Transcript: Linking Technology Together to Reinvent Real Estate

I think one of the really kind of key elements is also digital identity. And I think in our blockchain real estate path for me, great steps being made there with IOT sensors and unique identities already being built into materials from the day one. But I think there's still a long way to go to really do good identity schemes for buildings, for physical assets, to be able to really make them have a presence also in the digital world of the blockchain. Linking different systems together, I think is where the next step of innovation lies.

We have the technical infrastructure for it. We just need to kind of think of the smart combinations. Within the industry, people are changing a lot. They are embracing technology as an opportunity instead of a threat. There are a massive amount of applications and players in the industry that try to reinvent existing processes and existing way of working.

And given that fact, people are opening up in that sense that standardizations and getting your data standards in place is a movement that is people are very active with it in order to be able to use blockchain in a good manner. We are combining those two elements, data standards and experimenting with blockchain is something that would be a huge benefit for a lot of players in the industry. And they say the real estate industry, it's a dinosaur industry and okay, it's so old fashioned and they're not innovative.

Well, I think they are. And due to the fact that they lag behind in comparison with other industries is in this sense, a advantage because they can leap directly to a future-proof solution. You've also got, Brittany, a couple of other factors here is where is the change being driven from? So real estate is a multi-party industry. So you've got the developers, you've got the real estate managers, you've got financiers, banks, investment managers, capital markets.

You've also got the public sector. And in some cases, you've got very progressive governments or agencies who are looking to drive change and transparency. Or if you look at places like Dubai in their 2020 blockchain strategy, they're very deliberately taking a punt on technology transformation and enablement saying, we want to push from the top down transformation of industries because we know the industry either isn't incentivized or may not be able to have the funding to deliver that change itself. So from our perspective, the transformation and the drive for transformation may not necessarily come straight from the P&L, but may come from national interest.

Hello and welcome to the Constructor podcast, the future of the built environment. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Welcome to this episode of the Constructor podcast. Last week, we spoke with Simon Ennuiah, chairman, CEO and founder of Building Block REIT, a blockchain backed real estate investment trust.

Simon and I cover the basics of REIT, the structure of a REIT and why is a great way to invest in real estate. We also discuss what the opportunities are for blockchain and real estate investments. If you haven't had the opportunity to listen to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com slash Simon Ennuiah. In today's episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with three individuals at Deloitte. You'll hear a little bit about what they do individually, but I'll share with you who they are here.

Anthony Day, COO of the EMEA Blockchain Lab, Jakob Borsma, the Netherlands blockchain team leader, and Jan Willem Santing. He's the product owner for Smart Buildings blockchain proposition. We discussed at a high level about how to connect with collaborative technologies in order to improve business decisions, including well-being and talent acquisitions. We discussed the opportunities for blockchain and construction, real estate and look at the realities of blockchain use within BIM. Last but not least, we discussed Axiom, a real estate blockchain solution that Deloitte is working on.

We had a really fun time. We do enjoy talking. That's one of the qualities of a consultant, I think. Very enthusiastic about the topic. Quick question on logistics.

Is it easier for him to call in separately or what would you prefer from a sound quality standpoint? I don't know if either of you can get a little bit closer to the phone. It's just a little low as far as a volume level. How is this? Is this better?

That's quite good. Okay. Yeah, we're completely leaning over it now. We're probably going to hit our heads against each other at some point, but people are thinking we're going to kiss each other. Oh yeah.

I see them. I see them working. Exactly. This is podcasting gold. Please put in outtakes on this.

This is going to be great for the outtakes guys. This is gold. I will be happy to. And with that, let's get into the interview. I guess that's good afternoon to you guys.

Welcome to the Constructor Podcast. We have Anthony Day. We have Jacob Burisma and Jan Willem Senting. Could you go ahead and give the audience a little bit about yourself, share a little bit about your background and what you do? With pleasure.

Brittany, before we start, firstly, I wanted to say congratulations on hitting a hundred episodes. A real testament to the hard work that you're putting in, the caliber of guests you're able to bring on, the insight into the industry that bring and your guests bring has been really inspiring to us. We're regular listeners and thank you for doing what you do. A little bit about from myself. I'm the COO of Deloitte's EMEA Blockchain Lab, which is based in Dublin.

We're a blockchain delivery team. We're a mix of strategists, innovation designers and technologists. And our role is primarily to help Deloitte's clients, whether that be in the public sector or the private sector, to engage with blockchain as a technology and the other technologies that we have in the blockchain to imagine new ways of doing things, new platforms, new propositions, and then to help go and translate that into live platforms. So that's a combination of the technology delivery itself, but also a number of the complex areas around technology transformation in terms of governance, operating model, how to manage and support consortia and a whole lot more.

In reality, the technology is about 20% of the problem. The people, the process and the hearts and minds is often about the 80%. What it actually takes to transform entire industries in some cases. A brief bit about my background. I'm a strategist by training, more recently a digital strategist, which is helping to imagine how technology and emerging technology can enable business growth or business efficiency.

And then more recently transitioned into the blockchain lab. I look after the operations of the team. I look after helping clients devise strategies. I look after the development of the technology. Clients devise strategies and design propositions and platforms.

It sounds like you have a lot of fun in what you do and you work with a lot of great people and thank you for the congrats. It's definitely a milestone. I appreciate that. I appreciate the fact that you listened to the podcast as well. It's been a long haul, so you guys are, you bring a lot to the table and I pay attention a lot to delay as well.

And I'm really happy to have you guys on. So Jacob, could you go ahead and give me a quick introduction of what you do? So my name is Jacob Wiersma. I am a senior manager or the senior manager of the blockchain team in Deloitte in the Netherlands. I've been involved with Bitcoin and blockchain research since 2011.

