Here is a thought experiment for you: think ahead 10 years and imagine that no-one needs office or retail real estate in the way they need it today. No-one needs to go to an office to work, and everyone can discover, purchase and have delivered any item of clothing, or food, or whatever, in just a few minutes.
Don’t dismiss this as a crazy notion. Think back 10 years and consider that then there were no smartphones, no tablets, no social media to speak of, no Uber, no Airbnb, no Google Docs. Can you honestly say you expected to be doing what you do today 10 years ago?
Today there are 2bn people with smartphones, 1.4bn users on Facebook and hundreds of millions of people who use the likes of Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram on a daily basis. With 1990s supercomputers in their pockets, vast swathes of the world’s population are spending much of their day doing things that simply did not exist just 10 years ago.
Technology is increasing exponentially in power and speed and simultaneously becoming cheaper. Consider what might be if everyone had devices that were 16 or more times faster than now. Consider a life with multi-gigabit mobile broadband, unlimited data storage, ubiquitous super-high definition screens and personal artificial intelligence assistants. Imagine that Google’s mission to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” has been achieved.
Now you are thinking backwards from the future, rather than projecting a future based on iterating from the present. And that makes all the difference. Not digitising the past, but imagining what might be possible with tools that do not exist yet.
Many people today say planning is vital. But it is actually the worst thing that could happen to you. If you set a five-year goal the world will have changed by then and where you thought was the place to be will no longer be where it’s at.
What humans bring to this technological future is the ability to innovate, interact with complex objects in unstructured environments and to apply social intelligence to problems.
So here ends the thought experiment with us defining what spaces and what places we will need under these new circumstances.
It is not a matter of the death of the office or the high street, it is about understanding customers’ needs and developing the right product to satisfy them.
Essential tech for property people: WiredScore
WiredScore is based in New York but is set to be a feature on the UK property scene shortly.
It allows a property owner to demonstrate that a building is fit for purpose in a digital world. The Wired Certification programme, launched by New York’s former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and the New York City Economic Development Corporation, identifies and certifies buildings with the fastest and most reliable internet connections. The company is building a similar relationship with the mayor of London.
WiredScore performs in-depth analysis of a property’s connectivity with three key attributes in mind: absolute connectivity, infrastructure and readiness to improve. The higher the building’s score, the more suitable, at a base level, it is for technologically-savvy occupiers.
A doctored image has been doing the rounds on the internet recently that shows Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs with an additional layer at the bottom entitled “WiFi” – to much approval, because anyone who works in tech is stymied by anything other than great WiFi.
Just as you couldn’t imagine email on your phone in 1990, or streaming House of Cards in 2005, or following driving directions on your smartphone. The simple point is that broadband is the great enabler.
Wallis Simpson once quipped: “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” Well, today she would have added “or have too much broadband”.
WiredScore will help you find it.
Antony Slumbers is founder and chief executive of software developer Estates Today
