PropTech Expo: March 2024

From virtual tours to digital twins

Article by The Minister of Truth

Image taken from Proptech website https://proptechshow.com/

Flying across the Thames in the Greenwich cable car gives you a splendid bird’s eye view of the O2, the Canary Wharf district, and the £8.5bn Greenwich Peninsula property development masterminded by Hong Kong developer Knight Dragon. Everywhere you look new residential tower blocks and offices are thrusting up towards the sky.

Knight Dragon says the Peninsula – once a heavily polluted and derelict gas works - will eventually feature 17,500 new homes housing 45,000 residents over 60 hectares. That’s a lot of construction and a lot of properties to market and manage.

So it seemed appropriate to attend the PropTech 2024 expo at the ExCel Centre nearby which showcased all the latest technologies available to support letting and estate agents, developers, building managers, lenders – anyone in the ‘living’ or housing sector in fact.

As you might expect, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) loomed large, particularly when it came to generating interactive 3D videos of desirable new-build apartments. Now property developers can market their apartments using the latest high-res graphics generated in a flash by clever software.

Would-be renters or buyers can take a virtual tour and check out the views at that precise location, and see what the property would look like with a number of different lay-outs and colour-schemes.

Developers can more easily play around with apartment configurations to maximise the space, light and ambience, thereby making their properties more attractive and marketable, although you would hope a good architect would be able to do this, too, using the latest CAD (Computer Aided Design) software.

Agents are also being enticed with a whole new generation of digital portals promising to raise customer service and lead generation to the next level, using video, instant messaging, and business intelligence tools, all accessible via one platform. And landlords are being offered ways to automate and manage tenancy agreements, contracts and payments. Paper documents should be a thing of the past in this digital age.

AI can crunch masses of data to provide accurate and fast real-estate valuations, even perhaps predicting the likely trajectory of property prices given current economic conditions, making the planning, financing and cashflow projections of building projects easier.

Searching for a new property can be a lengthy and frustrating business, so anything that can oil the wheels has to be welcome. Finding suitable times to view is one such friction point given the time constraints on clients, estate and letting agents.

So one solution enables viewers to book and visit properties without an agent, much in the same way that we can now book and drive hire cars without a physical key, relying on smartphone codes and digital authentication.

The drawback with this system is that it does require new hardware to be attached to the doors, but for very large property managers the economies of scale should make this economically viable.

Keeping an eye on things

These large apartment blocks also require building management systems monitoring heating/temperature, lighting, air quality, key-pad access, door-card key access, video security cameras, parking sensors, lifts, escalators and so on.

All these Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and the data they collect can be analysed using AI to optimise performance, improving efficiency and cutting costs. And it's possible to create a digital twin of the entire estate and monitor all these sensors on one dashboard, generating reports easily and giving early warning when equipment is about to fail and disrupt the network. This enables managers time to intercede and minimise the impact on occupants.

But as these buildings become smarter and more connected, the more vulnerable they become to cyber-attack. A golden principle of cybersecurity is that you’re only as secure as your weakest link. Even a wireless photocopier can provide a backdoor for cyber criminals wanting to gain access to the entire network.

Here too, AI is playing an increasingly important role, monitoring the behaviour of the network and sniffing out anomalies that may indicate criminal intent. In the old days it was simply a race to defend against the latest viruses, malware, Trojans, worms and other nasties being spread across the internet. This entailed downloading regular updates or patches of antivirus software and firewalls – a duty some businesses didn’t carry out as assiduously as they should.

With AI at the helm a lot of that hassle is removed and monitoring can be automated, providing real-time alerts and instantaneous response.

Landlords and building managers also have to keep an eye on their occupants to ensure compliance with building rules around noise, smoking, overcrowding and such like, all while respecting the right to privacy. PropTech24 presented ways to do this as well, using plug-in monitors that could presumably be locked to prevent removal by snoop-phobic occupants.

All in all, the show gave a valuable insight into how quickly the property sector – not known for its embrace of new technologies - is digitising and exploring ways AI could drive efficiencies to the benefit of all stakeholders.