A positive vision of the many advantages technology brings is the antidote to ‘PropTech fatigue’, experts agreed at the PropertyEU PropTech, Data & Innovation Briefing, which was held in London this week.
‘There is proptech fatigue in the industry, because there is so much innovation and technology around that people cannot deal with it all,’ said William Newton (pictured), president and managing director EMEA at WiredScore. ‘Tech companies need to articulate their value proposition to landlords, explain what they can do to help.’
Half of landlords understand the importance of connectivity, while half prefer not to think about it, said Newton: ‘But the mindset needs to change because the issue will not go away, technology requirements are changing and the internet will become more and more important. Frantic retrofitting to bring buildings up to scratch will not do.’
The real estate sector has a lot to do to catch up with technology, said Phil Tily, senior vice president, head of performance analytics, Altus Group: ‘There is a huge amount of obsolescence out there. Traditional spaces will not be needed anymore.’
The office sector is being dragged into the 21st century faster than many thought possible. Workplaces are changing fast, buildings are getting smarter and occupier behaviour is evolving rapidly. A lot of thought, technology, science and imagination are going into creating better working environments.
‘Offices are becoming curated spaces,’ said Josh Artus, director and co-founder, The Centric Lab, which uses cognitive neuroscience to improve the built environment. ‘Data analysis shows how people work, what they enjoy, how they function and interact.’ All this information can be used to create quality spaces.
Work as we know it will change beyond recognition, said Newton: ‘We have started doing things on the computer instead of paper, but it is not a totally new way of working yet. That is yet to come, and in the long term it will change how people interact with each other and with the space and how they use buildings.’
Smart buildings will not just improve quality of life for people who live and work in them, but will also improve the bottom line for landlords and employers, Artus said. ‘Technology coming into the market will allow better decision making, improve value and generate cash from a more flexible style of working and task-orientated spaces,’ he said. ‘Better spaces lead to increases in productivity, and a 1% increase in productivity is a 10% saving in costs. You do the maths.’
Technology can also help to monitor and assess the changes and their actual impact, said Dan Hughes, director, data and information product management at RICS: ‘What can be measured can be managed, as they say, and now with more information and increasingly accurate data it is easier to see when buildings are performing and when they are not. There are huge investments at stake, so it is increasingly important.’
