Real estate firms, which have traditionally been slow to innovate, are beginning to embrace new technologies to find clever solutions to old problems. This newfound openness comes as millennials start to enter the workforce, creating a need for tools that appeal to a tech-savvy customer base.
“It’s pretty fascinating when you think about we’re 75 percent millennials in maybe a dozen years. Clearly technology’s going to have an incredibly important impact on real estate; the operation of real estate and what the tenants do and how they do it,” said Joel Marcus, the CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Properties, an REIT that specializes in science campuses.