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From bendable smartphones to driverless cars, these 5 tech trends and upcoming technological advances will change your daily routine on the job.
This could be your future: You’re driving hands-free, taking your clients around for a day of showings. While you’re behind the wheel (remember, you’re not actually steering the car), you pull from your pocket a bendable smartphone or tablet and bring up a home’s specs. (Apps display the home’s energy use and maintenance status.) As you’re approaching a home, the lights in the house automatically turn on. Sound far-fetched? Well, brace yourself: Some of these capabilities are already here—or are coming soon. Here’s at peek at the latest tech from the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show that should be on your radar.
Wearables
Wearable tech is a big buzzword right now, with the smartwatch business alone is expected to grow from 400,000 shipments this year to 35 million by 2017, according to market research firm Berg Insight. Watchmaker Pebble touts a $249 Pebble Steel smartwatch with leather or metal straps. It can connect to apps from iOS or Android devices for accessing e-mails, calendar alerts, news updates, social media accounts, and maps.
The technology may serve as a discreet way to keep an eye on your business. Real estate tech expert and author Chris Smith says that in order for smartwatches to catch on, they will need to have voice-control capability and connect to all your smartphone apps so that you don’t ever have to take out your phone.
Smarter Homes
A smartphone may become the key—literally—to showing a home. Several products are being developed with the goal of creating “connected homes,” which will allow for greater control and monitoring of home appliances and systems from a smartphone. The tech is getting more affordable and simpler to use, mostly through smartphone apps, and could make the connected homes more mainstream within the next decade, says Matt Rogers, cofounder of Nest, a home technology manufacturer recently purchased by Google.
The offerings for greater home connectivity are growing:
1. Energy-efficient “smart lightbulbs”: You can control these lightbulbs with your phone and program them with mood-light settings for relaxation and energy.
2. The ability to text appliances: Programs such as LG’s -HomeChat allow you to text your washer, for example, and ask it, “What are you doing?” You’ll receive a text response telling you where the washer is in the washing cycle.
3. Single integrated systems: These will allow you to connect appliances, thermostats, security systems, and more from one device. Lowe’s Iris Management System and Samsung’s Smart Home App are examples of these systems, and they also send alerts to your phone when an appliance is malfunctioning.
Drones
Real estate pros aren’t the only ones hankering to use drones professionally. Filmmakers, land surveyors, and farmers, among others, are waiting for the green light. But everyone may have to wait until next year when the Federal Aviation Administration releases rules addressing safety and privacy issues for commercial drone use, although a court has raised the question of whether it has the authority to enforce a ban until its rules are out. In the meantime, several companies at CES were debuting cost-effective advancements in drone technology.
View a slideshow of the latest mobile gear to leverage in your business.
For example, drone manufacturing company Parrot offered a sneak peek at its upcoming MiniDrone, which can be controlled by a smartphone or tablet to shoot photos and video while flying up to 160 feet high. It also has wheels to climb walls or move across ceilings. It is slated to debut later this year, and while the price has not yet been announced, it is expected to be cheaper than the company’s upgraded $300 A.R. Drone. Also, global drone manufacturer DJI’s Phantom 2 Vision, retailing for about $1,200, can snap 14-megapixel images and record high-definition video.
While NAR recommends that REALTORS® avoid using drones until the FAA issues rules on commercial drone use, as directed by Congress, next year, some practitioners are taking their chances. Brandon Doyle, a sales associate with Edina Realty in Maple Grove, Minn., has experimented with using DJI’s F550 drone since October 2012. He said drones will be particularly helpful for showing off high-acreage property. “It’s very difficult to show what 40 acres looks like in a photo, but with a drone, you can get a feel for the topography and where the boundaries are on a property,” he says.
Driverless Cars
Could texting while driving one day be safe? Automakers are racing to release the first publicly available self-driving car. Manufacturers such as Audi, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and BMW, among others, are testing the technology. According to officials with Bosch, a global automotive supplier, the company is about seven to 10 years away from having a fully automatic powered car on the roads.
The implications for real estate? Instead of chauffeuring clients to showings, the car will do it for you. That means you can focus on your client instead of the road. The cars use 360–degree sensors without human intervention for accelerating, braking, maneuvering turns, and parking. Driverless cars have been approved by lawmakers for experimentation in several states, such as California, Nevada, and Florida.
Flexible Phones
LG Electronics has created a smartphone that bends. The LG G Flex is the first smartphone with a flexible screen, and has just become available to AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile customers, starting at $600. (Wireless carriers offer a steep discount with a contract.) The G Flex features a 6-inch display and a slightly curved screen at the top and bottom. LG officials say the curved screen offers better sound, voice, and picture clarity. You can also bend it slightly without cracking the screen. Smartphone manufacturers as a whole are focusing on curvier devices. Samsung has launched its flexible Galaxy Round phone in South Korea, while Apple was granted a patent in 2013 for a curved display back, which has some tech forecasters predicting curvier, more bendable shapes for future Apple devices.
