The year is 2025. Mark Zuckerburg will hopefully have finally given up on the Metaverse, but the rest of the tech revolution appears that it will be well under schedule, and this includes future houses and apartments. It’s being called the 4th industrial revolution and it includes everything from the blockchain and biometrics to the IoT (Internet of Things) and AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Without further ado, here’s the Top 10 Ways we thing Real Estate Technology will grow going into 2025.
3D printing
3D printed houses have already started to be permitted in the United States and elsewhere around the world. And to be honest, the architecture and technology looks quite promising. 3D printed houses require less construction time and less manual labor. According to GokCapitol, they even cost less to build. Where the average manually constructed 3 bedroom home would cost $155,000 to $416,000 to build using traditional building methods, a 3D printed home of the same size and structure would cost 20-40% less. This would of course depend on where you live.
3D printed homes aren’t built using a typical 3d printer. They instead use a technology known as “contour crafting” where a robotic arm moves around on rails and prints the house layer by layer. This form of printing can’t be used to build entire houses yet but it does make it easier and faster to build curved foundations as walls. They’re also becoming an attractive option as lumber costs have gone up. Some of you might remember lumber going parabolic last year.
Look for surges like this to open up the door for more concrete built homes made with 3d printing. Things like roofing, windows, doors, electrical wiring, and finishing all still need to be done in the traditional fashion 3D home printing technology will only improve as time goes on.
Printers large enough for the job are being sold for starting at $39k ranging up to well over $100k right now and you can expect to see it become more ubiquitous as more permits are issued across the country. You can see some of the printing in action here.
Blockchain
It’s only a matter of time before all real estate transactions are on the blockchain along with many of your other transactions. If it’s what the majority of the major banks want to implement, then so shall it be. It will be easier to track real estate and deeds on the blockchain than it will be for normal everyday transactions and that is already underway.
Blockchain technology makes it easier to settle disputes around deeds as well as allows for more up to date realtime analysis of the market. This technology can provide secure data sharing as well as could streamline rental collections and payments for renters and leasers.
Blockchain tech can also assist with financing, real estate asset management, increased loan and mortgage security as well as helping to authenticate tenant and investor identities. It’s an all around more secure solution for a lot of real estate problems and will likely prove very useful in the future of fractional property investment for which platforms are already starting to pop up.
Biometrics Technology
Biometrics have been all the rave moving towards 2030. You know that scene in The Incredibles where Edna the supersuit designer does an eye analysis and palm scan and voice recognition? We’re pretty much there, although the iris scans aren’t super common.
Biometrics tools are becoming more common for people to lock and secure their homes. Especially in apartment complexes/. Biometrics is also increasingly being used in order to conduct the signings of legal documents related to real estate, specifically for loan signings or home closings.
When before you would need to be to spend time traveling to a local title agency to meet your real estate team/lenders and signing agent, now this can be done remotely online saving hours for all parties as well as enable long distance signings and transactions to take place. This is already legal in over 40+ states, but should be fully legal across the United States with the future passing of the SECURE Remote Online Notarization Act in the Senate.
Biometrics has also been proposed as a tool to increase security in commercial settings. For example you may have an automated notification when certain conditions are met –
For example, software might alert system
administrators and security that the company’s CEO is on-premises, or that a former disgruntled employee – now on a list of banned individuals – has entered the premises or building and may potentially pose a threat.
Look for this future signing tech with biometric capabilities to spread across the globe as the tools become cheaper and systems refined.
Cloud Technology
Cloud technology will likely be used to incorporate the aforementioned biometrics and blockchain technology. Real estate organizations already rely on email, file sharing, data storage, web hosting and mobile applications that frequently use the cloud.
The overall cloud market is expected to grow to $864 billion by 2025, and you can expect that the Real Estate Industry will play a part in this. Cloud storage provides for easier and smoother sharing of files between clients, lenders, and agents as well as keeps things backed up. It also allows for Real Estate Businesses to be run from anywhere so that when you are traveling, deals do not have to suffer.
To be honest we’d be surprised if any Real Estate team wasn’t using Cloud storage for internal collaboration alone, and we only expect the load and volume to grow.
Fractional Property Investments
Fractional shares of stocks began to be sold clear back in 1999 through a now extinct company called BuyandHold. They experienced a true revival in 2019 starting with Interactive Brokers and through the early 2020’s with the Robinhood stock trading trend and the GameStop pump during Covid.
Now, fractional investments are making their way into the Real Estate industry. So even if you can’t afford a 2nd home on your own, you can still profit off of the housing market. It’s a much better deal than the timeshare your uncle may have gotten scammed into, as its much easier to exit and you don’t have to convince somebody you care about to go live in Boca Raton.
Nowadays you can get in on the price action for as little as $10 for fractional property investments. Your essentially buyings shares of an individual property or real estate fund. You can even generate cash flow off of rent as a form of dividends. You can open up your app store and be investing in a new real estate property via fractional property investment in less than 10 minutes.
