The MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab has been awarded a grant from Epic Games to research digital twin as a living data integration platform.  The project aims to design a responsive and interactive digital twin data environment that forecasts the implications of new urban projects and development with multiple stakeholders in mind, while also estimating a real estate financial model to explain performance in online digital games.

In doing so, the overall goal is to ultimately help the industry to develop a data framework of the wide data-based digital twins, as it will begin answering the question of what type of data is critical at the city, building and human scale for its digital twin to thrive over time.

The pandemic, in effect, hit overdrive on a decadeslong shift toward online shopping. E-commerce sales jumped nearly 32 percent in 2020 compared to the prior year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.  So far this year, online sales are on track to outpace that record. To meet the demand, delivery companies such as Amazon, FedEx, UPS and food delivery services wrapped millions of purchases in layers of cardboard and plastic and hired thousands of new drivers to bring them to our doorsteps. Now, cities, climate scientists and companies are trying to figure out the consequences for the planet.

In the decade or so prior to Covid, fewer than 10 academic studies explored whether e-commerce or in-person shopping is better for the environment. In general, the studies that were done found that online shopping produced fewer carbon dioxide emissions than traditional brick-and-mortar retail. The most recent research is starting to incorporate more of the complexities of retail. In January, MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab published a study that simulated hundreds of thousands of those kinds of scenarios and found online shopping to be more sustainable than traditional retail 75 percent of the time.

But consumers today aren’t choosing one or the other, underscoring just how tricky this assessment is.  The MIT researchers recommended how shoppers and policymakers could help reduce carbon footprints at various steps of the supply chain, because either way, people are buying more. “This is so much more complicated than, ‘E-commerce is better than brick and mortar,’” said Dr. Andrea Chegut, director of the lab. “We’re not on a good trajectory, because everyone is using both strategies. So on the aggregate, there will be more emissions.”

What technology tools best support energy efficiency, and how we can collect the right data to track and measure progress toward a more sustainable future for the built environment?  Lab Director Dr. Andrea Chegut joined JLL’s Edward Wagoner, Jennifer Fortenberry and Brody Wilson of IBM to discuss the future of sustainability technology on October 20th for a LinkedIn Live webcast. The discussion addressed some of the latest and most effective materials – such as Biochar – and strategies to help combat climate change within the real estate sector.

Full recording above.

Balancing a desire for density with the need to preserve views and daylight is a common challenge facing urban development. On one hand, a cluster of tall buildings can provide enough tenant space to meet a project’s financial goals. On the other hand, if tenants can’t get a good look outside or feel the sun on their backs, they might not be willing to lease the space for quite as much — or at all.

The question of just what daylight or a view is worth is therefore an important one for developers considering how to make this tradeoff. It’s also helpful information for cities aiming to protect view access for as many residents and workers as possible. A new study provides the first measure of the value of views for commercial office tenants in cities, building on 2020 research measuring the value of daylight.

The new research by MIT [co-authored by Irmak Turan, Andrea Chegut, Daniel Fink and Christoph Reinhart], was published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, and finds that office spaces with high view access have about a 6 percent premium over those with low view access. That figure is a smidge higher than the premium for office spaces with high daylight access, which is about 5 percent. Taken together, the findings not only provide a financial incentive for developers to optimize for daylight and views, they can also help cities develop more equitable building codes.

“By measuring that tenants are paying more for daylight and views, we show that these attributes are valued in financial terms,” Irmak Turan, first author of the new study, tells Sidewalk Talk via email. “How can we ensure that everyone has access to such qualities in the workplace? While this research does not lead to a direct policy answer, it suggests that there may be economic mechanisms by which to push for equitable workplace settings.”

Co-hosted by the City, Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, Dr. Andrea Chegut was selected to present at the inaugural Fall Lecture series on Wednesday, September 22nd at 1pm EST.  The presentation highlighted the lab’s published research on the Value of Design initiative, which links design to financial performance in commercial real estate.

To view the presentation visit:

Venture capital funding reached $9.7 billion in the first six months of 2021. Surpassing last year’s half-year amount of $8.8 billion, this is the largest amount on record, according to a report recently published by JLL Spark, the venture capital fund affiliated with JLL, a global real estate services firm.  The MIT Tech Tracker, from MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab, tracks the nearly 8,000 “proptech” firms around the world that serve everything from how people buy, sell and market properties to innovations in building materials and methods. This is where inventions such as Martian concrete have made waves as manufacturers looked for a way to construct buildings on Mars, where the lack of water supply makes it hard to manufacture concrete. Martian concrete will rely on sulfur which cures in much less time and is highly resistant to corrosion. Currently it is in use in non-structural applications here on Earth, according to the report.