Joined Deloitte in 2015. Been working with some pretty large blockchain projects ever since. One of the main focus areas for the Netherlands is in blockchain and real estate. Yeah, so that's what I've been involved in since 2016, starting with a conference that we organized on the topic and some thought where and culminating in actual delivery of numerous applications by this point in a whole platform. But Jan Willem can say a lot more about that as well.

Thank you, Jacob. My name is Jan Willem Zanting, senior manager at Deloitte Netherlands, product owner of the blockchain real estate platform. I started with blockchain and real estate in 2016, early days for me at that time. Ever since I've been working on the platform with a dedicated development team of blockchain developers back end as front enders in order to make it ready to bring it to the market. And besides that, I've been talking with a lot of industry players in order to know what is their need, what is their view on blockchain?

What is the biggest problem? What are the issues and how can we solve that? And how can we also make sure that a ecosystem of players is going to use the potential benefits of blockchain for their core processes? I want to distinguish that Anthony is in Dublin and both Jacob and Jan Willem are in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and they actually work out of the edge. So that being said, I had the opportunity to interview PLP Architecture, the designer of the edge, and we talked extensively about over 32,000 sensors that monitors a plethora of things, whether it be lighting, heat information, the way people move about the space, and you guys work in it.

So it's an honor to talk to people who actually work in the building. So first of all, consider it a smart building, but it's also high on the Bre-Am scale. It's so far the highest rated on the Bre-Am scale. Ninety eight point five was the assessment, I believe. I think it's amazing.

But that being said, from your perspective, Deloitte, the major tenant in the building, I'm sure you have a broader perspective on smart buildings on a whole. And I'll direct this question to Jan Willem. What's your perspective on smart buildings and where are we going with this? I think the smart building is maybe we can speak to that, absolutely. But I think we are not like the ones who are involved in kind of further developing our smart office building.

We're much more, I think, involved in the in the blockchain real estate project. It's linked, but distinct. It is always a nice kind of a conversation starter that we do work in this in a smart building and that we have all the 32,000 sensors, etc. Since we are a tenant of the edge from day one to give some background information, we, as a major tenant, were involved in the design of the building as well and the installation of a number of innovations in this building and also had a role in how this office should function as a cutting edge smart building.

Well, some of the things we thought out those days are not being used anymore. Some other things are picked up and brought to a next level. So that being said, over the edge, it's a great success. People want to work here all the time and fool with people going forward in the perspective of smart buildings. I believe in the upcoming years we are going to see a whole lot of new concepts based on the edge, but also based on new ideas, new concepts.

I'm talking to a construction company who has an agreement with a factory that delivers sensors in the materials that they are going to use in the building that they're going to construct. So not afterwards put in sensors in a building, but integrate the sensors by design. We're going to see a whole lot of new things in the market within the one, two, three years to come. And a combination of smart buildings and smart mobility is also something that we're going to see. A shared car model based on the employees of a office building arriving in that car and the residents show apartments that are on top of the office building and the inhabitants of that apartments can use the car during the office hours and they can share that car.

And that is a concept that's already in use in the Netherlands. And we are also going to use the information of a building to focus more on the well-being of the employee in a building. It was based on efficiency. Can I accommodate as much people in this office? And therefore we need to measure the occupancy rates and stuff like that.

Going forward, we see that the well-being of the users of the building are becoming more important. And the challenge is to get out of the office in a more healthy manner than you got in. And the real estate developer, OVG, who developed this building is putting major efforts in achieving that goal. And they transformed themselves into a edge technologies and IT companies, so to say, instead of a real estate construction development company. So major shifts are to come.

One thing to add to that mainly is that new buildings in order to make existing buildings to the smart building opportunities, that's a challenge. It's going to take a lot of investment for people upfront in order to do so. It's going to take a while that every building is going to be a smart building. I love that feedback. There's so many nuggets in there.

I mean, the idea of putting the sensors in to the design and essentially prefabricating that prior to getting on site. That's a whole new perspective on DFMA. And I think that's hugely valuable. But you mentioned about the ride share opportunities. I just wonder when we're going to get to autonomous vehicles with that.

Well, that is hard to predict. Of course, the legislation part. There's a lot of safety issues, of course, that need to be conquered. But I think there's already a lot of efficiency that can be gained by just having shared fleets. So just kind of tokenizing ownership is already, I think, a huge improvement possibility in the sense of efficient use.

Because right now, the numbers are that a car through its lifetime stands still for more than 90% of that, and maybe even 99%. Most of the time, all our cars are just sitting there in parking garages. And especially in Amsterdam, it's almost impossible to find parking space anyway. So any way that you can make that more efficient, that usage of the space, I think that is where mobility and real estate management really find each other. And you're going to see that you have a community of occupiers of a building that are going to share their fleet, but also they're going to share their vacant spaces.

If you have a peak in people coming in, and another office in the neighborhood of your own company has some vacancy during the day, why not reuse that space for half a day or whatever for people to come in who need that space? So we're going to use each other's building during the time that the building is induced by myself. That's a thing that we're going to see a lot also. In addition to that, the flex office movement, like the companies of WeWork and in the Netherlands, Tribes, that's going to play a major role in the way your buildings are being designed and your buildings being used and how you're going to evaluate your buildings as well.

So entire new models will arise and we can learn something from the plane industry, for instance, while the demand determines the price per hour instead of a lease contract for 10 years. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think I would really like to know what your perspectives are on smart grid technology, utilizing energy, a battery backup that's not being utilized and sharing that as well. That's something that we also see as a rapid innovation that's to come. If you look to the port of Rotterdam, they produce a lot of energy that is not being reused again.

