WASHINGTON, DC–Yesterday CoreNet Global Mid-Atlantic brought together some of the top thinkers about technology and corporate real estate in the US to Washington DC for its 2018 Corporate Real Estate Technology Symposium. The event, held at the Booz Allen Innovation Center, was standing room only as the CRE community lined up to hear from such leaders as John Smart, IoT and Smarter Workplace Strategist at IBM, Steve Weikal, head of Industry Relations at MIT Center for Real Estate and Douglas Edwards, Workplace Solutions, Humana.
CoreNet held the symposium because “we'd been hearing from our members, corporate real-estate professionals, occupiers of space, brokers, architects, designers, vendors, contractors about the need to talk about technology and how it's impacting corporate real estate,” CoreNet President Peter Van Emburgh, whose day job is with CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, tells GlobeSt.com.
“We're aware that disruptive technology is already changing the way we operate,” Van Emburgh continues. “What we don't comprehend exactly is what will happen next and how these changes will impact the way we work in the future.”
The event was structured around a keynote by Weikal and two panel discussions, one of which was focused on the future of work.
Much of the discussion — and the six startups invited to display their real estate technology — focused on the actual vendors in this space.
MIT, according to Weikal, tracks over 2,200 startups in real estate globally, most of which are in the early stage, but some now entering the mid-stage. “Venture capital is going into this space, nearly $3 billion in 2017 according to CB Insights,” he said.
Many of these companies follow the model of a coin termed by Prof. Dennis Frenchman at MIT called Real Estate Fracking, Weikal continued. “It's where you take the use of the asset, break it up into smaller pieces and reconfigure it in higher value combinations” — similar to what Zipcar and Uber did to cars.
In the real estate space the two major examples are WeWork and Air BnB, which unlock value by increasing utilization, but there are others in all product types, Weikal said: LiquidSpace for empty meeting rooms, Pivot Desk for empty desks — which was acquired by co-working provider Industrious, Flexe for vacant pallet space in warehouses, Clutter for empty self-storage, Spacious for idle restaurant tables in the afternoon, and others.
“They all provide the tools to optimize and monetize under-utilized real estate.”
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Erika Morphy
Erika Morphy has been writing about commercial real estate at GlobeSt.com for more than ten years, covering the capital markets, the Mid-Atlantic region and national topics. She's a nerd so favorite examples of the former include accounting standards, Basel III and what Congress is brewing.
