The commercial real estate industry is considered conservative in adopting new technology. Most of the technological innovation in business today is aimed at more conventional business streams such as finance, investment and retail. The innovation that takes hold in other market sectors then tends to follow later in the real estate industry. However leading firms throughout the global commercial real estate marketplace are identifying innovative opportunities to embrace emerging technologies, platforms and solutions.
Market Insight
Springboarding from the residential market sector, with firms such as Zillow and Homes.com, commercial real estate research has emerged as the latest information battleground. Traditional market data from sales, rentals, vacancies, etc.—most of which had always lacked transparency due to disparate data collection and fragmented ownership—is now being sold as a commodity throughout the industry. Innovative firms are now beginning to incorporate non-traditional information, such as asset lifecycle, operational costs and sustainability factors, into the expanding data model. This incremental information provides tremendous insight and value in differentiating the financial, energy and environmental performance of various assets across a portfolio or market sector.
Accelerating Transactions
Again, drawing from the residential market, new technologies are emerging to speed up the commercial brokerage marketplace by linking buyers with sellers and landlords with tenants. Formerly something only a well-connected brokerage agency could do, technology is now speeding up the connection, communication and transaction-closing process. Properties and relevant information are posted online, automatically opening up a significant channel to the market. Steadfast websites such as Craigslist and Kijiji were early adopters, while Apartments.com is an example of emerging firms in the transaction segment. As technology accelerates the transaction process, the properties that provide more robust asset-level data will become more attractive to prospective clients. The more comprehensive data that is provided, the easier the due diligence and closing process becomes.
Online Marketing
As consumers expect to access information online, the demands of real estate marketing have become significantly more digital. On the commercial side, video, interactive websites and mobile applications are now common place media by which consumers view and access real estate information. Property visualization is a further avenue, whereby people can view renderings of buildings and spaces interactively. Arcestra, a Toronto-based company, has been an early leader of this charge in the commercial leasing segment. More detailed “asset-centric” data is now emerging as an important factor for the marketplace as capital investment requirements, operational costs and environmental impact are becoming decision-drivers for buyers and tenants.
Technology Advances
Software continues to be a key part of any enterprise platform strategy and rapid advances in data capture and storage, business process automation, reporting and analysis are helping progressive organizations reach new levels of operational efficiency and financial performance. The growth of big data has been a key driver in the advancement of real estate enterprise software, given the volume of data points relevant to the strategy, operation and value-creation for real estate portfolios and the necessity to analyze it in meaningful ways.
4tell™’s iPlan™ Real Estate Portfolio Solutions provide a significant opportunity to integrate technology into a firm’s performance management and real estate portfolio operations. The iPlan™ Portfolio Solutions platform offers flexible and scalable financial, operational and environmental data solutions by taking an “asset-centric” approach to strategic planning, asset management, capital deployment and portfolio performance.
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