What will real estate look like in 50 years?
Here’s an interview I had recently with Caroline James of RealEstate.com.au on the future of real estate:
Imagine building your dream home in a day and buying it with no cash. Welcome to world of real estate circa 2064.
Here’s a futuristic sneak peak of how we might be finding, buying and making homes:
Hello Saturday sleep-ins
Fifty years from now, jostling with 100 other buyers at weekend open houses will be, well, a thing of the past.
Oculus Rift (a virtual reality headset) and Google Glass (a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display) will make 3D VR inspections of prospective homes the norm.
“The rise of mobile cloud enabled devices will come to the fore and we’ll see a slew of wearable devices including … 3D displays seen inside the lens of non-prescription spectacles,” says futurist Morris Miselowski.
Tech head agents
Tomorrow’s property brokers won’t be sales agents – they will be “ambassadors”, Miselowski says.
They will help buyers import images of their furniture to visualisations of listed properties to “make sure it fits” before signing contracts.
And if the home is not yet built, developers can help buyers digitally customise off-the-plan designs.
“Someone will come into a real estate agency in 2050, share information about what they want from their next home and the ambassador will make contact with their digital warehouse and bring that buyer into their cyberspace to collaboratively navigate the purchase process.”
“Tomorrow’s property brokers won’t be sales agents – they’ll be ambassadors.”
Goodbye cash deposits
Let’s face it: nobody walks into an agency and slaps down a wad of notes anymore. Cash is so 20th century.
But while digital money transfer is standard practice in 2014, by 2064 crypto-currencies – exchanged peer-to-peer without intermediary – will be the everyday way to trade houses.
Sydney’s Forsyth Real Estate recently made headlines when it started accepting virtual currency bitcoin for house deposits.
Read more: Sydney agent takes a bite of Bitcoin
“The fact is we don’t have much cash floating around today already and this conversation about digital currency will continue well into the future,” Miselowski says.
“The whole process will become more fluid done in a few seconds, none of this sending off for title deeds as all stakeholders will electronically put out their hands for their parts of the (purchase) pie.”
Next-gen home printers
Fed-up with that dated early 21st century kids room?
By mid-century you may use a home printer to churn out a new extension, according to latest news.
The University of Southern California is currently testing a giant 3D printer that could be used to build a whole house in less than 24 hours.
Read more: 3D printed houses – is this the future?
Charles Brass from Futures Foundation reports USC Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has designed a robot that replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, which squirts concrete and can build a home according to a computer pattern.
The technology, Contour Crafting, could revolutionise the construction industry. It will enable production of bespoke houses on demand.
But tradespeople need not be alarmed. “Robots will certainly do a lot more manual mundane work, but we will still need humans for the craft of building homes,” Miselowski says. “It will not be like the sci-fi of our youth.”’