And they're making a plan to redistribute the energy to another part of the Netherlands to use it as a way to cool down buildings. And the greenhouses in the area, they also produce a lot of heat for the vegetables that they're going to produce in that greenhouse. And also the energy that now is lost is captured and reused for other purposes as well. And at that scale, are people making investments in order to become more circular and more energy efficient. But even at the smaller scale, so getting back to the edge as an office building, the building is also lined with solar panels.

So we produce a lot of our own energy. But of course, during the weekend, most of the people are off during the weekend. So what happens if the sun shines then? And now you have an arrangement that you can just sell the energy back to the power grid that doesn't really take into account any kind of supply and demand. So we see also within the Netherlands experiments being done with these smart grids run on the blockchain, where you do have much better supply and demand matching.

And you can take that down to individual people's homes. So that if I have solar panels on my roof and I'm not currently using the energy myself, I can sell it to my neighbor. And I don't have to do a whole complex administrative work, because that is all run by automated systems in a decentralized way. That's excellent. There's a further nuance to this one, guys, which is something we've explored with a large significant client of ours that's in the energy and resources space.

Obviously, what you're talking about there is redistribution or transmission to different parts of the grid or selling into the grid. But at some point, you're going to struggle to get to 100% utilization. So what do you do with the gap? And they were looking at it from the perspective of saying from an engineering perspective, in energy and resources, the guys are very talented engineers. So they come straight to an engineering solution to the approach is that we'll pump water up a hill.

And what we'll do with that then is as the water flows down that hill, we'll create hydroelectric energy that we can reuse later. And that's wonderful if you want to develop an infrastructure project and you want to demonstrate engineering fortitude. But actually, there's a lot of effort and waste that's in that construction alone. So we can have positive what's the shortest possible distance between a kilowatt and money. And while this won't necessarily be acceptable to or appropriate for everybody, we talked about Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency mining.

Now, it doesn't have to be Bitcoin. It doesn't have to necessarily be a cryptocurrency. But actually, Bitcoin mining industry itself is converting kilowatts and energy into bitcoins through powering the mining rigs with the energy to then create Bitcoin. So the guys were literally considering putting rigs on rigs or putting rigs within wind turbines so that at night time when they're still generating energy, they're able to convert that energy or at least not lose any of it in waste. And it's a really interesting concept.

It's a bit far out. And again, some people take umbrage with the energy usage and or the amount of energy that's used to support cryptocurrency. But it's another interesting way of getting us to 100% efficiency. You know, I like to parallel energy discussions with the discussion about presenteeism absenteeism and putting work in as an employee, true talent. And I kind of talk a lot about obviously lean construction and working together as a team and being efficient as a group working on a particular project.

As you know, I studied engineering as well and the whole idea of maximizing efficiencies, energy from an engineering standpoint is just as exciting. But I did want to turn to this discussion specific to wellness, something that Jan-Owe you mentioned before about wellness and well-being and that being a larger focus as of late. And to be honest, I would think that you guys must be the happiest people on earth working in the age. But you know, it sounds like you're still trying to figure out what's the best thing to focus on.

And you're parsing through the data to do that. What are the things that you're learning or understanding are most important to focus on from a well-being standpoint? If you have a workplace concept in place, stick to it in order to have that concept be met by fullest potential. Make people aware of the possibilities that there are in a building. Be, for instance, you can exchange the power of our lights in a room from high, medium, low.

People need to know that. Also make the technique usable for the users, so to say. Not only from the facility management perspective or other things. In the meeting room that we are in right now, at the end of this meeting, our lights are going to blink two times as a signal that we have to reschedule and other people are waiting outside. And that is a small example which you can see how you can use technique in order to make it beneficial for the users.

And there is another example I heard the other day that is not in this office, but in a hotel. That the water consumption is something you want to focus on in a hotel. And you want to make people aware of the fact that you are using water and energy that is going to consume. What did they do? They made a display under the tap of the shower.

In the display you saw a polar bear on ice. And during the time you were showering, the ice melts and the polar bear is going to drown. And it is a good and low profile but innovative and funny way, so to say, to get into people's head and make them aware of the fact that they are consuming energy and try to focus on their behavior in such a way that they can feel good in the hotel and also be very aware of the amount of energy that they use.

And in this example the water consumption was reduced by 20 percent. And they did it for a period of time. And afterwards when they removed the screens, the energy consumption was still reduced by 10 percent. So a temporary thing led to a structural change in behavior. And that is a very nice example, I believe.

And also if you want to put some sort of gamification in your building, that you can see hey, you are using more energy today than you did on average. And make a battle with your peers on that. People are also more aware of things that they consume. In the toilets in this building, there is a sign on top of that that says this toilet is flushed with rainwater. And of course it's clean and all that.

But that is a constant reminder that we can do stuff with buildings and with technique. And that every little bit helps. Yeah, as well. It doesn't need to be massive huge gestures all the time. You have all the little behavioral changes add up and all the little technology improvements add up.

And apart from technique, we have a basket of fruit every day to share with at the coffee stand. And that is a gesture from the company that says, okay, we want to stimulate healthy food and also make this a meeting point in which people can interact with each other and not only focus on the screens making terrific code, but also interact with each other. Does that answer your question a bit? Absolutely, it does. And you know what, I don't know how much interaction you guys have with the human resources side of things and or recruitment, but that's something that I know that I dug into quite a bit as far as a question with PLP architecture.

What was the intent from the design? And obviously they don't have insight as to, you know, how the organizations within the edge have been sort of carrying out. Yeah, but I'd be curious as to your feedback on that as well. This building was designed from a human resource perspective as well in order to have a building that is a good environment to work in which people want to work as well. So you have a clear and open space, it's energy neutral at least, and it's also an asset to attract talent and a way to meet people that was part of the design.

