Every six month this buzzword infested idea pops back up in the industry talking about how “Big Data” is going to TRANSFORM commercial real estate. I suppose it’s probably tied to some conference where the same speaker stands up and just starts launching buzzwords at the crowd making it easy to write attention grabbing headlines.
To make it easy, here’s how you will know Big Data actually exists in real estate:
- People can find an accurate list of all commercial addresses in their local market with square footages (finding same for the US or international just a bonus).
- Demographic / Psychographic data becomes actually available at the block level and it is not just some artificially interpolated estimate.
- Every building has submeters and every asset has some sort of RFID/digital signal reporting on its status.
- Live logs of workplace utilization are maintained (recorded by the second, not minute or hour) – not just of are people at a desk but how are they using it.
- Data exchanges are setup through easy to use APIs and accessible through services like IFTTT.
If you can show me 3 of the 5 of these at any point in time I will consider whether we are actually in a world of CRE Big Data. Until that time, please enjoy your moderately sized datasets in peace and quit pretending that we are at some technology forefront.
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