INDUSTRYHUB
Ever looked at a building and wondered who the developer was, the agents that let it, the structural engineer, who did the lighting or supplied the windows? Finding the answers to these questions could take days and often relies on personal and word-of-mouth connections. IndustryHub, set up by former Thor Equities associate Savannah de Savary, aims to simplify that process by democratising those connections and bringing them online. Search a building in IndustryHub, find all the players and contact them directly. It is a who’s who of the built environment, and has ambitions to go global.
PLACEMAKE
Talk to Placemake founders Chlump Chatkupt and Nikhil Vadgama about what they are doing with data to predict where we should be locating offices, shops, storage, you name it, and your mouth will fall open aghast. The mapping system created by this formidable pairing of a maths genius and a hedge-fund rising star can take snapshots of a city to identify up-and-coming areas based on everything from prices and developments to healthcare facilities and social media check-ins.
RIALTO
Spreadsheets are like Marmite. You either love them or you hate them. More than £8tn of property assets are managed in manual spreadsheets. Trillions of pounds of property, manually inputted into Excel, sounds like the stuff of nightmares: so much time and so very dull. But for Rialto, the industry’s reliance on spreadsheets is an opportunity. Its platform provides landlords, agents and developers real-time access to a centralised dashboard, allowing easy collaboration between all parties involved in property management.
LAND INSIGHT
Viability assessments can be the bane of the industry. Time consuming and costly. Land Insight aims to make it easier by bringing the core data to you. Its mapping tool collates information such as planning applications and land ownership, making it quick and easy for users to search for and assess development opportunities.
REalyse
“See the market before the market” is REalyse’s sales pitch. By bringing together numerous datasets, the company aims to identify trends, risks and opportunities across the residential sector. So instead of having to scour several different portals and traipse through local authority planning documents, it brings all that data into a single hub, promising improved investment decisions.
PAVEGEN
Founder and chief executive Laurence Kemball-Cook says that the Pavegen tile is just a stupid floor tile and that the people who walk across it make it smart. Well, perhaps, but it is also a tile that has the potential to change the way the built environment works. Clever engineering has led to a tile that converts kinetic energy produced by the people walking on it into off-grid energy. But it is also much more than that: the tile is able to collect a host of useful data for its owner, enabling them to manage (and personalise) buildings much more efficiently.
VIRTUAL WALKTHROUGH
Virtual reality has a big future in real estate. As the property game becomes more and more global, giving people access to buildings while thousands of miles away from the physical asset will become not just important; it will be essential. Virtual Walkthrough saw that trend several years ago. Now owned by US giant Matterport, Virtual Walkthrough provides immersive 360-degree virtual tours of buildings, allowing users to judge size, space and dimension from near or far.
VUCITY
www.wagstaffsdesign.co.uk/vucity-2/
VUCITY is the first interactive real time 3D digital model of London that enables developers, planners, local councils, architects and transport engineers to plan, propose and visualise new developments and infrastructure throughout the capital. Using city and environmental data, users can see the impact of their development on rights to light, how easily accessible it will be, what impact it will have on viewing corridors, and so on. It is a model designed to be continually updated so that London gets the right development in the right places.
HIGHTOWER
This US-based software company, recently launched in the UK, claims it can make you a 17-fold return on investment. Hightower is a leasing management platform for commercial real estate that aims to help landlords and agents save time and reach more tenants. The platform enables deal-tracking, provides leasing analysis, and claims to ease and speed up workflow.
PROPENSITY TO CYCLE TOOL
We all know that cycling is the new golf when it comes to networking in property. But as well as being a way to build relationships and show off how much you spent on your latest steed, cycling can also be a handy planning tool. Developed by the University of Cambridge and funded by the Department for Transport, this free tool was designed to help transport planners prioritise investments and interventions to promote cycling. But it can be used much more widely than that. In an environment where more and more occupiers are demanding cycling infrastructure (or other non-car forms of transport to work), tools such as the PCT will become increasingly useful from an urban planning and site selection perspective.