We started as a goal to reduce the number of offices that we have and utilize the office that we rent in a better way than we've done so far. And it is part of the way we work a lot of times out of office, we need to work with clients. And in that field, there is one major move that's very relevant. The IT department and the workplace service department went into a merger and we worked together in supporting us as an employee. We need the best building, the best equipment, the best iPhones and the best support in order to give us the room to deliver value to our clients.

It's a no go by policy that our laptop, for instance, doesn't function for an hour. They are aiming at a client satisfaction number on a scale of 10, a minimum 8 and higher at all the fields. And the way it's designed, it's taken into account that there is a war of talent going on and upcoming and make sure that you have a building that distinguishes you from other employees. And before we had this building, you could have a lease car and you still can have, but that is not a thing that distinguishes you anymore.

And this building can be and is, we know by experience people love to work here and due to its own success, it's sometimes too crowded. And that's what I meant at that moment in time, you need to focus on your workplace concept and take things into considerations and reschedule the amount of people that are assigned to this office. But that's a big learning. That's great. Yeah.

And again, that's about feedback loops as well. Some floors are sometimes very crowded, for example, on Friday, but some other places in the building might not be as crowded. And since the centers in the building would allow that information to be available, you can definitely see that the next step would be to reuse that information and feed it back to the employees to say, hey, why did you go there and there? Because there's still spaces available there. You know, the idea of creative communication mixed with gamification, it makes me think about obviously blockchain, because there's so many opportunities to use the incentivization approach.

And we've touched on a couple thus far, but I wanted to direct this question to Anthony a little bit, as it relates specifically to blockchain and construction and real estate a little bit more broadly, especially since you're looking across Europe, Middle East and Africa in the studies that you're doing right now in your labs. I think that's a great example. And what the technology enables is new ways of doing things. So if you look at blockchain purely, it's a platform technology. It's enabling multiple different parties, different devices, different entities, different objects to connect together to provide a single source of data, a single source of truth, and to allow for automation, to have a better transparency in what's happening at any point in time, better record keeping.

You know, when all of those things are digitized, it allows us to do things differently to the way we do them today. If you take notaries, or if you take paper contracts, or if you take any sort of sequential legal or contracting or even supply chain process, the reason those things are sequential today is because we required manual handoffs, because that's the way we architected it. If we're using platforms, and we're using blockchain as an enabler for that, paired with other technology capabilities like IoT or sensors, using analytics, cognitive, or artificial intelligence on top of that, you're then able to make things faster, clearer, easier.

And then you can reimagine the way we do things. Ultimately, the jobs we're trying to do as individuals, to live, to travel, to support our families, to work, the needs haven't changed significantly. It's how we enable those that are changing. From a B2B perspective, we're trying to trade, we're trying to transact. And what gets in the way in sometimes is trust, what gets in the way is regulation or process.

So what we see is analogous examples of business challenges. So what works well in financial services is applicable in energy and resources, is applicable in real estate. What works well in any one supply chain context, whether it be food, whether it be automotive, can be applicable across many. Most businesses have a finance process or a finance function. Most businesses have some challenge around identity and certification.

So how are we applying those learnings or using those platforms from one industry to another, or in the best places where actually it's multiple industries working together? So that's the interest that we have in blockchain. We're seeing good examples. So related to real estate, the application of how do you manage and maintain a building and how do you keep the history, the records, and maximize the value of that property? Jan Willem is going to talk about that a little bit more.

When you talk about construction and construction management, how are you managing projects, multiple vendors, multiple contractors, the contract requirements and deliverables, incentives management? At a super simple level, at the moment, if you have an elevator in a building, you're paying whatever it is, $200,000, 200,000 euros up front to install that particular elevator. You're paying a fixed price contract to maintain it, $50,000, 50,000 euros a year, regardless of the performance of that asset. What we're looking at is transitioning towards pay-per-use or consumption-based models where I don't have the elevator in the building because it looks nice, although there are some fantastic looking elevators out there.

What I'm paying for is altitude. Or back to the polar bear example, what I'm paying for is the opportunity for my staff to go two floors up without walking. And why can't I pay every time that happens? And that opens up new opportunities for creating win-win relationships with suppliers, so being able to provide incentivization for 100% uptime or incentivization for reduction in cost savings or reduction in the per-use price if they can find ways to do it. And what enables the ability to do that is the data, the transparency of what's happened, and the sensors and the IoT devices in those elevators or wherever it may be in a production process, in a pump, in a turbine, and then the automation around the data analysis, the payments, and the tracking.

And those pay-per-use models are going to transform a lot of the things that we see today, and we now have the technology to be able to do it. So let me ask you, obviously we talked about censoring, we talked about workplace and facilities management, and there are a number of layers that you hit there which are really important here, but there's the amount of maximizing the work, and there's the amount of, I guess, being able to negotiate contracts more succinctly. So from those two perspectives, I'd be curious as to where we are from an application standpoint, real actual applications, but where's the distinction?

Where's that line? I hear you 100%, and that's the challenges. In 2018, at least around blockchain and a number of industries, we've proved most of the concepts. We've proved that we can timestamp things, we can prove that we can integrate sensor data, we can hit a certain number of transactions per second, that we can do things securely on a private, public, permissioned basis. You see a new proof of concept every 10 minutes if you follow LinkedIn or any of the announcements that go out there.

