Real estate is one of the foremost exciting places to look at the tech revolution at work. Long seen because of the Cinderella asset class thanks to its relative illiquidity, opacity, and asymmetries of data, the very characteristics that made land difficult to navigate are also making it the right workplace for technologies that break down info barriers and eliminate friction.
We’re seeing PropTech have an impression at each step of the life cycle of a building, from development to operation to eventual change of use. For instance, within the office sector, our sister development firm Trammell Crow Company is making buildings with larger ride-sharing opportunities and drop-off areas. This may increase capacity by repurposing garages that are presently needed for future office space because the proportion of people commuting by car falls. Increasingly, these office buildings are marketed to tenants using virtual reality (VR) tours of space that's still being built, with visualizations of how space is employed most efficiently. Both investors and managers of the office are able to use PropTech to ascertain 3-D stacking plans of the tenants with all their relevant info per floor.