For full article please click on attached link.

Funding proptech firms raised soared to a record high of $9.7 billion in the first half of 2021, according to JLL research.  The pandemic is proving that even traditional property owners, managers, and builders must embrace features, from virtual reality to new materials, to stay profitable and relevant.

But which ones? A landlord dipping a toe into the proptech craze might have to decide between carbon nanotubes or graphene — two materials that both add extra strength — to shore up the concrete for a new building. A real estate brokerage could embrace either virtual reality or augmented reality for remote listing tours.

Help is on the way: There’s a new tool that helps real-estate firms make decisions about which new technologies to adopt. Commercial real estate services firm JLL and MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab unveiled a “tech tracker” on Sept. 8.

The cofounder and director of the lab, Dr. Andrea Chegut, said the tracker can inform industry players’ long-term plans. She pointed to virtual reality as an example of a technology whose development was heralded with lots of fanfare but that hasn’t yet made a huge difference in our day-to-day lives.

“We think proptech is incredibly important, but we need to add the longer-term view,” Chegut told Insider. “We’re a 100-year industry — but commercial products in tech can rise and fall in five to seven years.”

So often, great design, sustainability, planning solutions, technology and innovation are discounted because they have no value precedent.  We employ our data science tools, our wide data platform and fundamental R&D skills to measure the current value of innovation.

On June 25th, the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab participated in a workshop with Gensler to explore ways to leverage key performance indicators in order to demonstrate design value.  Key insights from the workshop will be documented and published in our upcoming Value of Design book.

Energy agencies agree that residential and commercial real estate account for about 40% of global energy consumption and emissions. Advocates of Digital Twin technology say that by increasing the efficiency of the built environment through real-time, comprehensive monitoring, that number could come down.

New flagship office towers and corporate HQs are more likely to take advantage of the efficiencies that could be achieved using a digital twin. But the greater challenge is posed by the sheer volume of aging building stock, which requires significant and costly repositioning to be able to achieve the same efficiencies.

“If you’re doing it with an older building, this could be a far more costly undertaking,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology Real Estate Innovation Lab Lead Researcher James Scott told Bisnow.

“That’s why the rollout of this isn’t going to happen as quickly as people would hope for.”

So far, the adoption of digital twin technology in commercial buildings has been slow, owing to its relatively new development and high price point. Annual subscriptions can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s not including the expense of installing sensors and upgrading connectivity to feed data to the digital twin software.

Because of their complexity, digital twins are most commonly used at the building level. However, if adopted on a district or city-level scale, the efficiencies and environmental outcomes could be much greater. For some real estate investors, it will come down to keeping an asset relevant and competitive in the marketplace. And there are clear financial and environmental benefits to using digital twins.

“Whatever your reasoning is, be it for an environmental purpose, or be it for an economic purpose, or a cost-saving initiative — this technology makes sense. You’re going to have to get it, and you’re going to need to get it,” Scott said. “But it’s the time frame of when this technology is going to be available to you,  and when it is at a price that makes sense for your organization to implement it.”

Bridget Begg’s cover article, “A New Lens on Real Estate Design,” is a feature on REI lab researcher Natasha Sadikin.  The article focuses on Sadikin’s design background, her experiences at the MIT Center for Real Estate, and her healthy buildings research in the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.  Inspired by Lab Director Dr. Andrea Chegut’s opening remarks during orientation for MIT’s MSRED program, she worked on a number of projects in the lab, most notably “The Financial Impacts of Healthy Buildings” paper.  Sadikin notes that “while the benefits of healthy spaces have long been qualitatively understood and appreciated, it has not been financially analyzed to impact economic decision-making. It’s sad to say that a majority of our buildings are not being built to even these basic human essentials.”

The rapid expansion of e-commerce sales has spurred demand for industrial real estate, including for large regional distribution centers and small fulfillment centers located in urban and suburban areas. The acceleration of delivery timelines has also reshaped industrial building interiors, as online retailers and third-party logistics firms have made substantial investments in new technologies such as collaborative robots and automated storage and retrieval systems. In addition to increasing the productivity and profitability of industrial assets, new technologies are also allowing retailers and building owners to add distribution uses to existing retail properties.