The difference between those POCs being technically feasible and creating real business value is implementation and transformation. I guess probably the third point also is scaling. Creating a blockchain for an individual elevator doesn't make a lot of sense. When you then take that to the elevator, refrigerators in the building, the lighting, the air conditioning, building entry and access management, all of these have separate administrative processes, all of them have separate costs. If you're being able to scale that from one building to five buildings to 10 buildings, from one equipment supplier to multiple equipment suppliers across multiple facilities, that's when you're getting most of the business benefit.

You can't start there because that's too much of the elephant to bite off in one go. Where I see that we are in blockchain terms is while Gartner will tell you we're entering the trough of disillusionment, which is not a particularly positive term in my view, what I actually think is that we are at the thin end of the exponential curve is that we've seen doubling of investment, we've seen doubling of interest every year for the past three or four or five years. What that means actually is in eight years' time, we are 1,000 plus away from where we started.

That's not linear, that's exponential. That's the difference is that we've proven the concepts now, we're into a process of scaling and increasing adoption. That's hard because that's people process, walking the floors and transforming business processes. Anyone who's ever tried to change a core system of any kind, ERPs, banking systems or anything, it's a multi-year program. That's within one bank's house.

Imagine then trying to take that across an entire industry or an entire supply chain. We're getting there and we're working on it. Linking different systems together, I think, is where the next step of innovation lies. We have the technical infrastructure for it, we just need to think of smart combinations. The other thing is you're looking at one building in isolation where it gets really interesting is if you've actually got linked buildings, if you're looking at an ecosystem of buildings saying which ones are running hotter and colder, which ones are utilizing more maintenance, more energy, has more replacement of certain things that can link to the design or to the operations.

If you get really clever, you can get the building-wide Nest device that helps you maintain a fleet of buildings. I don't know what the collective noun is for buildings, but I'm going to go with fleet. Because we're generating a whole host of data points. I don't have a complete insight into it because there is some analysis being done with that, but I'm pretty sure that if we put our smart machine learning guys onto it, they could probably get much more information out of that. That is currently being done.

Of course, you do run into all kinds of questions. How do we make sure that it's not personally identifiable? You run into ethical and legal questions. We don't want to use this data from the building to do individual performance checks. Were you actually working enough hours during this day?

But on an aggregate level, it might be interesting to see if you can see patterns in productivity from month to month. The guys who built this office, I talked to them as well for integrating blockchain into the building. They definitely have those kinds of plans because they are building similar smart office buildings all around the globe. Obviously, we discussed that this team is focused on blockchain solutions for real estate. There are blockchain applications and obviously finance that are definitely moving quickly.

There's lots of research and proof of concepts there. I wonder what the aptitude is. Please, Jan Willem and Jacob, please chime in. The aptitude for real estate and construction are, and why has that been a focus for Deloitte? I'll answer that one.

We started at real estate because it is an industry with a lot of information exchanges, a lot of people involved who need to exchange their data and who need to rely on the data as well. People don't necessarily trust all the players that are out there by nature and therefore sometimes inefficient process to get the trust in your data. Also, there's a great lack of transparency as well between all those different players. At the same time, we're talking about extremely high value transactions. We're looking for a good fit for something like blockchain technology, especially with the challenges of scaling that you have right now.

As Anthony also mentioned, you're looking for those areas where you have a lack of trust, a lot of players and high value transactions because you don't at this point yet want to put all the eggs or potatoes of the agri-food industry on the blockchain. It's certainly feasible to put all the buildings, all the office buildings of the world on the blockchain because it's just a much smaller set of assets that you would need to identify. Then they do represent a massive investment to all these owners and all these banks and parties that are involved in that.

To add to that as well, within the industry, people are changing a lot and they are embracing technology as an opportunity instead of a threat. As we say, the procter revolution has only just begun. There are a massive amount of applications and players in the industry that try to reinvent existing processes and existing way of working. Given that fact, people are opening up to embrace technology. We also see in that sense that standardization and getting your data standards in place is a movement that is in the Netherlands.

People are very active with it, but also on a global level. People from Oscar, the people from RSCS, the guys in Germany and France are looking into setting data standards in place. It is a very relevant step for the industry in order to be able to use blockchain in a good manner. Those combinations came into place when we started this. Ever since, we are combining those two elements.

Data standards and experimenting with blockchain is something that is going to be a huge benefit for a lot of players in the industry. Sometimes people say the real estate industry is a dinosaur industry and it is so old fashioned and they are not innovative. Well, I think they are. Due to the fact that they lag behind in comparison with other industries, it is in this sense an advantage because they can leap directly to a future-proof solution instead of another industry that has already a good solution for data exchange.

For them, it is more difficult to change than for the real estate industry because sometimes there isn't anything in place. That is easier to overcome those hurdles. That is also a reason to start in real estate. That makes sense. Just to add to that, in construction technology, there has been more than $1.3 billion invested.

I think we have the same issues. Lots of transfer of information and there is a lack of established systems in place and need for standardization. I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head as to the reason why these types of industries are ripe for the utilization of blockchain. I think you have also got, Brittany, a couple of other factors here. Where is the change being driven from?

Real estate is a multi-party industry. You have the developers, the real estate managers, you have financiers, banks, investment managers, capital markets. You have also got the public sector. In some cases, you have very progressive governments or agencies who are looking to drive change and transparency. If you look at places like Dubai and their 2020 blockchain strategy, they are very deliberately taking a punt on technology transformation and enablement saying, we want to push from the top down the transformation of industries because we know the industry either isn't incentivized or may not be able to have the funding to deliver that change itself.

From our perspective, the transformation and the drive for transformation may not necessarily come straight from the P&L, but may come from national interest. That's a great point you add. Oh, man. So I feel I already kind of dug into this question accidentally. The one that I have here about bringing blockchain platforms into the real world rather than proof of concept.

