Crowley: What we've noticed is, there's a real opportunity to partner with the industry. That opportunity comes from the fact that the consumers are opting for Uber and other similar flexible solutions in pretty increasing fashion, pretty rapidly. The consumer who lives or resides or works in these developments are using Uber or other services to get to and from or to get food. There are big implications on how you make pick-up and drop-off seamless. In the long-term, how we think about design as far as building is concerned will change—parking fewer cars, and the way you think about urban planning and the development of cities over time and the effect of these solutions on cities and build outs. The opportunity is to really partner with that industry, to talk with changemakers and figure out how we can work together. There's a lot of overlap.

GlobeSt.com: What trends are you seeing in the way people commute to work and move around between cities and within cities?

Crowley: There's the broader trend of people moving into cities; there are macro trends around people moving into major metros, metropolitan areas. Also, 10% of Millennials say they've given up their car because of the adoption of Uber and ride sharing more broadly. Other trends we see are that the prediction around car ownership, the percentage of people who own a car, will taper off around 2020 as congestion seems to get worse. Time spent in traffic year over year continues to rise, and 80% of the country drives alone to work every day. In fact, the majority of people still drive themselves to work every day, yet the car sits idle 90% of the time. On the other side of the coin, Millennials are using Uber, and their usage of cars is tapering off. These are conflicting trends, but all really relevant. So, how do we build a better future to make sure that we're reacting to those? That would be a bit of how we think about the problem.

GlobeSt.com: How has Uber made an impact on real estate?

Crowley: It's affecting how people use mass transit in a really positive way. During commuting hours, 30% of our trips are to and from mass transit. People are using Uber as a last-mile concept to and from the existing transit infrastructure: private cars for the public good. We can start to utilize public transit better via Uber—it doesn't reduce usability on mass transit. A building that might be a couple miles from mass transit has a magical connection point to mass transit via Uber. That has real impact on real estate and where people choose to buy. You can put offices in places you didn't imagine before. This stuff's still relatively new, but I get really excited about using that data and thinking about ways to partner with real estate and make an impact now that this is the case.

GlobeSt.com: Where do you see Uber heading in the future?

Crowley: Real estate is definitely an area in which we're making an investment. A lot of these things we can do today; we can partner with the real estate community and prepare for a world of more automation. If you think about the last mile or start rethinking parking, you can start redesigning buildings so that pick-up and drop-off are seamless, and you can start to have a better idea of what that world will look like in the future. I'm not sure of the timing, but a lot of the things we can do in partnership with the real estate community prepares the world for autonomous vehicles. With flexible parking garages, if parking drops off significantly, we'll know what to do. Let's go build a parking-less building—it's a trend that's some years out, but also current. Think about a world without parking—that's where Uber comes in.

This can be now; it's not just some future state. At Realcomm, there was a lot of interest in projects a year out. How are we going to design this building, the parking? How do we think about Uber waiting areas? We're bringing technology to the real estate industry via Uber. A lot of creativity is happening organically because so many aspects integrate with the app already.

The Uber for Business and Uber Central apps allows organizations to call rides on behalf of other people.

It's not just the abstract; we have these tools today; there are several examples of people starting to use these tools already. You can create an account to subsidize a pool ride from mass transit to our office each day. Let's have Uber Central on an iPad at our front desk to order rides for our people each day. Anyone can start to utilize these tools to access these things. Employers are giving people $100 to spend on this account each month.