Written by Industry Relations Head Steve Weikal and REI Lab Lead Researcher James Scott, The NAIOP Research Foundation commissioned this report to provide the commercial real estate development community with insight into current and future trends in building and logistics technologies and their implications for industrial real estate.

Over the last three years, a team from MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab, the City of Boston Housing Innovation Lab, the Boston Society of Architects, and MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab have come together to workshop solutions to a significant problem in our community: housing affordability.  The past two workshops – “Developing Differently” and “Innovative Materials and Methods” – provided an opportunity for community leaders across a range of fields with interdisciplinary backgrounds to think collectively and design solutions to core issues in the affordable housing supply for our community.

This year, on July 7th and 8th, 2020, we convened over 60 dedicated participants for a two-day, virtual workshop to discuss and identify innovative solutions that can help facilitate the production of equitable, sustainable, middle-scale housing in the city of Boston. We asked the housing community to help us craft a Request for Ideas (RFI) for our next Housing Innovation Competition, and also to attempt to respond to our central question: Can Middle Scale Housing Be Used as an Anti-Racist Strategy?

At this year’s event we witnessed, once again, the importance of inter-professional collaboration that can lead to alternative solutions to the issue at hand. We listened attentively to each of the breakout groups’ ideas and proposals highlighting the importance of inclusionary and innovative housing models, the role of housing as a process of community-making, the need for financial and institutional support in the creation of this form of housing, and so much more. Most of all, we appreciated the ways in which many of the participant professionals were able to openly critique and respond to the RFI presented, as well as our overall process and vision for the next Housing Innovation Competition.

Automation technology just got a job in real estate, says Dr. Andrea Chegut from MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab.

An online poll, conducted by EY of global real estate players in June found that two-thirds of real estate companies are looking toward automation and technology to solve their return-to-work challenges today and support the future of work in a post-pandemic world. The findings reveal 21% of respondents have already increased their investment in automation and technology.

A massive 41% are “considering their options.” Just 10% are making no change to their investment. But alarmingly, 29% are still uncertain.

Healthy buildings in the headlights

These were just a few of the fascinating outtakes from a recent webinar and panel discussion, hosted by EY and Dr. Andrea Chegut, Co-founder and Director of the Real Estate Innovation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

We got together to ask a simple question: how do we create healthy offices?

This is a question that has already been unpicked in hundreds of articles and flooded our social media feeds with “expert” opinions. Are we saying goodbye to the skyscraper? Or will we need to expand our real estate footprint in the era of social distancing? The speculation has swung from one end of the spectrum to the other, but often missing the nuances that sit somewhere in between.

So, turning to some of the smartest minds in the office space, we took a step back to get the basics right. If health and safety are the top priorities as we return to work, what does a healthy building look like? And what role does technology — especially automation technology — play in creating buildings that protect and enhance human health?

Healthy buildings can be viewed as the next generation of Green buildings that not only include environmentally responsible and resource-efficient building concepts, but also integrating health, wellness, and human experience into the built environment. In the recent events of the Covid 19 crisis, healthy buildings are more important than ever as business and building owners face many challenges with reintegration strategies, financial uncertainty and the planning of the buildings themselves. How can we design for a healthy, resilient workspace?

On Wednesday, June 24th at 10am EST the MIT REI Lab and EY will conduct their fourth webinar in their Automation in Real Estate series: “Automation, Healthy Buildings and the Future of Work”. Lab Director Dr. Andrea Chegut and Managing Partner at EY, Selina Short, will discuss how automation can make buildings safer and healthier, what we can do to prepare our assets and what the office will look like in the next five years. Guest experts in the field include Elizabeth Brink, Principal at Gensler, and Erik Umlauf and Mike Norton, Managing Directors of Global Real Estate at JP Morgan who lead initiatives on health and the future of work for their organizations.

Real estate is changing to be more responsive to the health, vibrancy and resiliency necessary for 21st century cities. One element driving that change is data.  For real estate professionals, data science and machine learning significantly impact the anticipated success of a property, and understanding how to communicate data-driven value propositions is critical in any market.  So how do we harness this data to make better decisions and enhance the 21st century built environment?

