PART 1 – There’s gold in them there hills – if you know where to dig

I’d like to start off by thanking GlobeSt.com for this opportunity to share with other industry professionals what I know about the technology for the real estate industry. My intent for this blog is not to focus on gadgets, provide fixes and workarounds for software/hardware problems or technical advice, but rather look at how technology can be applied to solve significant, costly, time to market real world business problems.

For much of my professional career which includes 20 years of commercial and heavy construction followed by 17 years as a technology consultant for AEC, Facility Management and Real Estate, have been serving the high tech industry of Silicon Valley where product lifecycles of only 18 months makes time to market delivery the difference in competitive edge and success or failure.

New products and services typically require business organizations to develop a specific workforce to design, R&D, manufacture, market and support it, thereby requiring space in their existing portfolio or forced to purchase/lease additional space, be it bare land or one with an existing structure. This is where the world of Corporate Real Estate meets Commercial/Industrial Real Estate. And in many cases, before the end user can occupy the new location, a new building or some amount of tenant improvement will be necessary, engaging Architects, Engineers and Contractors (AEC), not to mention working with the local municipalities for building permits, public works and other local, state and federal agencies to get the job done. Oh, let’s not forget the utilities.

Breaking down the number of stakeholders within commercial real estate, we’ll find Brokers, Listing Exchanges, Inspectors, Appraisers, Title/Escrow and others.

As you already know, a great majority if not all of these industry professionals have adopted various levels of technology to make their jobs easier and more productive. And while there’s no doubt there have been productivity increases due to the use of technology, they haven’t necessarily resulted in increased profits or even reduced the time to occupancy and operations over paper based, manual processes.

Don’t believe me? Check out the report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology entitled ‘NIST Cost Analysis of Inadequate Interoperability in the U.S. Capital Facilities Industry ’ whose research found during the design/build/operate phases, $15.8 billion dollars are wasted annually because industry professionals are using their technology to print specifications, reports and plans that they hand off to the next person in the supply chain who then has to manually re-enter the desired information. Or when the data originator provides the information in electronic format, the recipient’s technology is different, requiring them to spend time and labor resources to scrub the data before importing it into their applications, or manually enter it. And where systems can be integrated, their typically one-off custom projects that costs a lot of money and take quite a bit of time to complete and test before being put into production.

So if in the design/build and portion of the operations community are experiencing $15.8 billion dollars of annual waste, how much waste do you think there is in the rest of the industry by Owners, Investors, Operators, Brokers, Agents, Lenders, Inspectors, Appraisers, Utilities, Government Agencies, Service Providers, Vendors, First Responders, etc?

You may not have considered it before, but in order to take full advantage of technology tools and systems, we need to evolve to the next level where we can re-use and re-purpose information across the real property supply chain. Furthermore, you need to look at the supply chain as a holistic ecosystem, like our bodies, each part is dependent on other parts to survive.

Now that I’ve established the groundwork for you how I see the industry, each future blog will describe the people, organizations, methodologies, tools and techniques from around the globe that are participating in and supporting the transformation to the way information is created, acquired, processed, reported, exchanged and used to optimize business operations and ultimately the profitability and competitiveness of each stakeholder along the way.

Though your focus may be commercial real estate, you need to understand where you can provide additional value to your customer and others you have direct and indirect connections with. By understanding your place in the supply chain and these concepts, you can begin to lower your cost for information while simultaneously increasing data efficiency, consistency and transparency. There really is enormous value waiting to be mined from the mountains of data inside and outside of your organization. The course of my blog will provide the trail where and how to start uncovering it.