Smith says bendable glass helps protect devices from shattering. “We [practitioners] take out our devices from our pockets about 80 times a day and are always dropping our phones,” he says. “[Bendable glass] offers a way to keep the devices looking the way they were built as well as some protection.”
By: Melissa Dittmann Tracey (REALTORMag)
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Here’s how savvy developers are turning old-school office parks into vibrant, mixed-use villages.
Traditional suburban office parks are gray flannel suits in a skinny jeans world. Faced with adapting to change or becoming obsolete, the bland, old-school behemoths are increasingly getting mixed-use makeovers. The result is rave reviews along with a healthy stream of new occupants.
Originally built exclusively for business, office parks are evolving into vibrant villages as investors and developers strive to improve performance and add value through redevelopment. The result is a re-envisioned suburbia where people can dine, shop, and live—all within walking distance of work.
The move toward makeovers is the product of a triple whammy that hit the suburban office market during and after the Great Recession. First came the waves of layoffs that led to permanent corporate downsizing. Next came a shift to more open floor plans in offices requiring less square footage. The clincher is the perspective of a new generation of young professionals in their 20s and early 30s—the millennials—who have no interest in working in the same dull McOffice Park that their parents did.
It all adds up to an excess of suburban office inventory that is pushing developers to hit the reset button because employers no longer have the space needs they once did. “There’s definitely too much suburban office right now—substantially too much,” says Dane Anderson, CCIM, director of appraisal and litigation services with Real Estate Research Corp. in West Des Moines, Iowa. The nationwide vacancy rate for suburban office space was 16 percent as of the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the commercial real estate services firm Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. If over-supply is the problem, mixed-use makeovers are a potential solution in places where job growth is strong and there’s also high demand for multifamily and retail.
Helping Workers Feel at Home
To recruit and retain top talent, employers are eager to give millennials what they want: a walkable live-work-play environment. And suburban office parks can capitalize by giving employers what they seek: diversified environments where offices are surrounded by dining, entertainment, shopping, and housing. “It’s the new norm,” says Anjee Solanki, national director of retail services with Colliers International in San Francisco. “People are expecting it.”
That’s the vision Advance Realty and CrossHarbor Capital Partners LLC have for a vacated biotech campus in Bridgewater, N.J., which they bought for $45 million last year from a global pharmaceutical company. After getting a “good deal” on the campus, they hope to begin redevelopment sometime this year, says Peter Cocoziello, president and CEO of Advance Realty.
The campus, renamed the New Jersey Center of Excellence, contains 1.2 million square feet of offices and labs on 110 acres. While most of the office and lab space will remain, the new owners plan to demolish some of it to make way for multifamily housing (apartments, townhomes, and condos are all being considered), retail, and a hotel, as well as a new corporate headquarters building for an unspecified occupant. When redevelopment is complete, the overall footprint will grow to between 1.5 million and 1.7 million square feet, Cocoziello says.
The new owners found takers for 360,000 square feet of office and lab space in the first few months after buying the mothballed campus. A central location and state-of-the-art labs are big carrots for tenants, but so is the pending addition of apartments, retail, and a hotel.
Advance Realty typically holds properties for a period of time while they gain value, Cocoziello said. Current rents at the New Jersey Center of Excellence vary from $20 to $35 per square foot. “As I keep building out the product, I should be able to get better pricing,” he says.
Retrofitting for the Times Continental Park in El Segundo, Calif., has already traveled the path the New Jersey Center of Excellence is on. The 86-acre office complex once teemed with workers from the aerospace industry, but when defense spending began to shrink in the 1990s, the buildings began to empty. “We had to rethink what to do with the property,” says Alex Rose, senior vice president of Continental Development Corp.
Most of the buildings had been occupied by single large tenants. Continental Development steadily began retrofitting the buildings to fit multiple tenants. Then it began adding restaurants, shopping, hotels, fitness centers, and a movie theater—all served by a light rail stop. “Once you get the cycle going, it feeds on itself,” Rose says. With 3 million square feet of mixed-use space and an office vacancy rate below 5 percent, Continental Park found the right strategy to turn things around. “By taking a mixed-use approach, we think we did a good job of listening to our market,” Rose says. “We’ve been able to keep our rents up, keep occupancy up, and attract tenants that perhaps our competition can’t.”
Invesco Real Estate and SSV Properties of Ontario, Calif., bought four office buildings in Continental Park totaling 540,000 square feet for an undisclosed amount last year. One was fully leased, but the new owners are spending an estimated $75 million to convert the other three to open floor plans that support workplace collaboration.
Continental Park’s mixed-use environment was a key factor in the decision to buy the buildings as a long-term investment, said Peter Cassiano, director of acquisitions for Invesco. “The way officing is going right now, folks want the [mixed-use] environment and amenities,” he says.
Garrick Brown, director of research with Cassidy Turley in Sacramento, Calif., is bullish on mixed-use makeovers. “There are plenty of markets where this would solve an awful lot of problems—especially if you can incorporate multifamily in the mix, because that’s where the strongest demand is,” Brown says. “The only reason we haven’t seen more [mixed-use redevelopment] is cost.
