“Friday, initiate barn door protocol.”
The scene which follows this Iron Man dialog in Avengers: End Game could easily be the dream of many property owners, property admins, and even tenants – a building that listens to you, gives you the ultimate protection from other-worldly threats. All the entrances, exits, and windows are immediately barricaded by iron doors that slide down, protecting the Avengers within from the formidable might of their alien enemy.
Well, we’re not there yet. But with digital transformation embracing real estate, and especially commercial assets, like a canopy, this intelligent future might not be that far off.
But for the time being, there are challenges and there is evolution.
With the pandemic acting as an unanticipated accelerant of technology adoption, the solutions the industry needs are immediate. So how intelligent can an intelligent building be?
Real Estate Tech: More of an Ecosystem than a Building
Real estate property tech post-pandemic requires a 360o approach that includes flawless integration of technology, effective flow of data, accurate analytics, and optimum reinvention of client experience. This technology could well become the biggest differentiator of the industry in the near future, displacing location, brand, and of course, affordability.
For residential assets, while key cards and facial recognition as surveillance and security measures have already become ancient history, there are still many antiquated practices that often fall victim to delays caused by the need of human intervention. Tenant complaints on a malfunctioning AC unit or regular quality compliance of your gensets and elevators do not have to be tracked manually. The availability and accessibility of this data on a unified platform with automated triggers or alerts on non-compliance will make the life of facility managers a lot simpler.
Add to this the potential of gaining insightful information on how much energy has been consumed in a year and projections on how much you can save by following actions A, B, and C. That will be a total game-changer.
Commercial assets in real estate generate massive amounts of data that, more often than not, is severely underutilized. A mall, for example, can benefit immensely from data-driven decision making, which is still in its nascent stages in real estate tech. The scope for it is enormous. Imagine the benefits of real-time insights and regular projections on anything ranging from asset performance to client experience to threat identification with storing, tracking, and analyzing various datasets.
All in One Place: Unified Platforms are the Key
Insights and intelligence are often a couple of the most treasured benefits of digital transformation, AI integration, and anything that can be considered a smart solution. A dashboard that acts as a unified platform which tracks, analyzes, and provides insights on portfolio management, occupancy analytics, compliance adherence and breaches, audit logs, expenditure against baseline, energy efficiency, (and the list goes on) will be a godsend for any asset owner or facility manager.
With the goals and requirements of each and every real estate asset varying from one to other, a customisable solution is what the doctor orders. Yes, most things remain the same but any solution that provides asset managers and owners the freedom to access the intelligence that is specific to their unique challenge will fly miles above the rest in this accelerated tech market.
The current need is in real estate tech is not just digital transformation and automation, but intelligent or smart solutions that not just track data but interpret it, make sense of it to go beyond generating monthly, quarterly and annual portfolio reports but equip asset owners with relevant and accurate statistics that help them go beyond the obvious and expand into new markets.
