Recently FPC Global traveled to Tampa, Florida, to join hundreds of leaders in the real estate industry for the annual Realcomm | IBcon event.  The conference was attended by FPC’s Brian Vaughn, David Stoller, Ajit Gunjal and Rashi Parihar.

For those unfamiliar, Realcomm|IBcon is a leading conference held each year to explore, showcase, and progress connected real estate technology strategies in order to create a more efficient, flexible, sustainable, and resilient, built environment. This was the 26th year of this conference and continues to be a great learning opportunity and community builder.

This year the theme was “Beyond The Hype''. There was a clear focus on telling the stories of organizations who are deploying connected real estate strategies,  showcasing what works, and the challenges to be aware of. That's not to say we haven't seen showcases like this in the past, but what was different about this event was the diversity of organizations being showcased. For years we have heard from organizations who existed at the bleeding edge of technology, and last week we heard from some of the largest institutions in the industry who have all taken a very real step into what was 3 years ago, the future, and now part of doing business. 

Presentations included leading organizations such as Google, the GSA, Walmart, Hines, Goldman Sachs and others. This year we saw a mix of organizations including retail, industrial, private, investor owned, and public buildings which showed that the time to get connected is now. Even the most conservative portfolios had interesting updates to share.

Some key themes evolved as to why these strategies have moved beyond the ‘pilot’ stage. 

• Supporting key initiatives around carbon reporting and improving their client experience. There isn’t a premium on rent you can capture for this investment, but without this infrastructure you can’t capture premium market rates. You will need to lease at a discount. 
• Positioning systems to support future use cases such as AI. It was demonstrated that solid digital building strategies and governance differentiated those who could from those who can’t provide a mobile credential experience. Data governance is key to unlocking future insights from AI.
• Our built environment is critical infrastructure. It’s where we live, eat, play and work. It’s been proven our facilities have a weakness that is able to be leveraged by malicious actors. There are a lot of unknowns in most portfolios that can be leveraged for disruption. From the person leaving a password on a sticky note, to the experts at CISA, we all have a responsibility to protect this critical infrastructure.

With a substantial sea change like this, organizations are finding there are new headwinds. In this particular case the headwinds we are seeing most often are three fold. The first being resource challenges; the market is ready but the ecosystem of service providers who understand the complexities of IT/OT integration has been limited and fractured. The second headwind is scalability, to get beyond pilot a lot of sound processes are required to accurately deploy 1,000s of devices and capture the required details to support the lifecycle management. The final headwind is Cybersecurity of this connected infrastructure. A gap exists between the capabilities of these OT systems and the traditional methods IT organizations leverage to secure their business critical systems. While the products catch up, a unique skill set is required to create cyber secure solutions to deliver use cases.

The show was attended by FPC’s Brian Vaughn, David Stoller, Ajit Gunjal and Rashi Parihar.

FPC Global has been servicing global clients in this industry for over 10 years and has experienced these challenges first hand in our own growth to meet the market's needs. Realcomm|IBcon was a great opportunity to let others in on this little secret.  We are confident in our ability to partner with consultants and solution providers, filling the gap created by headwinds, and enable end users to get beyond the hype and achieve real world value objectives that provide ROI to real estate owners and investors.