From REAAS to REAAX

A quick post on yet another Space+ curated event, this time Built World Technology (BWT), held last month at the Ministry of Sound, co-hosted by the likes of Bruntwood, Greystar, GPE, LGIM, and The Crown Estate, and covering a whole raft of proptech hot topics, including ESG tech investment and deployment, scaling digital adoption, and low carbon residential. The event consisted of a keynote, panels, and focused special interest discussions. FreeState’s very own Adam Scott interviewed keynote speaker Laiout‘s James Pellatte and was in attendance for the day.

Having got a taste for data-enabled design at this year’s University Design Forum Annual Conference, Scott was keen to explore the very latest thinking + doing in prop-tech, particularly in the making of customer-centric workplaces and smarter asset management strategies, where it is clear, as many shared, that the concept and practice of real-estate-as-a-service (REAAS) is beginning to look like having run its course. Imagining the workplace as a utility for the optimisation of both productivity and innovation assumes it’s always the actual and mandatory site of work, an assumption the pandemic and advances of technology have laid waste to and so, therefore, to the notion of the workplace as utility.

If not utility, what then? ‘So many of the people I listened to or bumped into between different sessions,’ says Scott, ‘were speaking of the workplace as a place of choice rather than a utility, and in this respect an experience that results from having made a lifestyle decision. This move from REAAS to REAAX (that is, real-estate-as-an-experience) is really interesting, a brave new world where the interests and concerns of development managers and those of the asset mangers are much better allied, the collecting and analysing of data for making decisions about collective goals being much more experience-driven in nature, and in which developments are seen as dynamic systems informed, guided, and constantly refreshed by whole-stakeholder sanctioned pilots.’

Essentially, what this means – as The Crown Estate’s Executive Director for Purpose, Sustainability & Stakeholder Judith Everett noted – is the acceptance of and need for a new universe of development, where different stakeholders share data, risk, innovation, information, and so in the outcome(s) of not just their own individual projects, but also those of a multitude of projects. ‘This mix of experiences,’ says Scott, ‘across connected campuses, is what city centres need if they are to thrive.’

The above chimes loudly with tomorrow’s Space+ First Member Event The Agile City, where Adam Scott’s giving the keynote on this and much more. If you’re attending, we look forward to catching up. If not, look out for our thoughts on the day. In the meantime, do explore BWT and Space+ in general. Very much worth the effort.   

Photo credit: Space+