And so that's sort of my hesitation. We did for this office building actually build a blockchain prototype to put reservations on meeting rooms, which called the room blocker, which was kind of came out of the frustration that a lot of people, the book rooms and then don't use them. So there's a lot of kind of inefficiency. We build a version that where you kind of get some coins on the blockchain and you use those coins to kind of pay for your room reservation. And then if you actually check into the room, because all the rooms of course have sensors in them to actually check into the room, then you get your coins back.

But if you don't actually use the room, then you lose your coins. So, so please. So people who don't keep booking rooms, but don't use them, they are penalized. A lot of people were actually very enthusiastic about that, which says something about the frustration that happened with booking rooms in an office building. Of course, it is more a demonstrator than something that really needs blockchain in reality.

You could do that on a database internally as well. The project that we're working on at the moment in the EMEA lab is to digitize and tokenize what I want to say is units, units of a building, units of multiple buildings. So actually you can put the entire infrastructure or the availability of multiple you have is an open, you have complete, you don't have data disparity. So you have a single view of all of the availability that's provided in a decentralized way that's real time at all time.

So you don't have real estate agents or aggregators have any control over the availability or the perceived availability of certain rooms or assets. So city-wide program. Oh yeah. And, and I agree that that that is really, really powerful actually. Yeah.

That's for leasing or is that? I can't say because it's not public knowledge. The way I'll describe it is it's a way of looking at facilities and real estate to create a decentralized platform to remove that data disparity and improve transparency. So you don't get the pricing arbitrage of certain aggregators or certain real estate agents. We had the same conversation in Malta when we were there for the blockchain summit is saying, you know, broadly real estate sales and leasing is a fantastic place at blockchain because you've got multiple different sites, multiple different participants, multiple different lessors, but what the industry doesn't want actually is transparency because they profit from it.

Even the individual land from it. Yeah. So that's not necessarily a place to start or starting with the industry participants isn't a great place to start. Oh yeah. And, and I agree that that that is really, really powerful actually.

Yeah. My interpretation would be that they may be one transparency, but they don't want to be transparent. They'd love their competitors to be transparent, but they want to keep their data private, which is a kind of a common theme, I think. And it's, it's, it's, it's one of the reasons that we also look forward like the large players in the, in the ecosystem, which do have kind of the, first of all, the pain point of transparency and kind of the leverage to force, at least a part of this market to open up.

You look at like something like government agencies or even the government itself, because they have no commercial requirement to, to, to, or commercial drive to, to keep things for themselves, but also they own a lot of real estate and lease a lot of real estate. They could be one of the kind of crowbars to open up this system and big banks probably as well, who do a lot of lending to these real estate owners, but want to have trustworthy information about their investments. Let's go ahead and, and, and see if we can dig into the presentation a little bit, how much or how excited you are about BIM and blockchain.

That was something that I kept seeing get popped up on, on LinkedIn actually about the integration of the two. Yeah. And why is that? Because it's the basis to identify the building and to identify all the other processes that are related to a building. Having good floor plans for existing buildings is a difficulty.

It takes time and effort to, to get them and make them into a digital equivalent, but it's worth the effort. I speak so many people that say, well, I'm not going to make a BIM model of my existing building. It's a lot of money that I need to spend and I'm not seeing the benefits of it, but I totally disagree with them because the money is made per square meter and the money is saved per square meter. And you need to know in a detailed manner, what am I talking about with regards to real estate from your cleaning perspective, your facility management perspective, your workplace perspective, only your lease agreements, the value of a building.

And if you give a mortgage to a building, it's a thousand meters or a thousand fifty. Well, it's going to have impact. And if you want to start adding your data timestamp to a blockchain, you better be sure that your data is good and that you can trust the data that you start to put in garbage, in garbage, out is something that we don't want. And we want to capture data from the source and the source of the elements of the building or in a BIM model.

So that's why we want to start integrating that technique as well. And in itself, BIM is a way in which you are enabled as multiple players to work together. And that element is appealing to us as well from the blockchain perspective in which you want to work together as well. So let me ask this question from this perspective. Obviously, I work for MACE and there's the push from the government to utilize BIM and LAME on public projects.

However, I know it's sort of a tick box exercise in some cases. And all of us know here on this discussion how valuable BIM is. But if you can't get people convinced on BIM that it's worthwhile, what's the stretch to get them convinced on BIM and blockchain together? I guess I'm curious as to what your thoughts are on that. Jacob and anybody else who wants to add to that?

Of course, it's a difficulty, but you need to have a good starting point, I believe. And if you're looking into an innovative company who wants to have a showcase for themselves, they work, I would say, with BIM already. Mainly the guys in the Netherlands do it. And it's not for their own core processes that you want to combine blockchain with as well. Because the BIM model is a process in its own.

At the end of the process, when your building is ready, you're building it according to the BIM model. Then nowadays, that information isn't used anymore for upcoming processes or upcoming years. It's done. The construction company says, okay, I'm done and going to my next project. And then comes the second term of lease.

Then you perhaps need to evaluate and recheck again, what are the square meters of this building? Because I don't have my BIM model anymore. And I didn't utilize the data of the BIM model in such a way that I can reuse it for my lease agreements process. So we are focusing on doing BIM in the way you're doing it right now. But that process gives an output.

And the output of the BIM model, not the entire BIM model, but the output of the BIM model can be the square meters per floor and per room. That output is input for a digital process for signing of lease agreements. And from that perspective, we are looking over the flow of one particular company, one part of the life cycle of a building and giving that some thoughts and talking about this view with players that have a place in several parts of that life cycle to then it makes sense.

