Is A Connected Real Estate Revolution Upon Us?
Who will you meet?
Cities are innovating, companies are pivoting, and start-ups are growing. Like you, every urban practitioner has a remarkable story of insight and challenge from the past year.
Meet these peers and discuss the future of cities in the new Meeting of the Minds Executive Cohort Program. Replace boring virtual summits with facilitated, online, small-group discussions where you can make real connections with extraordinary, like-minded people.
Imagine going to work in a high-performance, “smart” building every day. Workers could take advantage of flexible and productive workspaces, wireless and mobile capabilities, and remote, collaborative technology. “Smart” buildings can virtually connect systems and people while measuring, monitoring, and managing resources. With more than $600 billion of new real estate constructed annually in the US and Canada alone, connected real estate offers an opportunity for developers and owners to simultaneously create better work conditions and increase their property value.Integrating this technology into working environments begins with connected real estate, creating a process of designing and renovating buildings to converge all systems onto a streamlined network.
Almost every government and enterprise uses real estate, which is typically the second-largest expense for any corporation. With more than $600 billion of new real estate constructed annually in the US and Canada alone, connected real estate offers an opportunity for developers and owners to simultaneously create better work conditions and increase their property value.
Connected buildings use a single IP network to converge data and systems with centralized operations, management, and efficiencies, enabling owners to extract information from real estate assets. In addition to being more efficient, using less energy, and lowering emissions levels, the converged network approach is less expensive than installing and maintaining separate systems. In turn, the property owner can pass along sustainable benefits to companies and workers in the form of more productive workplaces, lower costs of doing business, and a more responsive landlord/tenant relationship.
Overcoming Hurdles
Offering connected real estate—while worthwhile to both the property owner and company employees—can present logistical hurdles. Property owners, builders, and managers are striving to keep up with an ever-evolving and increasingly technologically focused tenant base. Taking a holistic approach to connected real estate is crucial in order to create lasting workspace benefits. Developers and owners can consolidate, connect, and virtualize the following areas to work toward holistic connected real estate:
- Increase collaboration and decrease operating costs while reducing the burdens created by travel and commuting (such as pollution, stress, and infrastructure wear and tear) by offering high connectivity, remote technologies, and wireless access.
- Improve productivity while decreasing energy, water, heating, and cooling requirements by reconfiguring workplaces to increase occupancy and leverage shared resources.
- Collapsing building management onto the network (including HVAC, lighting, and security).
- Facilitate scaling and security without significantly increasing the data center’s energy or physical footprint by replacing blade servers with sophisticated storage solutions and by using advanced energy management applications.
Although technology design consultants and implementation engineers are available to support the commercial enterprise, they are often unfamiliar with the construction process, just as the construction team is sometimes unacquainted with the required technologies. Close collaboration and communication between both teams throughout the entire process—along with well-documented experiences available for future use—will prevent projects from being executed in a haphazard, reactive fashion and will ensure sustainability for creating valuable connected real estate projects in the future.
The Future of the Built Environment
Control systems and network technologies are driving the transformation of the built environment. Solutions are now available that allow building owners, managers, and tenants to leverage their IP-enabled networks to converge a vast array of systems, and offer benefits to everyone involved. Intelligent systems work to increase the quality of work and personal life, and truly winning strategies will utilize connected real estate to enable citizens, business leaders, and policymakers to drive job growth, increase economic opportunity, and enrich citizen services.
Discussion
Leave your comment below, or reply to others.
Please note that this comment section is for thoughtful, on-topic discussions. Admin approval is required for all comments. Your comment may be edited if it contains grammatical errors. Low effort, self-promotional, or impolite comments will be deleted.
Read more from MeetingoftheMinds.org
Spotlighting innovations in urban sustainability and connected technology
Middle-Mile Networks: The Middleman of Internet Connectivity
The development of public, open-access middle mile infrastructure can expand internet networks closer to unserved and underserved communities while offering equal opportunity for ISPs to link cost effectively to last mile infrastructure. This strategy would connect more Americans to high-speed internet while also driving down prices by increasing competition among local ISPs.
In addition to potentially helping narrow the digital divide, middle mile infrastructure would also provide backup options for networks if one connection pathway fails, and it would help support regional economic development by connecting businesses.
Wildfire Risk Reduction: Connecting the Dots
One of the most visceral manifestations of the combined problems of urbanization and climate change are the enormous wildfires that engulf areas of the American West. Fire behavior itself is now changing. Over 120 years of well-intentioned fire suppression have created huge reserves of fuel which, when combined with warmer temperatures and drought-dried landscapes, create unstoppable fires that spread with extreme speed, jump fire-breaks, level entire towns, take lives and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres, even in landscapes that are conditioned to employ fire as part of their reproductive cycle.
ARISE-US recently held a very successful symposium, “Wildfire Risk Reduction – Connecting the Dots” for wildfire stakeholders – insurers, US Forest Service, engineers, fire awareness NGOs and others – to discuss the issues and their possible solutions. This article sets out some of the major points to emerge.
Innovating Our Way Out of Crisis
Whether deep freezes in Texas, wildfires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, or any other calamity, our innovations today will build the reliable, resilient, equitable, and prosperous grid tomorrow. Innovation, in short, combines the dream of what’s possible with the pragmatism of what’s practical. That’s the big-idea, hard-reality approach that helped transform Texas into the world’s energy powerhouse — from oil and gas to zero-emissions wind, sun, and, soon, geothermal.
It’s time to make the production and consumption of energy faster, smarter, cleaner, more resilient, and more efficient. Business leaders, political leaders, the energy sector, and savvy citizens have the power to put investment and practices in place that support a robust energy innovation ecosystem. So, saddle up.
0 Comments