Taylor Mammen

Technology may have come late to the commercial real estate market, but it is coming fate. Technology is quickly penetrating the industry, and it is promising disruption. This includes everything from robots inside warehouses to driverless cars, which will change development and parking requirements, AI and machine learning tools, which can change the way the industry handles and analyzes data. At the Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate's 23rd Annual Real Estate Conference, Taylor Mammen, senior managing director at RCLCO led the breakout session “New Technologies and Their Real Estate Impacts.” According to Mammen, technology is becoming pervasive in this industry, and companies should have a tech team on site to keep up.

“Every real estate organization should have a team or even just one relatively senior person who is responsible for paying attention to the technological innovations that have the potential to impact their segment of the industry and their business,” Mammen tells GlobeSt.com. “This means regularly reading technology press, attending tech conferences, meeting with vendors, and alerting their colleagues of trends or innovations that may be actionable. For most technology innovations, you usually don't have to be a first adopter, but someone needs to be constantly aware of new ideas so that you're not left behind.”

New technologies are already disrupting the real estate market, but Mammen said the extent of the disruption is still unknown. “Technological innovations are and will have dramatic implications on how we use, finance, and build real estate. None of us has a “crystal ball” that lets us know precisely how these innovations will impact real estate and our businesses, but we need to have a researched perspective,” he says.