Tech Comes To CRE

Joel Ross

As others have noted, CRE has been slower than some others to recognize the tremendous advances in technology to assist in due diligence, design and building facilities management. I am working with companies who have developed completely automated systems to due diligence sites and buildings.  They can put a underwater drone into the water to inspect a bulkhead, a aerial drone to get a topo of a site. And a robot to go into a building and map out everything in that building from walls, to pipes, furniture, and all systems, all within hours. In each case the drones feed data to a processor and humans who then provide 3 D graphics of what ever it is and reports and the data can be manipulated in a variety of ways depending on the need. Saves time and cost and provides better graphics and data.  Other technology is now available to provide sensors in any space to measure and analyze energy, occupancy, security, water, or whatever is required on a 24/7 basis and then to control the various mechanicals with little to no human help.

We are just at the beginning of these various systems which will alter how due diligence is done, the output for the decision-makers and also how buildings are managed. These systems are run by AI which allows the user to know much more about the site, or the building he is acquiring, and at far less cost and time. So for example we are developing a large parcel which is on the  water, has 70 year old piling, and needs up to 1 million tons of clean fill.  These AI systems can map and inspect the bulkhead, and tell us what needs repair and what kind of repair so we can cost that out. It provides a topo and underground mapping of pilings so we can have a detailed topo from which we can have the engineers determine a fill plan and the architects can do their site plan with better information. There are existing old buildings on the site needing demo. We can in a couple of hours determine all aspects of those buildings and devise a better demo plan since they are old fortress like concrete and brick and not easily demolished.