If you already have a BIM model and you're not using it anymore, but someone else can reuse some elements of it, why don't make it available for them? Put a timestamp on it, make the data available through APIs, via an application as a platform we're working on, and make it in such a way useful, landlord, tenants, facility management company can reuse their data as well. So then it comes to use to everybody. And that's what we try to focus on from your ecosystem perspective, make sure everybody has a benefit.

I think the secret to this one is we're not using technology for technology's sake. The dirty secret is if you want to get adoption of blockchain, don't talk about blockchain. We're not talking about BIM because we need BIM. We're talking about enabling certain processes or unlocking certain savings or enabling new experiences. And to be able to do that, we need to invest in certain technologies.

So when you're talking about saying, if we can increase greater transparency over the history or the efficiency or the operations of a building, that can increase its value by X percent. You can quantify that. If you talk about actually having a reduced amount of time or reduced legal fees related to a certain transaction, you can quantify that at an individual level. Now then what you have to do is scale that calculation to say, if I'm just doing this for one building, do I get value? If I'm investing a million dollars or a million euros in a piece of technology, is it going to give me back five times of that over the life of an asset or a life of multiple assets?

And you need to take the conversation back down to how are we creating value through the technology or what are the problems that we're solving that we can quantify? The enablers naturally are IoT devices, BIM, blockchain, analytics. All of those things are what makes the experience or the savings possible. But you have to start with the outcome and keep it relatively low level because there are enough evangelists for technology out there. We don't need more of them.

In some cases, that slows down because not everyone loves an evangelist. A lot of people are data driven and require quantification for certain things. And so you need to talk to that audience with empathy. I think you hit the nail on the head. Actually, both of you guys, it's understanding the value as a result of utilizing the technology, but not speaking necessarily from that perspective.

After all, we're consultants, right? We have to empathize, like you said, Anthony. I want to dig into the ecosystem that you touched on a little bit, Jacob. Axiom. Could you tell us a little bit about what that is and how it works?

I know it's pretty detailed, but I just, I don't want to miss the opportunity to learn about Axiom. Okay. Yeah. So Axiom is actually the name that we have given now to a blockchain real estate data sharing platform that we've been working on for several years now. It started out as actually a prototype.

We built a client, the city of Rotterdam for the Cambridge Innovation Center as a building in Rotterdam that leases space to enough of the startups. The goal of the prototype was to put the lease contracts for that on the blockchain and really make the building leasing experience as easy as ordering a pizza online. That was kind of the goal that we had there. And from that first kind of initial implementation, we really built it up from the ground up to be almost a protocol for putting trustworthy real estate information, not just on the blockchain, but also in this application and make it shareable between different stakeholders in that ecosystem so that everybody can make sure that the data is trusted, but they still remain in control of their own data.

So we don't put any identifiable information on the blockchain itself. We just put trustworthy hash values of that information on there. So if you are a party in a lease contract, or if you are the owner of a building, then yes, you can verify that data. But if you are just one more member of the network, you don't have insight of the actual data that you're not privy to. That in a nutshell kind of is axiom is or was, but Jan Willem, I think, can also say a lot more to that.

The main concept is clear. It's an exchange and verification platform in order to enable data to be shared among multiple players in that ecosystem, capture data from the source at the moment that it's born, so to say, so the signing of a lease agreement. At that moment, your comparables for next buildings are born. At that moment in time, make sure you hash your data and make that event put on a blockchain. Timestamp it, make it the trustworthy, auditable data points that can be verified even years later when, for example, the building may change hands again.

And it becomes necessary to know for certain what the exact history of all the contracts is. Rather than getting a stack of paper, paying expensive lawyers to do due diligence, you can just take one, press a button and verify, okay, this is to the letter, the exact contract history of everything that has happened to this building, basically from eventually from the time it was built onwards. And we are convinced that the data should be verified once and reused often and not the other way around. And that's what we want to do.

And if data is available in a system, you want to enable that system that reliable verification of data is possible by third parties as well. So you can say, okay, it's on a blockchain. If you don't trust the data, well, do it again. But we need immediate insights in your real estate portfolio data. And we want to bring instant clarity to real estate information.

And the portability and interoperability of data in systems, that is key. As mentioned, the combination of APIs, taxonomy and blockchain is the golden triangle that we are working within. And landlord and tenant sharing, setting up a lease agreement that is digitized from the source. At that moment in time, the consumers of the data that want to consume the data in a later moment in time can require access to the data based on data point level and get the actual data from the owner of the data machine to machine.

And we don't do PDFs and emails anymore. From GDPR perspective, there's also something you want to reduce the amount of data that you share and data minimization. That is something we are taking into account by design. So that's a more in detail view of this platform as well. It helps the real estate brokerage side of things, right?

Ownership. But it also helps the tenants as well when they're assessing their portfolios as it relates to their leasing agreements and how they're spread across, right? So it really looks at both sides and helps to make it plain. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a system in which you insights in the data that you've gathered while signing lease agreement, both for landlord and tenant. And there is another view and another part of the portal in which the landlord and a bank or an auditor or an appraiser can see what is the data that was shared with each other. So no more phone calls. Can you give me the latest version? I'm not sure I have everything that I need.

It's an online environment in which people can see what's shared, how long it's in the system and what is the source of the data. And the audit trail of the blockchain is also available. So people don't trust it. You want to verify in what moment in time did this data get into the system, go to the blockchain, but giving your counterparts with whom you are sharing your data the same insights that you have that is relevant and only do that on the level of data that you are actually sharing.

Very cool. So we've covered a lot of ground here. First of all, I want to just ask you guys, did you want to cover anything else? Did you want to make sure to mention anything else that you think is relevant that I didn't ask? Well, maybe very briefly because I don't want to take up any more of everybody's time.

