Traditionally, commercial real estate had been slow to change, but this once tech-averse industry is now heading toward digital modernization.
In just the last two years, from accounting software to intelligence platforms, we've seen technology emerge to solve the challenges that real estate teams have been struggling with for far too long.
What caused this shift, and where will it take the industry? As the commercial real estate industry evolves, 2022 will be a crucial year for technology adoption.
Let's look over the past year to see where these trends started and how they'll affect the market in the new year.
Remote Work
In 2020, COVID-19 forced office closures, significantly changing how employees worked. COVID became one of the catalysts of the commercial real estate digital revolution, influencing the industry to adopt new technological solutions.
With teams going remote, the industry had no choice but to evolve—and quickly. With the need to manage flex-work arrangements, work-at-home communications and social distancing, there was a turn to technology to enable efficient work in the "new normal." Now, CRE technology is available to aid almost every aspect of real estate development.
The Great Resignation
2021 was the year of the Great Resignation, and like most industries, commercial real estate felt the pain. While some commercial real estate professionals couldn't handle the changing market and hybrid/remote work schedules, other high-performers desired more strategic, complex tools and projects. The industry saw considerable turnover, making teams run leaner, onboard employees faster, and approach their processes differently.
As real estate teams anticipate the high-turnover trend to continue in 2022, they find themselves depending on technology to fill the employee gaps and compensate for the changes ahead.
Changing Expectations
The digital revolution, inflation, property values, and new work and lifestyle demands—there seems to be an endless list of factors changing the real estate landscape.
For example, millennials are building families, while baby boomers are transitioning into senior living areas. People’s expectations around how they live and work have changed. They're experiencing overlap as working and living now often happen in the same place. Developers are adjusting properties to the tastes of the current market, such as equipping multi-family developments with rooms dedicated to being a home office space.
Commercial real estate technology advancements are creating data-powered enterprises, where real estate teams can leverage the organization's collective knowledge to make smarter, faster decisions in a leaner operation.
Continuing the Revolution in 2022
Proactive intelligence will drive the project revolution in the next couple of years. And in 2022, the industry will experience the transition from cloud 1.0 to cloud 2.0.
The original wave of cloud technologies to hit the commercial real estate industry simply transferred spreadsheets and administrative work that bogs down development teams into the cloud. Manual, administrative work still ate up the developer's time. The new generation of cloud intelligence technology is eliminating spreadsheets and manual tasks. These tools aren’t just moving where the work is done but leveraging automation and AI to eliminate the admin workflows altogether. AI in commercial real estate is trending towards being a key figure in how real estate development workflows will grow more efficient over time.
Even more importantly, the new technology focuses on ease of usability, where teams can use the tools right out of the box. And build scalable processes that new team members can easily pick up. With the Great Resignation, this has never been needed more.
This frees up time for your development team leaders, so they can focus on high-value strategic decisions and not be bogged down by low-level administrative work. Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning do all the legwork while serving up the insights for real estate professionals to be smarter, faster and better at what they do.
Real estate teams are ready to build a well-rounded tech stack in 2022. An innovative solution like Northspyre will be one piece in a complete operating system, using data, AI and automation to deliver complex projects and manage real estate portfolios like never before.