Steve Weikal

"The big trends are climate change, major breakthroughs in science and technology, the emergence of technologies we have never seen before, and socio-geographic movements. There will be major restructuring across the globe, and the environment around us will change. Weikal says that such changes will require discoveries, inventions, and innovations on a global scale, and the real estate industry is among them."

"Ai is already being used but [the] responsive algorithms that power generative Ai are the current exciting developments."

CRE lecturer, researcher, and thought leader Steve Weikal, industry chair of the Real Estate Transformation Lab at the MIT Center for Real Estate, characterizes Web3 as “the 3D Internet.”

Like all advancing technologies, the medium for entering this 3D world is in the midst of change. Brokers and their clients won’t be walking around town with those “goofy” AR goggles, as Steve Weikal, industry chair of MIT’s Real Estate Technology Hub in Cambridge, MA.

Honored to be a reviewer of this excellent article on real estate data science for the AFIRE Summit Journal.

"Cloud-based property management technologies underpinned these landlords, explains Steve Weikal, real estate ​​tech lead at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab. These allowed firms to manage everything—from rent collection to home maintenance—in geographically dispersed homes, as easily as corporations had managed apartment buildings."

New technologies and systems are reinventing the supply chain and could soon become widespread, say MIT Center for Real Estate’s researchers.

In an expansive interview, Steve Weikal, Real Estate Tech Lead at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, explains how technology is changing the housing market for the better.

“If the future of the world looks like semi-autonomous truck platoons going down the road with no driver, they can only go down the ramp and into the loading dock; they can’t really navigate around town,” said Steve Weikal, CRE Tech Lead at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.

"“A lot of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, and the spreadsheet is 41 years old. We have some of the most valuable assets in the world, managed with 41-year-old technology.” - Steve Weikal, head of industry relations at the MIT Center for Real Estate

"Warehouses have huge open spans on their roofs, so it makes sense to put solar farms there," said Steve Weikal, the commercial real estate tech lead in the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.

"“Real estate is getting smarter and more sophisticated. We now have this immense amount of data on properties so it’s no longer about having enough data."

"While technology is here to stay, humans aren’t going anywhere. Weikal and Scott say robots, sensor networks and AI will make the workplace safer and more efficient. They will also allow human workers to focus on creative problem-solving."

As the rapid growth in e-commerce continues to redefine last-mile delivery, new building uses and logistics technologies emerge.

“There is a heck of a lot of dry powder in the [construction tech] investment world. The industry is realizing this transformation is going to happen one way or not.”

"Prior to COVID-19, some of these solutions already were beginning to gain traction. Now they may become mission critical in getting people back into buildings and maintaining safety. Buildings might adopt a whole new level of smart technology."

The scope of IoT is vast; it ranges from guest-facing solutions to operations optimisation and ultimately, real estate fracking, i.e. the ability to use technology to monetise buildings in a new way, according to Steve Weikal, Head of Industry Relations at the MIT Center for Real Estate.

“Real estate use is getting broken up into smaller bits and reconfigured in higher valuations,” explains Steve Weikal, Head of Industry Relations at the MIT Center for Real Estate. “Companies are taking underutilized or unutilized real estate and monetizing it — in ways we never thought were possible."

“A current trend in PropTech is to break up real estate assets in novel ways in order to extract additional value from the asset. This is what Steve Weikal from the MIT Center for Real Estate calls ‘real estate fracking.’”

"We’ve never had R&D for our industry,” he said. “This is our version of R&D. It will have a tremendous impact.”

“With the advent of increasingly sophisticated machine learning processes, we’re embarking on an era of automated asset valuation, which could fundamentally change underwriting, development analysis and appraisal."

“The MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab has identified 130 promising young tech companies that are currently using machine learning to re-think how we evaluate and operate real estate,” he said.

"[PropTech] has its origins in the frustrations concerning the large, unmoving, illiquid asset class and the vested interests of the business which control it, plus unprecedented breakthroughs in technology — cloud computing, leaner coding, mobile devices, sensors — and much lower costs, plus ubiquitous connectivity driven by broadband, Wi-fi and 4G telephony. ”

"I think there will be continued innovation in how space is utilized and monetized," said MIT's Steve Weikal.

“Increased focus on the UI (user interface) and
UX (user experience) in real estate. For example,
the growing importance of the user interface
or user experience of real estate in all product
types."

One of the main themes to be discussed at the 2019 World Build Environment Forum Summit in New York is the impact of blockchain in real estate investment and transactions. We have interviewed Thomas Wiegelmann FRICS, Managing Director at Blue Asset Management and Honorary Adjunct Professor at Bond University & Steve Weikal, Head of Industry Relations at the Center for Real Estate, MIT to find out more.

