A new generation of innovators in commercial real estate is taking inspiration from—and even going beyond—the hospitality industry’s focus on customer service and satisfaction to invent new ways to make residential and office tenants happier.
The commercial real estate sector must adjust to a trend in which corporate tenants increasingly see buildings as tools to recruit and retain talent and boost workforce productivity, panelists said at the ULI Spring Meeting in Nashville. Real estate developers need to focus on designing innovative, customized spaces and offering amenities that help their tenants meet their strategic goals concerning human capital.
New applications for artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, and the “internet of things” promise to transform the commercial real estate industry and create new ways to generate revenue and reduce expenses, said the head of a real estate–oriented investment fund speaking at the 2019 ULI Spring Meeting.
The U.S. economy continues to perform strongly nearly a decade into the current recovery and China appears to be bouncing back from a slowdown, but weakness in Europe is a cause for concern, a prominent business journalist told an audience at the ULI Spring Meeting in Nashville. The U.S. GDP growth trend is still solid, said Kathleen Hays, global economics and policy editor for Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg Radio, who has covered the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve for more than 30 years. “The bottom line is the economy is still growing and it’s still creating jobs,” Hays said.
A new generation of software platforms could do everything from monitoring buildings’ energy and water use in real time to providing tenant workforces with on-site access to medical treatment services, said panelists at ULI’s Spring Meeting.
Once a declining industrial expanse, Wedgewood-Houston has morphed into an enclave for creative businesses and emerged as one of Nashville’s hottest neighborhoods.
The real estate industry traditionally has valued gut instinct and experience. But the ability to collect, analyze, and visualize vast amounts of information could be the new competitive advantage.
From the increasing urbanization of emerging nations in Africa to the graying of the U.S. population, demographic shifts will have a major impact upon demand for various types of development over the next few decades, according to a demographic analyst who spoke at the ULI Fall Meeting in Boston.
In the closing address at the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting in Boston, social psychologist and best-selling author Amy Cuddy urged audience members to alter their physical posture, speak more slowly, and use expansive breathing to feel more powerful and open to communicating with others.
The commercial real estate sector is poised to undergo a radical technological transformation in which it will be as quick and easy to buy or sell a home as it is to order a new iPhone, in which blockchain and digital tokens will allow commercial real estate assets to be split into tiny shares that can be easily traded, and in which construction companies will deploy autonomous bulldozers to grade sites and make up for a shortage of skilled labor. Those were just some of the transformative innovations described by venture capitalist Brad Greiwe in a session on technological change at the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting in Boston.
