Technology And Commercial Real Estate: The Management Challenge | The Source For NAR Commercial Real Estate

// Tuesday, January 3, 2012

RealComm CEO Jim Young On Technology And CRE

Managing technology change in commercial real estate is a challenge with a lot of dimensions. The act of staying on top of new sources of and tools for market data might be the first thing we think of when we consider technology change in our industry. But change doesn’t stop there.

Office property managers, brokers and reps already have a giant task in meeting the needs of clients. Today, evolving technology is shifting those needs more than ever before. How can we relate these changes to our practice?

One way is to look for how specific technologies change the expectations of users of office space. Take cloud computing. When we hear about cloud computing, it’s tempting to write off the trend as something that we on the physical-world side of things don’t have to worry about but the IT guys and gals in the back rooms of large operations do.

As RealComm CEO Jim Young points out in the below video, nothing could be further from the truth. The rise of cloud computing means, among other things, an expectation of constant wireless access to business applications by way of pad, phone and laptop. That means that connectivity — “bars” on smart phones — are now a major deliverable for office space, something that today’s college grad workers and tenants can’t — and won’t — do without.

The can of worms this realization alone opens for property managers, brokers and reps is huge. Are rent level calculations up to date? And how were these decisions made?

A soup-to-nuts, interdepartmental approach to these questions is counseled by Young in the following video shot at the Atlanta Summit in 2011. Thanks much to Coy Davidson for posting the video.