“Our researchers have captured the commercial real estate industry at a moment of transition.”

"Weikal’s presentation brought Silicon Valley to RVA, focusing on how new innovations and technology were disrupting many sectors of the real estate industry."

“The tremendous success of WeWork, now the largest office occupier in New York City and AirBnB the largest hotel operation in the world that doesn’t own a single bed, are both examples of how real estate fracking enabled monetization of real estate assets.”

"The importance of “stickiness” will have a bigger impact on real estate than anything, particularly to rising on-demand generations with little interest in long-term obligations."

“We have a bunch of really smart people — either recovering real estate people or tech people — who are looking at our industry and saying, ‘You are running this whole thing off of spreadsheets, basically. So they are starting these companies. This trend started about five years ago.”

"[There's] a dramatic shift in how owners are thinking about development as companies are now engaged in an ever-escalating war for talent."

Welcome to PropTalk, a new series on our blog where we interview the most influential and prolific thought leaders in the commercial real estate tech industry today.

Technological innovation, from blockchain to shared-economy start-ups, threatens to unlock value that has always been hidden in real estate markets. Steve Weikal and Thomas Wiegelmann explain.

"“Blockchain will do for transactions what the Internet did for information.”

“The more common scenario in which AI is used in commercial real estate is in … pieces, as part of other applications.”

"AI is starting to infiltrate bits and pieces of the commercial real estate tech as well."

“They all provide the tools to optimize and monetize under-utilized real estate.”

"We have this multitrillion-dollar industry globally … and yet we still run it off of spreadsheets and PDFs.”

"The Jetsonian world we’ve been made to believe is far in the future is actually here now, and Weikal urges real estate professionals to stay nimble and be open to evolving in order to stay profitable."

"Real-estate fracking refers to the act of utilizing technology for breaking your real estate property and monetizing it in a completely new way. You could compare this process to the act of injecting high-pressure fluids into a rock formation in order to release the oil contained in them."

"The fracking, or sharing economy, conversation is powerful because it looks at how to unlock the value in all the underutilized or dark time in real estate," MIT’s Steve Weikal tells GlobeSt.com in this IREM Global Summit preview.

"It’s incredible how much early technology has the potential to be totally transformative, given how much we already have to work with."

"For decades, the multi-trillion-dollar commercial real estate industry has leaned heavily on the tried-and-true spreadsheet", notes Steve Weikal, head of industry relations at the MIT Center for Real Estate.

"1600 RE tech startups in the world are changing how the industry operates."

"Low- or no-margin activities will be increasingly automated, allowing real estate professionals to focus on higher margin, advisory services requiring unique skills and knowledge."

“Some developing countries have no existing system of land transfer and registration, or like Kenya, the current process is painfully time consuming ... That presents an opportunity to create an entirely new system which, in theory, is superior to what’s been built up over the years in Western countries.”

Prensa Real Estate entrevistó a su director, Steve Weikal, quien nos brindo su visión del sector, y quien además será un panelista del evento REit Initiative que se celebra el 9 de marzo en la Ciudad de México.

“This will speed up the development time at a time when we’re really short of housing.”

“This is the big test. Can you really build a high-rise modular building and prove that it’s faster, better, and less expensive? The verdict is still out on that.”

"The possibilities are too exciting to ignore and steps can be taken now to prepare for the inevitable transition to blockchain-based systems."

ANUARIO INMOBILIARIO LATINOAMERICA entrevistó a Steve Weikal, Head de relaciones institucionales del MIT Center for real estate, responsable de manejar las relaciones entre el centro y la red global de players de la industria.

Weikal referred to what the RE tech companies are doing as “real estate fracking. Using technology to break a real estate asset apart and put it back together into something more productive.”

“Tech follows the money,” Weikal said. The technology available to make real estate decisions is growing exponentially, with roughly 400 companies in this category currently being tracked" by the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Steve Weikal, a researcher and lecturer at the MIT Center for Real Estate. “Crowdfunding has the real potential to disrupt the entire real estate industry.”

"It's a migration of workers and companies to cities, and a flood of capital into marquee addresses," MIT real estate professor Steve Weikal tells Tech Insider.

“What happens when your whole business model is based on being hip and you’ve got to re-hip it?” Steve Weikal, head of industry relations for MIT’s Center for Real Estate, asked BuzzFeed News. “You’re supposed to be at the leading edge of cool, and what’s the cost? I doubt that landlords will be paying for that the next time around.”