What’s Behind the Ongoing Global Digital Transformation of the Real Estate Sector

The real estate sector contributes heavily to global warming and is responsible for about 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions globally. As regulatory bodies establish strict frameworks to keep emissions in check, digital transformation helps tackle critical issues across energy management, sustainability, and remote operations.

The real estate workforce often faces the brunt of manual, repetitive tasks, such as scheduling appointments or processing rental applications, that take up a lot of time and energy. Modern technologies can streamline and standardize these mundane tasks, freeing time for professionals to focus on more critical tasks.

With competition in the real estate sector getting increasingly intense, digital transformation can allow for broader and more effective marketing campaigns. Companies can use modern ERP and CRM platforms to connect disparate business operations, manage vendor and client relationships, and improve sales and customer service

Real estate operations are spread across locations, challenging enterprise visibility and transparency. Digital tools can enable real-time collaboration and communication between stakeholders, including buyers, sellers, agents, and legal advisors, ensuring better insight and operations across the vast ecosystem

As the sector faces several economic, political, and climate headwinds, digital transformation initiatives empower companies with the capabilities to react and respond to these forces with agility. Digital tools can facilitate better coordination in development projects, ensuring adherence to timelines and budgets while catering to evolving market, business, and customer demands.

Business analytics plays a huge role in the global digital transformation of the real estate sector. Insights into market trends, customer expectations, regulatory changes, and analytics can empower investors and developers to make informed decisions. Analytics can also provide much-needed information about energy consumption, allowing the sector to make the right decisions for sustainable operations.

Digital platforms can streamline property management tasks, including rent collection, maintenance requests, and lease management. By automating repetitive tasks such as scheduling property viewings and processing rental applications, real estate professionals can focus on more strategic activities and efficiently meet their business, customer, and regulatory goals.

With real estate operations spread across geographies, cloud platforms can help bring vast amounts of data from disparate locations and systems into one centralized place. Such unified storage can make critical data accessible from anywhere, at any time, and using any device – facilitating real-time collaboration among stakeholders.

Generative AI-enabled solutions can enable real estate companies to get actionable insights from third-party sources about properties, communities, tenants, and trends and effectively manage, monitor, and track processes, vendors, and assets to improve business operations and customer satisfaction. These solutions can also streamline contract management while allowing companies to adapt better to geopolitical conflicts, irregular shipping schedules, and new global legislations and policies. According to a report by McKinsey, Generative AI could generate $110 billion to $180 billion or more in value for the real estate industry.

Machine learning and associated technologies can empower real estate developers to unearth critical information about HVAC, lighting, fire safety, and security aspects – allowing for unified control, monitoring, and optimization. Companies can streamline energy use to improve efficiency and reduce costs by continuously adjusting temperatures and lighting based on occupancy. Machine learning algorithms can also analyze data from equipment to identify patterns and predict when maintenance is needed, preventing breakdowns and extending the lifespan of assets.