EPRA 2008: Technology to radically alter property industry, says futurist

The market for logistics space and offices will be radically altered by technological advances, according to the futurist guru Wolfgang Grulke. During a presentation on the second day of the EPRA conference in Stockholm, Grulke said companies can no longer afford to base their strategies on what has happened in the past. 'It is no longer possible to learn just from experience - in this warp-speed world, it has become essential to learn from the future!'

He said appliances we take for granted such as washing machines and laptops will be history by the 2020s thanks to technological innovation and businesses that don't plan for this reality are doomed.

To illustrate this point, he drew on the anecdote of a child in the 2020s asking her grandfather about the obsolete appliance - the washing machine. Grulke suggested that sonic cleaning would soon replace the washing machine. Sonic cleaning, he said, is already a reality. It involves a small device placed in your wardrobe that shake off the dirt from clothes as soon as the door is closed. Then the technofibres used to make the clothes restore the garments to the un-creased state they were in when they were new.

Grulke, of the FutureWorld company that advises businesses on strategy, said technical innovations like sonic cleaning would cause a 'step change', resulting in a sudden and total collapse of washing machine sales. He said this had happened to the VCR and to the answering machine. Such technological changes would also replace other bulky goods such as the television and laptop computers, and there would be no need for large logistics centres to store and bring the items to the market.

'The logistics industry is scared to death of this. You won’t have to move stuff around anymore, only information.' Grulke said corporations had traditionally been the larger employer in the global economy but this is changing as monolithic enterprises are losing ground in the new networking culture involving smaller units.

'I am not saying you won’t be able to rent out an office block in La Defense. Just bear in mind that in any one company perhaps only six people will be working in an office as opposed to 200 in the past,' Grulke said. Other employees, he said, could work anywhere around the globe as technology will allow them to stay connected.