On June 10^th the MIT School of Architecture & Planning will release its online short course, Data Science in Real Estate, teaching practical applications of data science and machine learning in order to explain industry experiences and forecast asset values.  With the help of @GetSmarter, REI Lab Director Dr. Andrea Chegut and her team have designed this six-week class to make complex data science techniques more accessible to non-technical professionals, as well as those with an existing knowledge of data science who wish to gain more real estate domain knowledge. They provide guides on how to code, what to look for in real estate data science, and engage with industry experts in how they listen to the data to help real estate stakeholders achieve their goals. Interactive videos, infographics and e-learning activities are also included in the program to cultivate a more diverse learning environment.

To register, click link above!

Buildings and construction represent nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. Although the environmental benefits of green buildings seem indisputable, do the upfront costs make economic sense?

In their paper “The Price of Innovation: An Analysis of the Marginal Cost of Green Buildings,” Lab Director Dr. Andrea Chegut and co-authors Piet Eichholtz and Nils Kok maintain that building green provides overall financial value. The data concludes that green-certified buildings not only sell and rent at slightly higher prices than standard buildings, but they also have higher occupancy rates. Knowledge Director Maya Fischhoff details the evidence to support this, as well as some of the obstacles involved with green building in her recent article for NBS.

Greg the Persian cat is the mascot for the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab. He was recently featured in The Tech for his hard work during the course of the pandemic, inspiring his lab team and helping to keep up morale.  He is currently working remotely, but has made several virtual appearances in the 11.321 Data Science for Real Estate class, keeping everyone’s spirits up with his thirst for knowledge, obsession with water glasses and love of hide and seek.

Great job Greg! To learn more about Greg you can follow him at @gregthepersian on Instagram.

Traditional office deals and coworking leases make no difference to landlords when it comes to the rent they collect, according to a new MIT report. Coworking companies have expanded in recent years to become the leading office tenants in some of the world’s largest real estate markets like London and New York City. The providers were willing to enter into longer lease terms with a higher base rent when many companies were shedding space and wanting shorter commitments.  But 10 years of coworking lease data in six of the largest U.S. office markets show landlords view coworking tenants as viable substitutes for any traditional office tenant, according to the report from MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab, called “The Financial Impacts Of Coworking: Rental Prices And Market Dynamics In The Commercial Office Market.” “It looks like the landlord is doing this calculus and saying, ‘This works for us,’ especially if they have the same credit quality as the other tenants in the building,” said MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab Director Andrea Chegut, who co-authored the report. “But there was no cost-benefit really hanging out in either [the landlord or tenant] direction.”

James Scott, Lead researcher at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab and newly appointed Innovator-in-Residence for IREM (Institute of Real Estate Management,) is helping real estate managers and building owners get a better understanding of the new technologies and products available for the built environment.  One of the biggest challenges for real estate professionals, Scott argues, is the integration of multiple systems, and automation can help: “This new wave of technology is really starting to make an impact in real estate, [and] these technologies are no longer just about potential and start-up companies.” Digital twin technology, in particular, will have the biggest impact on real estate because it allows for greater data analysis and system monitoring of a building at a specific moment of time.  Overall, there are real efficiencies to be created by products that can provide far greater insight and understanding than ever before within an actual asset: “I’d love the audience to see that automation and technology are not things to be feared, but embraced and taken on board to maximize efficiencies and, ultimately, create value.”

WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s business approach and model for the multi-billion dollar co-working company has transformed the real estate sector.  While some regard the operation of combining long-term leases on office buildings with shorter-term client contracts as risky, Dr. Andrea Chegut addresses its powerful, long-term potential and the role that technology plays in it: “Real estate always had a subscription model: it was a rent contract. WeWork just changed the time period of the subscription and gave you a really easy way to access this.  They allowed you to click to buy.”  To justify its valuation WeWork will need to show profitability, which – despite racking up a significant deficit up to this point – has an opportunity for growth on an Amazonian scale.

Data is changing the real estate game everywhere and especially in housing. In this Houston Chronicle article, Dr. Andrea Chegut, discusses the impacts of data platforms upon house prices, “she said that as more people have access to the types of information and analysis Entera provides, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to make smart investments. If I have the same access to the same information that a bigger institutional investor has, then we’re on a level playing field,” Dr. Chegut said. “It’s creating competition.”

Competition to provide the best technology in office buildings is increasing among office developers and landlords.  Those that have the technological prowess may be able to command premium rents, but those that lack it may be forced to offer a discount.

