The post-pandemic world of commercial real estate is entering its fourth year. Average weekly office attendance is about half of 2020 levels, but attendance fluctuates dramatically from day to day. Peak days will be close to pre-corona levels, but there will also be days when occupancy is much lower. It’s almost empty on Friday. There are more demands on the office. Workers want spaces that support hybrid workstyles and make commuting worthwhile. Meanwhile, concerns about climate change are prompting corporate occupiers to demand more energy-efficient operations from landlords.
This new dynamic real estate market requires owners and operators to be more responsive and efficient if they are to succeed. This situation is changing the way this historically conservative industry looks at real estate technology, moving from simply testing new innovations to maximizing their immediate impact. According to JLL’s 2023 Global Real Estate Technology Survey, more than 80% of respondents, both occupiers and investors, plan to increase their technology budget despite the challenging operating environment. His 91% of occupiers say they are willing to pay a premium for technology-enabled space.
While decisions have not yet been made as to which technologies to invest in, the most relevant technologies will streamline building operations through automation and real-time insights into real estate usage, give hybrid workers more freedom, and protect them from hazards. We know it’s a viable solution. Increased risk of cyber attacks associated with system construction. Here are some ways commercial real estate trends are impacting the technology in buildings.
dynamic occupancy
In a hybrid world, the need for commercial space remains, but the amount and duration of space needed is shrinking. Commercial operators who can leverage technology to accommodate this evolving behavior will be able to most effectively and efficiently survive in this new environment.
The good news is that occupancy continues to rise. The daily rate of improvement is not spectacular, but if you look at the workplace utilization rate compared to the previous year, it is a slow but continuous improvement. However, it is doubtful that occupancy will fully return to 2019 levels, so commercial real estate operators, especially in older buildings, will need to find ways to use excess space more dynamically.
How landlords achieve that operationally will vary, but more robust occupancy is needed to gain real-time insight into the highly dynamic nature of hybrid attendance, which fluctuates more day-to-day than pre-COVID-19 activity. This may include the introduction of tracking technology. .
Many traditional systems (access control, video, etc.) simply aggregate data into daily totals. In the case of hybrid activities, the operator has real-time data that distinguishes the number and frequency of attendance among different tenants, colleagues, visitors, and special programs that show user engagement using the office or amenity space. will be needed.
At Kastle, we call this “active occupancy.” This measures patterns of access activity by individual tenant occupiers over time, rather than the more traditional view of occupancy measured by leased and uncontracted space. This is a fairly static method. Measure in this new dynamic environment.
Access control is the most widely used method for measuring occupancy, as it is already a business necessity for security, but technologies that track workplace occupancy, such as video surveillance and spatial sensors, There are many other options, each with their own benefits. . Tech-savvy operators may employ a combination of these tools to better understand crew behavior.
open mobility
Smart devices and cloud computing have unleashed a mobile-first world that allows employees to choose where they work based on their lifestyle-centric needs, such as avoiding long commutes, access to child care, ease of parking, and other concerns. may be changed daily. Daily work today is more diverse and includes a mix of locations, from central offices and home workspaces to satellite coworking and hotel spaces near where you live or travel.
As such, workspaces are fluid, and “landlords” who enable and encourage this behavior by offering access to multiple nearby and distant locations as part of a tenant’s rental agreement become more attractive to businesses. It will be something like that. membership. In this model, access control is less about keeping people out of buildings and more about allowing people to get into more places.
This may sound technically difficult and operationally insecure, but on the contrary it simplifies separate access between buildings, even if the access system manufacturers are operated by different operators. New technologies are being developed to do this (a major hurdle in current access control). The new connectivity standard, called Aliro, was announced in November by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which is made up of hundreds of IoT device manufacturers, led by Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon, and more. This established a common way for these previously proprietary non-mutual platforms to become “open” by processing each other’s access signals and to be assigned to the property management organization’s master active in his user directory. You can check the user’s access privileges.
Access rights are tied to the individual user ID present on the user’s mobile phone, similar to mobile payment apps. These permissions are managed by the Aliro-compliant credential manager app when a user initiates a transaction between the device and her Aliro-enabled reader. The app can interpret signals generated by Aliro, regardless of the access credential provider or building access system.
This seemingly technical detail unlocks the transformative freedom for users to move between allowed spaces with just one app on their phone. This is equally a picture for homeowners who gain the ability to manage a combination of hardware and software while covering a variety of user devices, greatly streamlining the management and maintenance of access operations across their portfolio. It will be temporary. It also allows landlords to offer “fluid” access to multiple workplaces beyond a single building, accommodating the mobile nature of their tenants.
Although this standard is still in the development stage, access control providers are looking for new platforms that they are ready to accept when Aliro becomes mainstream to avoid selling systems that could become obsolete in a few years. We plan to create it rapidly. His first Aliro-compatible access system, Kastle EverPresence™, was announced shortly after Aliro’s launch.
building efficiency
Sustainability mandates and the need to improve operating cost efficiency continue to drive the smart buildings market. A key aspect of smart buildings is that systems can quickly adapt to changes to optimize efficiency and reduce a building’s carbon footprint. In a hybrid world where the number of people in the office fluctuates daily, systems need to be more adaptable than ever. More importantly, as more companies adopt their own decarbonization goals, tenants and real estate professionals are now increasingly seeking sustainable real estate over non-green real estate.
Cisco Systems estimates that smart buildings will account for 75% of all new commercial construction by next year. These trends are putting pressure on legacy properties to finally address the need to retrofit older buildings with smart building technology if they want to compete for tenants. Given that existing buildings account for more than 90% of urban infrastructure, that urgency will dramatically increase the demand for smart building technology.
Fortunately, retrofitting buildings with smart technology is not as expensive as it once was. You can use the latest sensors wirelessly, without installing expensive wiring, and benefit from lower energy usage and lower maintenance. This latest smart technology is lightweight and compact, making it suitable for hard-to-reach areas with a signal booster that can extend coverage in and around thick walls.
Cyber risk and AI
The downside of smart building technology is that it increases the potential vulnerability to cyber risks. These intelligent systems rely on the Internet and are networked through IoT connections to continuously share data. As stated in the Siemens white paper, A new standard for a new smart building era, “IoT configurations provide multiple points of entry for potential hacks. This puts both the building’s information systems and operational technology systems at risk…The risk of cross-contamination is real.”
Because physical intrusion by unauthorized parties can lead to cyber-attacks on building systems, the primary technologies for the first line of defense are physical access control and occupancy monitoring (as previously discussed). But more broadly, the challenges of securing both a building’s operational technology (OT) and the IT systems that use data generated by buildings and their occupants create a highly complex ecosystem. . As a result, a patchwork of firewalls, software updates, and endpoint security practices across computers, IoT devices, and sensors can become significantly unmanageable.
This is where artificial intelligence can help. Senior smart building owners deploy security information and event management (SIEM) solutions within their smart building infrastructure to collect, analyze, and correlate log data from disparate devices and systems to uncover suspicious activity and security incidents. quickly detect abnormalities. These systems utilize large-scale machine learning to identify typical network behavior and spot anomalies, enabling threat identification and response much faster than human staff.
Many of these technologies are still in their early stages, and industry-wide adoption will be far from complete by this time next year. However, challenges in the market will begin to snowball in the use of new technologies in buildings. While most of the real estate industry won’t be implementing these technology solutions in the next 12 months, tech-savvy owners and operators are at least planning to do so now.
