It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking real estate hasn’t changed much.
Drive around any big city, or a small town, for that matter, and it’s easy to believe that real estate not only isn’t changing – it can’t change. After all, buildings are still buildings, and they’ll always need land underneath them, owners, builders, renovation, development, redevelopment. Everybody still needs to live and work somewhere.
And it’s true, that isn’t changing. But that doesn’t mean the industry is static – far from it.
In fact, in the first twenty years of this century, technology has created seismic shifts in real estate. It’s basically overturned an industry that did stay more or less the same for centuries before that. And there are many more changes still to come.
Working in the real estate industry as a valuation professional, you need to arm yourself with a wide range of tech trends and tools to help you do your job better and more efficiently.
Like what?
Here are just a few that have become more and more commonplace just within the last five years:
- Cloud-based property management
- Blockchain-based real estate sales and investment
- Augmented and virtual reality listings
- Fractional investments in real estate assets
- Online real estate marketplaces and sales
In many cases, these technologies work hand in hand. As you know, I’ve spent lots of time speaking about the powerful combination of fractional investment and blockchain-based transactions. That’s just one example of leveraging the technology to make something people are already doing – investing in real estate – simpler and more intuitive than ever.
As a valuation professional, however, I’d say the biggest tech trend to watch is the rise of Big Data. Though the term might sound daunting, it’s basically an extension of what appraisers have always done. Mining big data means gathering as much information and intelligence as we possibly can, not just about a particular property but about the surrounding neighborhood and city.
Some of the data is new, but some has been around for a while. We just had no way to dive into it and apply advanced analytical technology and artificial intelligence to find out what all this data was actually telling us.
The goal of mining big data in valuation is to find hidden trends and possibilities that could either boost the value of a property or undermine it – planned redevelopments, infrastructure works, gentrification or a subtle downward shift in the character of the area, along with information about rental and purchase price trends, vacancy rates or adjacent and nearby properties, and much, much more.
It’s true that people are always going to need places to live and work, which is why the real estate industry isn’t going to disappear. And successful valuation will always be the bedrock on which all real estate transactions and investments are built. So it must be solid, stable, reliable.
The best way to do that is by taking advantage of the latest tools and understanding where the technology is headed in order to ensure accurate, reliable valuation not just for today, but for tomorrow and beyond.
