By taimoor1982 Real estate companies in Sharjah and around the world are on a roller-coaster ride of transformation driven by technology and automation. Almost every real estate agency is being impacted in one way or another by the trends defined below!
- Internet-of-Things (IoT)
Industry giants like Google and Amazon are already in the thick of integrating smart home technology in every unit. Another leap is likely to be taken this year with Internet-of-Things (IoT) in more than 60 percent homes in the US so far. The technology would allow you to read the weather report, book air travel or simply turn the lights ON/OFF with a gesture or voice command as you move across the home.
- Augmented & Virtual Reality (AR & VR)
In 2016, the coming of Pokémon Go was a radical move made possible through the Augmented Reality (AR) platform with New York Times and Google shipping millions of disposable VR headsets a year earlier. Though not much of a custom nowadays, property tours would be conducted virtually by typically state-of-the-art real estate companies in Sharjah!
Finest examples of virtual-based property tours are of YouVisit and Google’s Street View. Touring a street is now a game of simple cursor movement. Consumers in near future would prefer home tours the same way.
- Machine learning
Real estate industry driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) defines today, tomorrow and future. A catalyst to this rising trend is machine learning that affects consumer buying behaviour through online recommended products based on historical searches and web-based transactions. Property niche would do its best to catch up with the search experiences in media and consumer product industries that’s however pretty cumbersome nowadays.
- Humanising the Big Data
For at least two years, Big Data has been a major debate in technological industry. It influences a business significantly by driving corporate decisions and creates a better consumer experience. Humanising Big Data would make it easier to comprehend, process and manage the technology for overall betterment of real estate industry.
Residential sector has already been using Big Data as a means to pull buyers for years now and in 2017 is likely to be more active. Realtors harnessing social media as a targeting tool are likely to have an edge on industries that simply avoids.
- Physical-digital collaboration
The physical and digital worlds have already merged to a much greater extent with ever advancing technology and Augmented Reality (AR) is the best example. It’s simple as placing an online order from your phone and going to the store to pick it up, thereby saving a lot of time and effort.
The dash buttons from Amazon are other super examples such as a physical console on the washing machine that would automatically ship the detergent to your door when running low.
The collaboration of digital and physical world would allow consumers to skim through a neighbourhood and look for their preferred real estate unit.
Conclusion
Like every other industry, real estate companies in Sharjah experienced radical shifts driven by advance technologies and the only way for long-term survival is adapting these for the betterment.
Lorenzo Billie 
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