Landlords must be up to speed with technology if they want their tenants to stay, experts agree, and use the data that are now easy to gather to improve quality of life in their buildings.
‘The writing is on the wall for landlords who do not monitor the air quality of their buildings or have all the information at their fingertips because they will be caught out,' said Philippa Gill, partner, real estate, Verdextra. 'People will choose offices in the same way that they now choose homes, based on beauty, comfort, atmosphere and technology.'
The change is irreversible, she said: 'We now design buildings for the human beings that will live and work in them, instead of designing boxes that we then fit human beings into.'
Gill was a panellists at PropertyEU's PropTech, Data & Innovation Briefing in the International Investors Lounge at Expo Real on Wednesday.
Seen from the tenants’ perspective, landlords are being too slow, said Max Verteletskyi, co-founder and CEO of Spaceti, a start-up that provides smart sensors and mobile applications to monitor people’s interaction with buildings.
'Technology is too often perceived as a disruption to be resisted instead of a positive change to be embraced,' he says. ‘We have found a high resistance to change in the real estate industry, yet technology is here to stay and it will have an increasing importance in all our lives. Tenants’ expectations will have to be met.'