But I think though we focus here on real estate data, I think there's a lot of kind of common denominators. Anthony already mentioned a little bit as well that when you dig into the problems in different industries, you see a lot of similarities. I think one of the really kind of key elements is also identity, digital identity. And I think in our blockchain real estate platform, we see that there's two key elements there. One is kind of the identity of the users, of course, in the real estate world, a lot of identity verification is done by notaries.

So you need really trustworthy identities. And the blockchain can do that, but it is almost a whole project onto itself again. And the other side of it is the identity of objects and of buildings. And I think Jan Willem also mentioned there's great steps being made there with IoT sensors and unique identities already being built into materials from the day one. But I think there's still a long way to go to really do good identity schemes for buildings, for cars, for all kinds of physical assets to be able to really make them have a presence also in the digital world of the blockchain.

I might give a few summary thoughts. I think what we've talked about today is a microcosm of the potential of what emerging technologies can do to create value. So we're talking about transactions, we're talking about histories, we're talking about identities, we're talking about enabling a better workplace, more efficiency, reuse of scarce resources, all really positive outcomes. And, you know, as I said earlier on, when thinking about applying emerging technologies, think about what are the jobs we're trying to do? What are the outcomes that we're trying to drive?

What are the digital capabilities that these new technologies give us? You know, the ability to use IoT devices and sensors to verify the identity of an object, to verify the identity of a lift of a person, of a device, to allow building entry and access management. Thinking about blockchain, what does that give you? The underlying capabilities of keeping a secure store of data, having visibility of a certain transaction or of the state of certain things across multiple companies, multiple buildings, multiple countries even, that single source of truth, to allow for automation of activity between multiple parties.

If you can break down, you know, if I could only do this, right, if I could only have this be digital, if I could only make this a more automated process, if I could make this outcome based, what would I do differently? So try not to think about the technologies in isolation, try and think about what are the capabilities that I can combine. The most interesting propositions that we see, the most innovative platforms where blockchain is a part, actually incorporates multiple technologies, IoT devices, machinery, and smart vehicles and analytics on top.

And also remember this is a platform story. You know, so if there are companies out there or individuals or entities out there who are looking at technology, looking at blockchain, the first thing to think about before you start going down the road is do I have a minimum viable ecosystem or do I have enough parties around me where this platform can create value? You know, in some cases it's an end-to-end supply chain. You know, if you're a real estate manager, even if you're a city, are there enough participants in that ecosystem who would benefit from being able to connect to this platform?

And oftentimes if it's a company looking at blockchain individually, there are other technology solutions that make more sense. Or you can start with a database and some APIs as a different way of architecting it. But that doesn't work when you're trying to integrate, you know, an entire manufacturing process. Because not everybody's on the same technology solution. Or if you're trying to allow for data upload from somebody that's working in a farm in a rural countryside, you know, they don't have SAP.

So how do we allow for data and interconnectivity? The bigger the network, the bigger the platform, potentially the bigger the value and the more participants and the more different types of participants, the more likely blockchain is to be a relevant underlying technology. But it's not the only one. I think it's a can do and just go mentality that you need to keep this going and proceed for upcoming years. And well, that matches the real estate industry.

From a technical perspective, people love to build stuff. Well, from a real estate perspective, we also like to build stuff. So this is a golden combination, I think, for adding value to our industry and ecosystem. So thanks for the opportunity to share our insights so far and keep you posted. Yes, thank you to all of you for taking the time out and sharing your perspective.

I want to just ask one last question. What is the best place to learn more about what we discussed today? Whether it's email or a website, social media links? How can people get in touch and learn more? Number of initiatives, I believe launching our action platform upcoming January, we'll make sure some more information package available in which people can look into the things we've done so far.

So we'll make sure there's more information available from our own perspective. And there's a lot of meetups organized all over the place. Focus on proptech networks as well as blockchain networks and try to find a combination of the both. If you want to learn more about blockchain, no matter which country you're in, obviously, Deloitte.com, you'll be able to find blockchain through there. Things move fast in the blockchain space and our content managers can't always keep up with us.

So please do reach out to myself, Jakob and Jan Villeb on LinkedIn. We try to post as much as we can on what we're doing, what we like. Great examples from across different industries that are relatable and that help our teams and our clients learn more about blockchain and obviously complementary technologies. So please do reach out to us there. If you're in the edge, please do look out for Jan Villeb and Jakob.

If you're in Dublin, that's the home of our EMEA blockchain lab. So you're welcome to come find us there. And Brittany, thank you very much again for giving us the opportunity to share our experience. And again, congratulations on 100 plus podcasts. It's a privilege to talk to you.

Thank you guys. If you liked this episode, find out more in the show notes and you can go to constructor.com slash Deloitte Innovation. If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn. You can also email me at Brittany at constructor.com that's B R I T T A N I E at construct double R.com.

Next week, you'll be hearing a voice that you've already heard before, Bill DeVebic. He is the host of BIM Thoughts, CAD Thoughts, Revit Op-Ed, and he's the founder of the Shared Coordinates Network. He and I decided to get together and do a joint podcast interviewing Maliki Matthews. He is the senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and the Technological University in Dublin. He is also leading in BIM blockchain and collaborative pedagogy.

I decided to bring BIM Thoughts Bill along for the ride when discussing BIM and blockchain with Maliki. It's an awesome discussion about the combination of BIM and blockchain and how it has the potential as a platform for true collaboration. He wrote visual evidence of value transaction. Are written into a ledger, timestamps gathered and through consensus locked into a block visible for all stakeholders to see. We had a really fun conversation and I look forward to sharing this episode with you guys next week.

If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, do so at your favorite podcast player. I look forward to continuing the journey with you next week. Thank you.