Real Estate Trends: If you’re thinking about investing in the real estate market, today your options extend far beyond the standard house or apartment building.
Today’s savvy investors are taking a look at current real estate trends and watching carefully to see what new ones could pop up.
Let’s take a quick look at one real estate trend you’ve likely seen surface at your local shopping center: Pop-ups. One example of a company leading this trend is xNomad, a Swedish marketplace platform for short-term retail pop-ups.
Lorenzo Bonfiglio, xNomad’s head of Expansion and Strategy, has managed the company’s expansion into the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as developing financial models and company process playbooks and dashboards for how such pop-ups can proliferate in other areas.
Below are half a dozen other innovative real estate trends you may want to explore:
- Keep an eye on AI. Artificial intelligence is infiltrating every sector of business, and real estate is no exception. Generative AI is creating more accurate and detailed representationsof properties, classifying various types of buildings and spaces, and developing descriptions of properties based on market trends and buyer feedback. Just remember: AI is built on human input. While it has the potential to revolutionize the industry, flawed data can produce skewed results.
- Staying Safe. Since COVID, a key real estate trend is making buildings safer for occupants. From enhanced HEPA filtration with UV lights, to touchless entry and automated sanitization measures, today’s technology is ensuring real estate safety by installing state-of-the-art purification systems in new developments, and by updating existing structures.
- Blockchain blockbuster. Is real estate only a third dimensional asset? What blockchain did for art now applies to real estate: the rapid digitalization of real estate ownership and growing demand for RWAs (Real World Assets) make real estate a digital asset with all transfer functions such as recording, signing and notarization now taking place online, since the advent of the pandemic. While it seems like liquidity would be an obstacle, solutions such as NFT technology help reduce fees and correlate mobility demand with homeownership velocity. Crypto is clearly poised to become the biggest new kid on the block(chain).
- Greener pastures.The real estate market has long been the largest climate change culprit, but the evolving decarbonization of real estate is a critical trend that has the potential to positively affect the entire planet. The cost savings in more energy efficient buildings with greener heating and cooling systems will increase the market value of any properties you own, but beyond this, as the co-founder of a leading proptech company says, “real estate will become the keystone in the global imperative to remove C02 from the atmosphere to prevent climate change. And not just in the obvious ways, like decarbonizing buildings, but in the use of land to protect and/or regrow forests and jungles to generate nature-based carbon offsets. The value of land that is capable of dense, high-volume photosynthesis is posed for enormous growth over the course of the next decade.”
- Video visits. Video isn’t a new technology, true, but the prolific adoption of video in the real estate industry is a fairly recent development. Beyond video for marketing, touring, leasing, sales, asset management, you name it — live video can now take the place of an in-person tour. And it can’t be photoshopped.
- Playing bridge. This kind of bridge uses the big cards: those worth the price of a house. In the past, it’s been challenging for anyone without deep pockets to buy a new home before selling their current one. Bridge providers solve this dilemma with a game-changing loan that enables the purchaser to buy their next home while the previous one is still for sale.
The real estate market is undergoing what trend forecasters in the field refer to as “The Great Reset,” ushering in a new era of thinking, building and operating that will forever change the landscape of what real estate used to mean.
From hybrid work to reinventing the downtown, from pop-up retail spaces to digitalization, real estate is unrecognizable from a few decades ago.
