Beyond delivering the building
6' read - published January, 5th 2025
Today’s real estate customers expect more than just a place to live in—they seek convenience and practical solutions to everyday challenges. Mixed-use developments create new demands for technologies that seamlessly manage both private and shared spaces. In modern real estate, residents increasingly judge homes not only by architecture or location, but by how well they align with contemporary lifestyles. As daily life evolves — becoming more connected, energy-conscious, and service-driven — buildings are expected to support these shifts seamlessly. This focus on usability and service, however, must never come at the expense of architectural quality or construction integrity, ensuring homes remain durable, adaptable, and well designed for today and tomorrow.
Smart solutions, including PropTech innovations, now support the full resident journey: from immersive project visualisation that helps buyers make confident choices and select finishes, to efficient property and condominium management during occupancy; from smooth move-in processes that coordinate utilities and services, to personalized, safe, and convenient living supported by intuitive building features, automated maintenance, smart waste management, and connected home technologies. These tools make the entire process—from the decision to purchase or rent, through settling in, to everyday living—easier, safer, and more enjoyable.
Helping buyers visualise and decide earlier
Reducing uncertainty early in the buyer journey accelerates decision-making and builds confidence. Interactive floor plans enriched with images, pricing, and unit details let developers engage leads efficiently, track interest, and prioritize follow-ups without technical expertise—a process made seamless by tools like Planpoint. Meanwhile, LifeSize Plans enables exploration of full-scale layouts with furniture and décor, helping residents visualize their future homes realistically and reducing post-sale adjustments. Some developers are even embracing creative virtual experiences: Ecuadorian firm Minutocorp recreated a 700-apartment project inside Fortnite, reaching millions in a playful, interactive way.
Structured finish-selection systems, such as Finished Selector, guide buyers through predefined options, helping them navigate complex choices without feeling overwhelmed. By framing decisions within clear constraints, buyers can personalize their homes with confidence, while promoters maintain cost control and operational efficiency.
Simplifying rental and condominium management
Smooth property management enhances tenant satisfaction while reducing risks and operational burdens. Across different markets, RentPrep in the United States and Nestaway in India help secure reliable tenants while fostering supportive communities. In India, where single and non-married renters often face discrimination, Nestaway combines fair digital screening with social initiatives such as clubs and shared activities to help create social links between residents. This approach fosters inclusion, reduces isolation, and strengthens trust between tenants and property managers. HomePad digitizes occupancy processes, consolidating inventories, exit agreements, and incident communication into a single platform, saving time and reducing errors.
On the condominium side, particularly in PPE ownership structures, cooperative platforms such as Matera provide promoters and co-owners with real-time access to budgets, messaging, and expenses. These platforms are supported by local specialists—including accountants, legal advisors, building works experts, and energy renovation professionals—enabling them to address complex financial, legal, and technical issues. This transparency streamlines operations, simplifies handovers, and has been shown to significantly reduce condominium fees.
Making moves and spaces effortless
Simplifying transitions in buildings improves resident experience and minimizes friction for property managers. Just Move In coordinates utilities, broadband, council tax, TV licenses, and insurance, allowing tenants to settle in quickly and reducing errors or delays during handovers. Personalizing interiors becomes easier with solutions like Unpaint, whose flexible, peelable paint can be applied and removed without damaging surfaces. This environmentally responsible option allows residents to customize spaces while keeping maintenance simple for property owners.
Easier and safer everyday living
Smart building and connected home technologies automate routine tasks and enhance safety, improving daily life while supporting modern, attractive developments.
Laundry Jet automates clothing collection in multi-unit buildings using pneumatic tubes, reducing congestion and simplifying chores for residents of all ages. Gallery 3 offers video tutorials and after-sales support to help residents navigate technical installations, lowering management calls.
SensFloors transforms floors into intelligent sensors that detect movement and falls. Ideal for assisted living or high-traffic spaces, it ensures safety, supports gait analysis, and provides anonymized data for facility managers to act proactively. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) integrates sensors and smart devices to support seniors and vulnerable residents, enhancing safety with automatic stove shut-offs, voice-controlled reminders, and remote healthcare connectivity. Together, these solutions make daily life smoother and more secure.
Looking to the future, humanoid assistants like NEO can handle domestic tasks across multiple units, from transporting laundry to light cleaning, adapting to surroundings with AI-driven perception. This type of forward-looking amenity demonstrates how service-oriented innovations may further simplify daily life in residential buildings.
Secure and convenient building access
Efficient access management ensures safety while reducing operational complexity. VIGIK focuses on secure, temporary access for professional service providers such as postal workers, maintenance teams, and utilities, using contactless badges that automatically expire and give property managers precise operational control. Complementing this, resident-facing solutions like Kivala modernize intercom systems with 4K touchscreens and mobile apps, enabling occupants to open doors remotely, issue temporary access codes, and receive notifications, while administrators retain full oversight through a central back-office.
Fast and hassle-free repairs
Efficient maintenance platforms enhance resident satisfaction while easing operational burdens. Fixmyspace connects tenants and owners with vetted local contractors, providing fixed-price quotes within hours. Scheduling is handled automatically to match availability, covering a wide range of repairs from plumbing to locksmith services. Urbest complements this by offering collaborative software for building maintenance, centralizing requests, tracking work, sharing documents, and facilitating invoice approvals. These platforms accelerate repair processes while maintaining transparency and reliability.
Easy and engaging waste sorting
User-friendly waste management improves both convenience for residents and efficiency for building operators. Binit brings smart recycling into homes with a kitchen-mounted device that scans and categorizes waste, offering real-time feedback and personalized insights via an app to encourage better habits while easing management oversight. This reduces errors and prevents conflicts between residents and building staff over incorrect sorting. Lemon Tri deploys smart recycling vending machines in communal spaces, using sensors and barcode scanners to identify and sort beverage packaging accurately.
On a neighborhood scale, Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm combines front-of-building bins, vacuum collection, recycling rooms, and hazard-specific points, making disposal intuitive for residents and simplifying logistics for operators.
Reducing consumption of water, energy and heating
Smart building information systems turn data into everyday savings—reducing costs for residents while improving comfort and giving promoters better control over building performance. Sapient Industries reduces energy waste by analyzing usage through smart plugs, optimizing device consumption, monitoring equipment, and even tracking space utilization. EGreen combines behavioral science with data analysis to promote eco-friendly actions through energy monitoring, sustainability challenges, coaching, and gamified experiences, helping residents save up to 20% on bills. Viboo leverages machine-learning thermostats to predict heating needs, improving efficiency by 20–40% and enhancing comfort. Luniwave encourages water-saving shower habits by providing real-time monitoring and consumption feedback, cutting water usage by up to 30%.
For promoters, the priority is not technology for its own sake—it is reliability, smooth execution, and long-term value creation. The tools presented here each solve a specific friction point: visualising projects earlier, coordinating works more accurately, simplifying rental and transactional processes, managing operations more efficiently, and delivering a modern, intuitive user experience once the building is occupied.
By integrating the right solutions at the right stage, promoters gain more control, improve the quality of delivery, and create buildings that are easier to manage and more attractive to residents. The competitive advantage no longer lies only in the architecture or the location, but in the overall journey the promoter is able to shape—from the first project sketch to the daily life inside the building.