At the end of every year, the Propmodo team gets together to brainstorm about what we think are the trends that are providing the property industry with its biggest challenges—and opportunities. We try our best to think of some of the developments outside of the built world that will eventually permeate into the way the real estate industry operates. These ideas eventually become the basis for our Propmodo Metatrend campaign the first half of every year. This year, we thought of things like human-centric data architecture, building trust into building operation software, using AI to predict asset performance, and 3D images becoming the new system of records for properties.
No matter how much time we spend thinking of all of the possible change agents, we know that we will likely miss a few and be wrong on some of the others. But this year we learned more than ever the limitations of our ability to predict the future. None of us in our wildest guesses would have been able to envision what has happened to the world in these last few months. The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it has made many of these topics more relevant now than before the coronavirus descended on our lives like a moldy duvet.
We had a large Propmodo Metatrends event planned this year in Manhattan that would gather some of the property industry people who have helped inform our research but obviously that had to be canceled like so many other activities and events. So instead we decided to use our quarantine time creating something totally new for us. We have recorded a special miniseries of investigative podcasts that explore several of the chosen topics from new angles and feature fascinating interviews with subject matter experts. Each episode is about fifteen minutes or so, and combined with the digital articles on our website around the trends, we think have presented a compelling narrative to support each Propmodo Metatrend topic.
The Infiltration Of 3D Scanning Into The Property Industry
The use of 3D images as a way to better manage a property is taking a unique adoption path. At the intersection of insurance and property management lies an important use for 3D scanning that is helping make inroads for the technology in the property industry. If using 3D images becomes standard practice for things like adjusting insurance claims and risk engineering, they could soon become a standardized tool that is used by facility and management teams in the future.
What Linguistics Has In Common With Real Estate Data
Data is its own language. For it to be useful it needs to convey meaning. So to understand how meaning is interpreted we look at a the work of one of the founding fathers of modern linguistics and breakdown what factors are important. By doing this we found that to help data communicate effectively data architects are learning to create data around the people using it and not the other way around. This is particularly true for real estate data which has a lot of different uses by a wide variety of people.
Hearing The Signal Through The Noise Of Property Valuation
How much of a property’s value is based on fact and how much is perception? The answer to this question tells us how much the property industry stands to lose from the (hopefully) temporary economic shutdown. We set out to understand the meaning of value in the property industry, how it is calculated and what its limitations are, to figure out how technology can help make the process more sophisticated.
How Buildings Can Learn, Together
Buildings learn how to optimize their performance over time. But doing this requires a certain amount of regularity. The coronavirus has kept some buildings empty and others busier than ever. This departure from normalcy had caused problems for building engineers trying to optimize in a time of belt-tightening. Finding ways to share information might be the key to helping our buildings live their best quarantine life.
