The building industry is divided into two separate, but equally important groups: property owners who make investment decisions and AEC professionals who turn concepts into reality. For the longest time, these disparate factions have relied on one another to drive development, but despite their alignment of goals, challenges arise due to their different languages and scopes of work. At the AEC Hackathon last October in San Francisco, there were a lot of interesting approaches on how to solve problems faced by building industry professionals. One in particular dealt with “hacking the process,” essentially working to develop a framework which encapsulates the development process to find areas of overlap and drive projects forward. The industry is in dire need of tools to connect decision makers around project specific and public property data to eliminate asymmetries of information to bring projects on line more efficiently and to ensure that economic and community goals are aligned.
With a variety of new technologies brought to market to aid in the design and analysis of real estate, it is the crossover between design, construction and economics that deserves more attention. More often than many outsiders realize, the decision to purchase or develop a property is made based on anecdotal information and back of the envelope math. Developers are anxious to put capital to work on projects that appear to “check the boxes” and meet their investment criteria. Once a project is green-lighted, tools such as email, Sharepoint, and the telephone remain the dominant way in which this analysis is shared and processed.