Savills MDI

In order to help property owners and occupiers get the most out of their buildings, Savills China has launched MDI – a property management platform which can integrate a range of building technologies.

“There is a lot of new technology being developed for real estate,” says Frankie Fan, associate director, information technology, at Savills. “Our new platform leverages our understanding of real estate needs with the benefits of new technologies, such as facial recognition, environmental sensors and parking management systems.”

The MDI service provides a framework to clients which can integrate a growing number of technologies. It is currently focused on property management, but will expand to cover more aspects of the real estate business, including valuation and agency.

The service is live with a select number of Savills clients, but will have a wider launch next year.

New data services

New capabilities to get the most out of data will bring new opportunities to quantify real estate. “I think we see the creation of new data services in commercial real estate,” says Chris Marriot, South East Asia chief executive at Savills.

“For example, Empirical CRE in Australia has begun documenting all existing and future supply of commercial properties, tenants and transactions.”

The emergence of building performance and optimisation technology

Existing technologies managing occupation, building engineering services, power supply and air-conditioning will become consolidated into a single dashboard for the control of all services in buildings.

An important part of this will be sustainability and ESG Tech, says Marriott. “This is an extension of building tech but will show an asset’s actual performance against sustainability benchmarks. These data can then be used to improve building performance and reduce the impact on the environment.”

What landlords learn from these technologies will feed into construction technology and making buildings more efficient over their whole life cycle.

Digital real estate securities go live

Blockchain technology has been hailed as the most efficient way to securitise real estate, but until now has been a fringe idea. “I think we will see the first set of mainstream real estate digital securities appear in the latter part of next year,” says Marriott.

The offline growth of e-sports

You may not realise it, but e-sports champions – professional players of video games – can earn as much as offline sportsmen and have just as large a following. Matthew Jackson, associate director, investment, at Savills, says: “E-sports will have an impact on many real estate asset classes, though some more than others. We have seen the development of e-sports stadia and experience centres: with concerns about the over-supply of retail space the e-sports sector provides huge potential to reposition assets.”

While most e-sports activity is online, demand for offline facilities is growing. Hong Kong-based e-sports coaching firm Kinguin has a physical e-sports performance centre in Poland for online sports stars to hone their skills!

Further reading:
Savills MDI

Contact us:
Simon Smith | Chris Marriott