Leading property developer, headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Lendlease has outlined its vision for a 'smart building ecosystem.' CEO, William Ruh laid the plan out, which aims to boost the number of live data points in buildings tenfold.
The company's Barangaroo site in Sydney currently generates around 1 million live data points with a range of connected system including lighting controls and metering systems. It has marked three areas by which to increase its live data points.
These areas span building automation, digital infrastructure, and digital experience, service and information capabilities.
During the IoT Impact conference in Sydney, Ruh explained, “people come in and say ‘I have one of those’. But it’s a general-purpose thing that doesn't actually do what we want, and it costs a lot to make changes.” Ruh also stated that the company is looking for systems that “address business value”. These include energy, water and waste sensors, smart surveillance, facial recognition, smart parking systems, electric vehicle charging technology, smart lighting and advanced “in building” mobile coverage.
Mostly, Ruh forecasted that the property industry is at its “tipping point” in terms of the importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology.
“The fact is, IoT is just built in almost everything we buy. And so every major system we buy – the water systems, the HVAC systems, the lighting systems – they all come with what one could view as basic IoT capability and basic applications,” said Ruh. "People are using it, they can get enough out of what they’ve got, to do good hygiene. But there's no business model behind it, other than we run things a lot more efficiently than ever before. We use less people to operate it. We address challenges and problems earlier than we ever have. But this is sort of the hygiene department,” he added.
The Lendlease CEO also pointed at the increased investments in the industry. “It's really going up dramatically because I think that we're starting to see business models appear where people can start to think differently about what a building is…that to me is really the tipping point of whether IoT is going to matter in our industry or not.”