On April 9th, 2019, the New York Times published an article that highlighted MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab director, Dr. Andrea Chegut’s research on these technologies and how they range from smart windows to fiber optic office walls, and in some cases even data sensors to optimize the use of space.  What landlords and tenants alike need to keep in mind, however, is that the benefits of a digitally enabled building also create more security risks.

The MIT lab is exploring the future of the built environment and how design and technology will affect the way humans live, work and play.  The team is also developing Real Estate Innovation Life Cycle, a visualization of real estate product innovations and how they change over time. This product will be used as an industry framework for tracking and harnessing innovation impacts, which will help prepare buildings for a physical transition every five to 10 years as newly developed technology is adopted.  A summary of technologies on the horizon that are likely to have a significant impact on real estate investment follows.

Dr. Andrea Chegut, director of MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab, joined EY in Sydney, Australia to discuss the role of automation.  Though a report from the World Economic Forum predicts that 75 million jobs will be displaced by robots, another 133 million roles may emerge as we adapt to a new division of labor between humans, machines and algorithms.  We need to be building now for an autonomous future.

The Real Estate Innovation Lab has published the Idea Report chronicling the last two years of the Housing Innovation Workshop, produced in conjunction with the City of Boston’s Housing Innovation Lab and the Boston Society of Architects.

Solving the affordable housing crisis requires new ways of thinking. Through collaboration and innovation, we can make housing safer, more accessible, and affordable. On June 11, Fannie Mae and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT convened with faculty, industry leaders, and policy-makers to discuss disruptive technologies and innovative policy solutions. While many of the examples focus on the issues faced here in Boston, insights will have broad applicability to many cities across the U.S.

The one constant for the real estate industry throughout history is change. The partnership between JLL and MIT’s Real Estate Innovation Lab explores the future of the built environment by looking at the products, processes and technologies continually disrupting the real estate sector. Projects in MIT’s lab include the creation of a geometric, geospatial relational database of Manhattan, Real Estate Innovation Life Cycle, and the autonomous future of work in real estate. In this Ambitions Magazine article, Dr. Chegut discusses some of the themes that the lab works with lab partner JLL on.

New research from Dr. Bokhari, Dr. Chegut, Professor Frenchman and Dr. Tausendschoen asks can we actually help startup firms grow with real estate?In a new study from the MIT Center for Real Estate’s Real Estate Innovation Lab, the team studied whether accelerator programs and their unique combinations of physical space, mentorship, capital injections and market timing has an impact on the cumulative funding of startup firms. It turns out, these interventions when thought out carefully can lead to up to 7 percent, on average, more funding over the lifetime of the firm.

The results show that accelerator programs really help firms when they; get physical and give firms a space to work; remember that programming matters, like keeping class sizes smaller, giving the firms as long a program as possible, keeping the equity stake reasonable, giving as much cash as possible, celebrating the firm with a demo day; and work with firms to get as much pre-funding as possible.

The median price of a home in the United States has been rising for years, and the trend is expected to continue. For an entire generation, that means the American dream of homeownership seems increasingly out of reach. Housing affordability is no longer simply a challenge for low-income families, but for the middle class as well.  How can communities address these challenges, ensure affordable housing, and bring home ownership within reach to more Americans?  Rebecca Rosen, Senior Editor at The Atlantic, interviews Dr. Andrea Chegut, Director of the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, Robert Dietz, Chief Economist for the National Association of Home Builders, and Nela Richardson, Chief Economist at Redfin, to discuss the state of the real estate market and the path to expanded access to affordable housing.

Dr. Andrea Chegut, director of the Real Estate Innovation Lab at MIT, presented at Sidewalk’s Idea Tour on housing affordability on December 13, 2016. Her team takes a multi-disciplinary perspective on housing innovations through the lens of design, planning, and economics, and her work draws from previous research on large-scale affordable housing projects in Europe.

Part of the architecture school at MIT, the Real Estate Innovation lab will apply new data-driven rigor to buildings and technological innovation. In a smart city age, it’s become that much easier to apply rigorous analysis to our built environment, and by studying the economic impact of proposed innovations, MIT academics hope to speed up the transition from rendering to reality. Working with real estate industry partners, such as JLL, as well as the school’s own design-focused architecture accelerator, DesignX, this new initiative wants to get innovative, economically feasible projects under construction as soon as possible, and demonstrate the value of 3-D printing, modular construction, and new design innovations.