One of the disadvantages of working in an open office space is that not everybody likes to clean up after themselves. Many have the bad habit of eating at their desk, so there will most definitely be crumbs on the carpet. Rainy days result in dirty shoes. Somebody celebrating their birthday can leave a trail of confetti on the floor and just like that, the whole space can be a mess in just a few minutes. But what do you do when you have a visit from your customers and the place needs to look sparkling clean, but the cleaning crew isn’t coming before they arrive? Robots Will Save Us This is when 21st century tech comes in handy. By using IoT technology, an intelligent robot vacuum cleaner concept was created for smart offices. Each of the robot vacuums has a different approach to cleaning. Some are methodical, while others may move around randomly, which can be a bit confusing, but in fact, they’re mapping the whole surface with in-built cameras or other smart sensors. Some of these devices are controlled via a mobile app that allows you to schedule the cleaning sessions and access status, battery and alerts through your phone, while others come with a remote control that allows you to direct the device to the exact spot you want them to clean. One such example of commercial indoor robotic vacuum designed specifically for office buildings is using an intelligent booking system in Outlook to schedule the automated services. The robot creates and updates its program in real time, considering existing bookings made in Outlook. In addition, the device analyzes when one room was booked and plans its next cleaning session so those conference rooms are always clean for the next meeting...
Office Sector Update
From Yardi Matrix
The U.S. office property market stayed on the upswing in July, with asking rates increasing 1.1% year-over-year. Office-using jobs increased 1.7% in the same period, driven by the computer design services portion of the professional business services segment, according to a new national report from Yardi® Matrix. Additional good news includes a robust late-cycle construction pipeline comprising 174 million square feet of space. That will represent a 2.8% increase in inventory when delivered. Manhattan, N.Y., with 24.2 million square feet, and Boston and San Francisco, with 11.5 million square feet and 10.9 million square feet, respectively, are the leaders in that category. Office space deliveries in the first seven months of 2019 totaled 33.8 million square feet, broken down by central business district (6.5 million square feet), urban (14 million square feet) and suburban areas (13.3 million square feet). Office sales valued at $46.5 billion took place through July, only slightly off last year’s pace. Roiling capital markets haven’t affected demand for office space so far. “Economic growth has been running at an annualized rate of about 2.5%, and fundamentals such as employment and consumer spending remain healthy, so a recession does not appear to be on the immediate horizon,” the report says. Find out what else is happening in the dynamic U.S. office market in the most recent Yardi Matrix national office...
Tech and CRE
Bringing Change to the Commercial Sector
Technology is destined to change the way the commercial real estate market operates, but a debate is raging as to how and how much. Will it create a sea change in the industry, or will the impact be less than transformational? Certainly, technology has revolutionized the daily lives of most people—including the way they communicate, work, shop, eat and entertain. Yet some industry analysts contend that technological change has been slow to take root, and commercial real estate generally operates as it always has. In some sense, this is true. Commercial landlords lease the same basic property types, buy and sell based on cash flow projections, and take out mortgages. Ownership is concentrated in the hands of private companies, which tend to be zealous in guarding proprietary information. Also relatively undisturbed are the metrics by which real estate is measured: occupancy and demand levels, price per square foot and so on. Yet in other senses, there has been a transformation in an industry in which analysis was once performed on napkins and deals completed at country clubs. While the sector may still only be scratching the surface of its potential use of technology, there have been massive improvements in the availability of data used for underwriting. In software, that helps property owners manage assets more efficiently. In technology, that enhances access to investors. Using Real Estate Underlying the story of technology in real estate is the evolution in the way it impacts demand. For example, the amount of office space used per employee has continually shrunk over the past couple of decades, due to factors such as more efficient floor plans and technology that enables more people to work from home. The growth of WeWork space meets the needs of the current generation of workers, who are looking for flexible lease arrangements and a relaxed environment. The story of how Internet shopping has changed retail is well known. The U.S. has more retail space per person than any other country, and shopping center owners have had to revamp their focus from shopping to creating an experience and complementing online brands. Changes in retail are providing a boost to industrial real estate. Amazon and the largest brick-and-mortar retailers (such as Walmart and Target) that have large Internet presences are occupying and building tens of millions of square feet of warehouse space from which they can deliver quickly to highly populated areas. Airbnb is slowly becoming a strong competitor for the hotel industry just as hotel construction is recovering from the dip caused by the last recession. In multifamily, rather than building cookie-cutter units, apartment owners are being forced to consider amenities like co-working space, common areas for social activities and high-speed Internet access. Even Uber, which isn’t in a business related to real estate, will eventually have an impact on demand for commercial space. As fewer people drive, office buildings will need less parking, and companies will continue to retrench in urban areas close to public transportation and mass housing. Drilling down further, there are several broad areas in which technology is developing in commercial real estate: transactional underwriting, property management and broadening the investor base. Let’s look at these issues. Improved Transactional Underwriting The most obvious way technology has advanced in commercial real estate is in the collection and dissemination of information. Both at the property and market level, information was hard to come by years ago, but it is increasingly more available from both mainstream providers and new technology. Services that provide data have been around for decades, but in recent years companies (such as Yardi Matrix) have made huge strides in both the amount of information they gather and the way it is disseminated. More sophisticated software enables subscribers to customize and map information in ways that go well beyond what was available in the past, allowing them to delineate submarkets and correlate real estate performance with...
