Will Real-Time Technology Forever Change Real Estate?
Courtesy of Imerza
The real estate industry moves fast. It wasn’t so long ago that potential buyers narrowed their searches by driving around with a sheaf of printed listings, and designers and builders relied on CAD drawings and artist renderings to show yet-to-be-built spaces. Nowadays, advances in graphics technology have brought us interactive 3D renderings, making it easier for investors, buyers, and other stakeholders to truly understand the designs they’re looking at.
Following on from these advances, we’re also seeing technology that can excite and entice buyers, like sales configurators and interactive tours, where visitors can choose finishes and design their own spaces right before their eyes; virtual reality experiences, where architects can get feedback from investors on design at key stages of the process; shadow studies, where potential occupants can see how a space will be affected by sunlight at various times of day; and digital twins, where cities can get a true idea of a building’s usage, which leads to new ways to optimize efficiencies and design better spaces for residents.
Courtesy of Buildmedia
Many of these applications aren’t new—shadow and massing studies, for example, have been around for decades—but the difference is in how they’re delivered, and in their high level of interactivity. Imagine a combination configurator / shadow study tool where users can, by tapping a few buttons, see how various finishes would look at different times of day. Such applications are not only possible, they can now be pushed to just about any device, from smartphones and tablets to PCs and kiosks, making them accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
We’re reaching a point in the proptech journey where, if you can build it virtually, anyone can experience and explore it visually, interactively, on just about any device.
What these new types of experiences have in common is real-time technology—the ability to render in real time, and to implement game-like controls such as unlimited movement through 3D spaces, on-screen buttons and sliders that cause instantaneous changes to materials and lighting, and the ability to read live data and update the scene accordingly. And behind real-time technology is a real-time engine—more specifically, a game engine.
Courtesy of Buildmedia
How could a game engine be involved? Game engines have always included real-time rendering—as a player looks or moves around, the environment is rendered in real time. And while the graphics in video games of yesteryear were often blocky or clunky, these engines now include features like physically based materials and ray tracing, making them capable of a level of visual quality that rivals many offline renderers.
In fact, architectural design leaders Zaha Hadid, ARUP, and HOK are already embracing real-time technology, using it to develop new ways to communicate design to builders, gain approval from investors, and garner interest from buyers. Epic Games has taken a strong interest in these new applications because its game engine, Unreal Engine, is behind many of them.
To bring awareness to these new uses for real-time technology, Epic is hosting a real estate episode of The Pulse, a video series devoted to industries making use of game engines to entice, engage, and inform with these new types of experiences.
Courtesy of Epic Games
In The Pulse: Real-Time Real Estate: Visualize, Connect, Buildon September 21, you can engage in discussion with forward-thinking companies using real-time technology to inspire interest, educate stakeholders, and sell real estate. Join host James Scott, Director of the Real Estate Technology Initiative at MIT Center for Real Estate, as he discusses the digital transformation within real estate with industry experts Edward Wagoner, CIO Digital at JLL Technologies; Dorian Vee, CEO/Founder at IMERZA; and Sam Anderson of Epic Games. At the live Q&A afterward, you can pose your questions about how you can leverage real-time technology to achieve your company’s goals, and how to get started in this brave new world. Register today.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