Green Technology
The Green Technology and Sustainability Market is set to reach $36.6 billion by 2025 and $60.7 billion by 2027. You can bet that a large portion of this will be involved in Real Estate Tech. Especially with all of the government subsidies. You have to love good ol’ free market capitalism.
Over 10 states as well as Puerto Rico are offering Puerto Rico offer solar incentives in addition to the Federal Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) to encourage homeowners to install solar. In August of 2022, Congress passed an extension of the ITC, and raised the ante by providing a tax credit of 30%! for the installations that take place between 2022-2032.
Ecowatch broke down some of the top states to take advantage of tax credits for solar panels. We only expect this number to grow as more people attempt to become less dependent on centralized power stations and sources.
While there is still debate from the far right on if green technology will be efficient in the longrun, by 2025 it is predicted that 85 percent of businesses are expected to calculate carbon saving building into their strategies. So in the short run. like most heavily subsidized government programs, it appears to be a safe bet.
As of April of 2022, only 3.2% of homeowners have solar panels installed in the United States. That leaves a lot of room to grow. 🌱
IoT (Internet of Things)
Although it seems like just a catchy phrase tacked onto the 4th industrial revolution of technology. This refers to basically putting the internet in numerous devices of the past that conventionally didn’t incorporate internet. The main goal of this tech is to make things more convenient and relaxing for it’s users.
In the context of real estate technology, this includes anything from lights and garage doors to things you may not have even though of, like built in plant watering systems or even the lock on your door.
Overseas in more industrialized countries like Japan, South Korea, and China, doorlocks have become an increasingly common tool eliminating the need to carry around your keys as you can instead open up your home or apartment using your smartphone or biometrics.
The IoT also can help control and optimize your HVAC system for efficiency, integrate with home cleaning systems, or work with package delivery services.
Generally speaking, having an IoT optimized home, will just increase resale value as we move into the future. IoT has also been used for community management and Home Owner’s Associations to keep members up to date on community events and residential assistance.
From turning off your lights to turning on your fireplace and running your dishwasher from your bed. The only thing the IoT doesn’t integrate into so far is getting your driveway shoveled, but we’re sure somebody somewhere is working on just that.
Smart homes, apartments, and devices are changing the way we live in many ways. Smart devices, in general, are powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) and are becoming one of the main property management trends.
Machine Learning and AI
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have improved by leaps and bounds in the early 2020’s rendering digital artists significantly less potent. So too has this intelligence spread into other fields beyond art.
While AI technology will likely be used for more simple tasks like conversational AI built into websites as referenced by Deloitte, Machine Learning is likely where the real money will be made.
One prominent study from McKinsey, found that machine-learning models can predict changes in rent rate with 90% accuracy, while the changes in other property metrics are only able to predict within a mere 60%. Machine Learning (ML) can simply account for more variables in less time. This same method for rent can be hypothesized to work just as well for property valuation. You can bet that the biggest Real Estate Groups are going to be taking a big look into big data.
Real Estate Management and CRM Platforms
Everybody is a salesman in the year 2025, and if you have a tool to optimize sales, you better be able to sell that too. That’s exactly what businesses are aiming to do with their Customer Relationship Management and Real Estate Management Tools.
Real Estate companies have been perpetually worried about maintaining the customers that they already do have as they’re hard work to acquire! This is why you got so many Happy Thanksgiving Day emails to go with your quarterly magazine with updates on the market and deals from the local eats in town. CRM tools make it even easier for real estate businesses to keep track and take care of their clients.
The CRM market size in real estate is estimated to be $12.8 billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 4.2%. Real Estate Management Tools are predicted to have a market valued at $2.2 billion by the same time. At present globally, only 38% of these property management companies worldwide are running these businesses through SaaS. These numbers are expected to over double to 80% by 2025 as everybody else looks to jump on the highly efficient SaaS train.
Virtual Reality Tours
According to the National Association of Realtor’s 97% of all homebuyers used the internet in their home search.
Studies as old as those form 2018 showed that 77% of Americans agreed to a statement that they would love to be able to take VR house tours before actually visiting prospective homes (Coldwell Banker).
As the average homebuyer visits 7-10 homes before, it only stands to reason that the the average homebuyer will soon enjoy the ability to screen more of these houses online first. Especially in a post covid world with a younger generation of tech savvy homebuyers.
Goldman Sach’s is predicting the Virtual Reality and AR (Augmented Reality) market in real estate to reach a Total Addressable Market Size of 2.6 billion by 2025. field. More than a few real estate agents may be looking for a new way to make themselves useful going forward.
It will be interesting to see how this technology expands going into the future and how much it is adopted. As of yet, there is nothing that can quite capture that “new house smell” or give a potential home purchaser the chance to feel the air of the neighborhood. Still, one can gather quite a bit of information about a house from taking a virtual layout tour to see if it fits theirs and their families needs.
VR can also be used for architectural visualization and if the aforementioned Mark Zuckerberg is still going, maybe there can even be some sales on his heavily facebook (meta) subsidized virtual marketplace 😉.