling. But, that temperature data could also be sent to a tenant app, used to signal if a window is open, used for statistics and optimizations, and so on. Also, if you have many properties you would be interested in collecting all data from all the properties to a remote common control center.

When you are in the process of investing and upgrading to save money, you should think about the whole picture. Or as we say at Sensative; “think big, start small and scale fast“.

October 29, 2019

Smart Building buzz

These Are The Top Real Estate Tech Trends In 2020

Real estate is no longer about “location, location, location;” it has evolved into a new mantra that we have termed, “location, experience, analytics.”

“Data and the ability to access it, while presenting many questions and challenges – such as data ownership and privacy concerns – represent a tremendous opportunity for the commercial real estate industry to enhance operations and improve the tenant experience.”

This doesn’t highlight the huge challenge of legacy systems and data locked-in into incompatible system silos in older buildings. Constructing a new building makes it quite straight-forward, you just install systems that are open and can be integrated. These high standards will be norm and tenants in older buildings will request the same services, or they will move out.