By Kyle Tooke (National Director of Sales - Smart Buildings - US)
After a week of hectic priorities and too few hours in the day, I finally have the opportunity to sit down, reflect, and share my experience from the RealComm CIO forum in New York City. The event was full of real estate industry leaders speaking about technology investments, current and future states of PropTech and FinTech, and legal considerations tied to these topics.
It is enlightening to hear perspectives of organizational technology leaders at such varying stages of their own digital journey. This group had representation from innovators, early adopters, the majority, and maybe some that were perhaps a little behind the curve. There were even some real estate firms taking their hand at software development and building their own solutions. Regardless of where your firm sits on the technology spectrum, this is a great event to participate in – not an ad just passionate about great communities that foster good conversation within our industry.
The NYC Fall event was hosted by John Fitzpatrick from The Blackstone Group in a gorgeous building at 601 Lexington Ave. The event began with a recap of the Realcomm|IBcon event earlier in the year by Realcomm’s CEO, Jim Young, who joined us from Singapore on his birthday at approximately 3 AM in the morning his time. He is spending his travels exploring one of the most technologically modern countries in the world to gain perspective on the newest tends from opulent indoor car parking right outside of your high-rise apartment to autonomous transportation.
We were then joined by Alby Bocanegra from the city of New York, who spoke to the initiatives on pushing smart city innovations. His group is dedicated to working with technology companies focused on smart building, IoT, and networking technologies to help realize this vision and ensure the standards are set as a collaborative effort between the city and the developing vendor. ThoughtWire’s very own CEO, Mike Montieth, has spoken extensively on this subject – connecting the inside and outside worlds.
My favorite portion of the event was the PropTech landscape round-table discussion consisting of some very influential organizations including Blackstone, Rudin Management, Meridian Capital, and Camber Creek. The consensus was clear – investing in smart building and IoT strategies today is crucial to success and the end-goal is twofold. On one hand - you have tenant engagement applications, and on the other hand, you have operations platforms which integrate sub systems and IoT sensors within a built environment.
The pinnacle is when you can have these two systems integrated to work together in real time and make use of the data gathered from the tenant engagement application. This is what commercial and corporate real estate companies should be aspiring to.
I relished in the fact that right after they discussed this at length and what a challenge it was for the industry, I had the opportunity to tell ThoughtWire’s story which solves this very problem. We call this Operations Performance Management (OPM) – something the industrial world has been thinking about and using for decades. OPM is occasionally called by various names but the end goal is the same, do more with what you have. Lower operating costs, increase tenant engagement and start to see truly intelligent automation without throwing a mountain of cash or resources at the problem.
ThoughtWire will be attending the CIO Forum in Toronto on October 24th - if you're attending, make sure you meet with Remo Di Fronzo - our Director of Smart Building Sales in Canada.
To learn more about how we’re helping building managers achieve higher asset values download our exclusive eBook on OPM.
