Good morning, it seems like affordable housing has gone viral and before you bring out your notebook of examples, sample this.
Amazon just announced its plan to spend over USD120 million to build affordable-housing units close to transit stations near Seattle and Washington, D.C, the hottest instance of a tech company reaching out to address the affordable housing crisis.
👩🏽🤝🧑🏻 Hang on, there's more. Microsoft has also said it will spend at least USD750 million to create affordable housing in the Seattle area following years of complaints that the tech boom made things worse as salaries in the sector and housing prices escalated.
That's gonna open up thousands of new windows to sunlight and hundreds of new doors for deliveries.
🏋️♀️🍌🍳
Warehousing Is (Still) On A Roll
Not all real estate is created equal and those who doubted that have been successfully course-corrected by the pandemic.
While office, retail and hospitality real estate assets continue to burn their transmissions trying to climb out of the 2020-21 ditch, warehouses are on a roll.
Yeah? Got Some Numbers?
Per this report, the global demand for warehousing has witnessed a sharp increase in 2021 and is slated to go up by 7% YoY to reach USD285 billion in 2022 and USD326.3 billion by 2024.
In India, leasing of industrial and warehousing real estate across the top-8 cities increased by 35% in 2021 (over 2020) to 35.1 million sq. feet.
What's Triggering This?
Increasing online purchases of fresh produce and grocery, day to day stuff, and pharmaceuticals, fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, is the biggest growth driver for warehousing today.
Digging a bit deeper:
🔼 A big increase in ecommerce, pharmaceuticals, online buying of groceries, and the rapid rise of the dark store.
🔼 Wholesalers and 3PLs have been relying on inventory-at-hand to effectively address supply chain disruptions.
🔼 Plus, the need for modern urban distribution centres to ensure hassle-free last-mile deliveries, trade embargos, and geopolitical issues have been the driving factors for this global demand growth for warehousing and cold storages.
Just Thursday Things
🔖 Maharashtra's CIDCO has expanded its Mega Housing Scheme 2022, one of the biggest housing projects in recent times, by increasing the number of apartments on offer in Navi Mumbai by 6,508 units.
🔖 JLL has blended its property valuations expertise and market insight to brew its best chai yet create its latest property intelligence and technology tool, Valorem, a state-of-the-art client experience that delivers valuation data and risk insights.
🔖 The Welspun Group has signed a memo with the Haryana government, with a development potential of around 5 million sq. ft. of warehousing to be built over 3-4 years which will help generate more than 4500 jobs. It will invest around ₹1500 crore.
What's Hot? Commercial Real Estate And AI.
Today, real estate tech plays a big part in delivering efficiencies as well as creating the services and experiences property users want.
And in that journey to serve consumers better, key areas of focus for real estate companies are; increasingly embracing construction technology, digitizing workflows and boosting their data analytics capabilities.
A Silent Deployment
While all that glitzy stuff is what we see on the surface, AI brandishing proptech is slowly taking over the commercial real estate (CRE) subdomain.
What's The Advantage: Often times, tech transformation initiatives start with platforms that automate one or two aspect of the operation, resulting in spot solutions. On the other hand, fully integrated systems powered by machine learning extract maximum value for commercial asset managers by capturing, centralizing and analysing portfolio-wide data effortlessly and accurately.
Hang On A Sec... What?
Too strong? Let us water it down for you with a few relatable instances:
🚰 Developers seeking new properties are starting to use AI analytics to gauge their potential use, pricing and other parameters.
🚰 Asset managers are evaluating their pipelines and matching deals with investors, tying capital calls to investment data and generating decision worthy reports.
🚰 Retail real estate owners and investors, meanwhile, are merging property-level operational data with sales data from in-store sensors, social media and per sq. ft. sales, then using machine learning algorithms to spew out critical to-dos in the investment lifecycle - from deal sourcing to portfolio management and risk management.
In One Sip
Being connected to a centralised data hub provides real-time insights into assets, driving more informed decision-making and enhancing construction project oversight, deal execution, investor reporting and other operations.
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That'll be all for now and this week as well.
Enjoy the long weekend and we will see you on Monday morning with the usual monochrome history lesson.
Good day. 💚
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai