Professor Andrew Baum has been thinking about and studying the real estate industry since 1970. He recently began teaching MBA students and executives at the University of Oxford, soon realizing that his students wanted to learn more about the future of the industry than technical information. Thus, his extensive research reflects a greater understanding of the forces driving the future of the industry.
Andrew spent three months analyzing the market, while visiting Silicon Valley, London, New York, Boston, and Amsterdam, to create PropTech 3.0. Though he published the report in 2017, Andrew’s recent conversation with Chase Garbarino on The Let’s Go Show touched on updates to these themes and developments in the commercial real estate (CRE) industry.
Chase and Andrew began by diving into the basics of the proptech space, which Andrew splits into three distinct parts. The first encompasses technology for the physical property construction and operation process, and the second includes real estate FinTech. Finally, the third touches on the occupier market, which was stimulated by the idea of the shared economy and companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Zipcar.
Their conversation shifts towards the future of PropTech and CRE, which Andrew sees as inseparable from the climate crisis: “Everything that I think about is colored by the idea that we have to do something about carbon and global warming.”
With COP26 unfolding on the world stage in Glasgow, the climate crisis is top of mind for company leaders around the world. He predicts a shift in CRE agendas towards thinking about how to retrofit existing buildings in the U.S., U.K., and Germany to make those buildings more energy efficient. He gives an example from the U.K., where they currently need to spend over 500 billion pounds to simply insulate the homes that they live in.
Overall, Andrew asserted, the industry has “a simple, but huge challenge of reinvestment in the existing stock that needs to be achieved through training, technology and just sheer hard work and money.”
To learn more about the future of PropTech and the workplace, listen to The Let’s Go Show’s latest episode.
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On Today’s Episode
Chase Garbarino, CEO and Co-Founder at HqO, the only end-to-end operating system for commercial office buildings.
Andrew Baum led the University of Oxford’s teaching activity in real estate 2009-2021 (MBA, EMBA and executive education), and in 2017 he established the Oxford Future of Real Estate Initiative, an industry-supported research programme focused on the 2025-2030 impact of innovation and technology on the global real estate industry.
Want to learn more? Listen to the Let’s Go Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.
