Driving Build-to-Rent Business Value with a Digital Twin

Invicara Talks Digital Twin Solutions at Bisnow Dublin

On June 27, I joined Build-to-Rent (BTR) professionals at Bisnow's Dublin event to learn about the drivers and restrainers for the Build-to-Rent model, what the sector has accomplished, its immense potential and how to maximize future opportunities. I had the privilege to speak about Digital Twin technology, it's applications and how it can impact the Build-to-Rent sector. This blog summarizes the key topics from my presentation, “Driving Business Value with a Digital Twin.”

Digital Transformation

We all know that building information modeling (BIM) helps design buildings in 3D and allows us to coordinate different trades and optimize design. BIM also lets you tie data to the design, helping firms do things like managing the project schedule and reducing risk. However, what many people don’t know is that BIM is a great foundation for a Digital Twin. A Digital Twin is a digital representation of a built asset that maintains all the rich data from many different sources in one centralized data repository, which is accessible and usable throughout the life of the property. Creating a Digital Twin is vital for driving operational efficiencies in the Build-to-Rent industry, while also allowing owners to provide new services to tenants and enhance their yield. https://invicara.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/blog-feature-20190703-01.png

Change drivers

Soon millennials (loosely defined as those born after 1980) will be the majority of individuals who rent living space in your properties. Millennials appreciate transparency, self-service, speed in responses and are happy to provide information to receive personalized services. Millennials represent a significant opportunity for this sector to drive and optimize revenue over time. 5G connectivity will bring unprecedented changes to lifestyle of people. From Holographic meetings to managing anything from anywhere, the place people live and work will converge, therefore requiring Build-to-Rent schemes to offer flexible spaces and facilities as part of their amenities. Managing spaces and assets optimally to serve the needs of occupants requires a data driven approach. Provisioning of services, ranging from concierge to managing short term letting, becomes an integral part of the revenue model. The opportunity to better understand and respond to occupants who can spend on personalized services is significantly driven by data.

Convergence Information Modeling

Let’s look at a real-life example to better understand how a Digital Twin can expand offerings and provide a better experience for users. Google Maps is an excellent example of how information drives services that create more data - which further drives new services. In 2004, planning a trip was a different experience than it is today. We had paper maps and guessed how to get places. There was a level of uncertainty that we were accustomed to. When Google Maps introduced a converged model to bring information together, it didn’t happen overnight. They introduced the service in 2005 with the very basic interface below: https://invicara.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/blog-feature-20190703-02.jpg The picture is a 2D image of North America. Today it has evolved to a point where, if I need to plan a trip from point A to point B, I can not only leverage the digitized maps on my smart phone, I can also plan my travel options considering user generated traffic data, live data relating to public transport, and dynamically get fare data from ride providers like Uber. I can find restaurants near my destination, read reviews, and book a table. Using a base layer of information that is meaningful and usable, Google aggregates additional data from the users who make use of it, and drive the new data to deliver new services, which produces even more monetizable data! So the idea of using an information model to gather data and make that data available in a useful, meaningful way results in opportunities to drive new outcomes. Connectivity and data is fundamentally changing people’s lives and businesses need join the party!

The Future of Data

Data is an interesting animal. Unstructured data, or the information you have about your building assets in many disparate silos, is essentially unusable. For example, after a quarterly inspection, the data that is produced generally sits in hand scrawled documents. Nobody will ever be able to find and use that data meaningfully. The Invicara platform enables you to gather data and documents from multiple sources, from various stages during the capital phase and later during operations and associate all that data to 3D models of the building. This information is invaluable, out of the box to operate and maintain the facility efficiently and to make it available as on line data room for potential investors should you need to transact the building. By integrating information from building operations, you very quickly start to see how the building is operating and compare it against what was meant to be. Energy and water consumption, equipment and space utilization – critical information to optimize operations. Operational efficiency drives cost, which is a direct contributor to improving yield.

What is a Digital Twin?

An Invicara Digital Twin is a virtual building: a rich information model about a physical building. It brings together:

• Data
• Documents
• Building Models and Plans

A Digital Twin integrates data across multiple systems, creating custom solutions for your business. Learn more about Invicara Digital Twin Solutions here. https://invicara.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/blog-feature-20190703-03.png The platform enables several Digital Twin solutions to come alive. A good way to look at this is to not consider the Digital Twin a typical software product that you buy “out of the box”. Instead, consider a Digital Twin as a set of solutions that you define and optimize in the context of your business, and the services you are offering. Enabling all that, is the underlying information model which brings together structured information and makes it available to digital solutions. Digital Twin solutions are a key requirement to optimize yields from BTR schemes. For more information on how to leverage building information to find new ways to reduce costs, streamline your business processes, and improve building performance, contact us today.

Ready to Get Started? Contact Invicara today!

Whatever your BIM data needs, Invicara can customize a plan to capture and maintain your building data. Contact us