Enabling digitalisation for the real estate industry
How many articles, reports and posts have you read about the death of the office market after the pandemic? Many have developed their fortune-tellers and put their finger in the air to provide the analysis of how the office market will continue to live on. Here is not another analysis, here is a reflection on why digitalisation does not necessarily have to be a threat to the real estate industry.
The need for a physical place
Several players have taken the bold step of taking a relatively traditional industry such as healthcare and making it digital through care apps - for many it is not news. The innovative development has made healthcare available to many and with the aim of partly creating an extra channel to reduce the burden on other health centers and emergency rooms.
What could previously be seen as an impending threat to the physical healthcare clinic and thus the local and office market, seems to have just the opposite effect. One might have thought that the care apps would mean that we are only "in the cloud" and at a distance, but in fact we have recently seen that more and more of these digital healthcare players have established themselves in physical premises.
Most recently, the company Kry is the first in Sweden to go from a care app to setting up a physical BVC clinic (in the suitable health-sounding Curantenhuset), which we can read about in Middle of. Something that is interesting is that they in the article say that their patients have requested a physical location as a complement to the care app. We can also see this trend in other industries, such as Foodora and its 4 darkstores in Sweden.
Human nature to meet
The reconnaissance is interesting and makes me not so unwittingly think about whether humans will always have a need to be able to meet and visit physical places, despite the digital development we will continue to have.
"If we look at how humans have isolated themselves in the past year, it is perhaps not so uncommon to think about whether it is in human nature to meet physically and thus have an effect on the office and premises market?"
It may be that some industries will not be able to afford offices and premises, while others requires, needs and props on physical places? Will we be able to see a new market in the future, where new digital players establish themselves physically?
As I said, I am not sitting on a fortune teller, others can do it, but it will be interesting to look back and see where we have ended up in 5, 10 and 15 years. What do you think?