Many underperforming office parks can’t afford mixed-use makeovers because the owners don’t have the capital. They don’t have the capital because the property is underperforming. The only escape from this Catch-22 is acquisition by new owners with deeper pockets, Brown says.
Investing for the Long Haul
Synergy Business Park in Brentwood, Tenn., wasn’t necessarily underperforming when Boyle Investment Co. bought it for $62.8 million in 2012 with an eye on giving it a mixed-use makeover and holding it as a long-term investment. The 500,000-square-foot complex—since renamed CityPark—was at 90 percent occupancy at the time of the sale and climbed to 96 percent occupancy with a bump in rents before the makeover even began earlier this year. “It wasn’t an issue of needing to redevelop the property due to increased vacancy and declining rents, but more an issue of us wanting to enhance the property … so that it adds value and succeeds both now and 30 years from now,” says Shelby Larkin, a Boyle spokeswoman.
Boyle got good value by purchasing the property in a downturn, Larkin says. Construction is underway on 40,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, a 126-room Hilton Garden Inn, and a one-acre park—all within a stroll of a 300-unit upscale apartment complex another developer is building nearby. “There really won’t be anything like it in Brentwood,” Larkin says.
North Carolina’s iconic Research Triangle Park will start construction later this year on the first of three planned mixed-use clusters. Phase one consists of 1,000 apartment units, 200,000 square feet of retail, and 700,000 square feet of new office and research space.
The triangle in Research Triangle Park refers to three surrounding universities: the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and Duke University in Durham. The vast park, founded in 1959 and now home to 170 companies with more than 38,000 employees, created an identity for the region as a center for innovation, but the park is a laggard when it comes to urban amenities. “Research Triangle Park is 7,000 acres—that’s half of the size of Manhattan—and you can’t buy a latte anywhere,” says Bob Geolas, president and CEO of the Research Triangle Foundation, which manages the campus. “We want to make sure the park stays at the forefront. If the park was viewed as a dinosaur, that would impact the Research Triangle brand.”
The overall vacancy rate in the 21 million square foot park is 3.34 percent, but most buildings are owner-occupied. The vacancy rate is 18.9 percent in the 4.3 million square feet of space that is under lease. Lee Clyburn, sior, principal with Avison Young, a commercial real estate firm in Raleigh, N.C., says adding a live-work-play flavor should help Research Triangle Park improve occupancy. “I think adding amenities to the park will help all of us attract more tenants and lease more space out there,” Clyburn says.
Transportation Game Changers
Some suburban office parks are better positioned for redevelopment than others. The presence of transit options and support from local government for any needed zoning changes are game changers. Redevelopment was a nonstarter in Tysons Corner, Va., until the Washington, D.C., Metro decided to extend light rail service to the unincorporated suburb—four new stations will open this spring—and Fairfax County approved greater density.
With 26 million square feet of office space and a workforce of 110,000 people, Tysons Corner is a “tremendous employment and economic engine,” says Eric Maggio, vice president and chief financial officer at CityLine Partners, a leading developer and owner of office and commercial property in Tysons Corner. “The problem is it’s just a collection of office parks and a large shopping center. It’s not a livable place.”
CityLine is in the opening stages of a sweeping live-work-play makeover that could total up to 8.5 million square feet of residential, retail, and office space over the next decade and beyond. Construction is underway on 1,575 apartment units. “You can continue to operate old office parks, but you’re chasing falling revenue,” Maggio says. “Corporations are no longer in the mode of wanting office buildings where all their employees have to drive to work.”
By: Brad Broberg (REALTORMag)
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Mirroring broader trends, commercial transactions in REALTORS® markets registered a positive fourth quarter. On a year-over-year basis, commercial sales increased 11 percent in the fourth quarter, as prices rose 4 percent. Cap rates continued compressing with a 50 basis point decline, from an average of 9.2 percent in the third quarter to 8.7 percent in the last. Multifamily properties recorded the lowest average cap rates, at 7.7 percent, followed by hotels, at 8.0 percent. Office and retail spaces posted cap rates of 8.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively.

The average transaction price moved from $1.3 million to $1.2 million in the fourth quarter. In a noticeable change, commercial REALTORS® reported that the most significant concern was the pricing gap between buyers and sellers. The second major concern was lack of available inventory. After several years of topping the list of concerns, financing dropped to third place, signaling a shift in market conditions.
In keeping with the upward momentum in the markets, REALTORS® rated the direction of commercial business opportunities 5.0 percent higher compared with the third quarter.

By: George Ratiu (National Association of REALTORS New Mexico)
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Softening rents and the slow pace of construction has helped the commercial office market in Santa Fe, and the vacancy rate now is below 10 percent, according to Allen Branch.
Branch, who recently published his 2014 commercial real estate reports, pegs the overall commercial vacancy rate at 9.28 percent, while the retail vacancy rate citywide is below 5 percent for the first time since the start of the Great Recession.