Leapfrog technology in Africa must serve as a reference for the real estate industry

By 2022, sub-Saharan Africa will have nearly 1 billion mobile phones – enough for the vast majority of the projected 1.2 billion people who live there. By going straight to mobile, many African nations will be able to skip the step of building extensive and expensive landline infrastructure. Development experts call this an example of a "leapfrog technology." A phenomenon can be seen in today's real estate industry too.

The real estate industry, a sector that alone stands for a staggering 40% of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, is looking for techniques to reduce energy consumption, cut emissions and create better indoor conditions. And here is where the new approach should be of interest.

If Sub-Saharan Africa could leapfrog straight to mobile phones and mobile internet, the real estate should go direct for new available Artificial Intelligence solutions for optimizing their portfolios. Instead of investing time and resources in updating traditional "control room" systems for just reporting and visualization.

African companies like Safaricom, MTN, and others did not reinvent the wheel. Instead, they used all the best available ideas and technologies to support this - from app developers, device manufacturers, telco vendors, and software players like Facebook. Similarly, the real estate industry does not need to build their teams, develop their software, define another software architecture, or spend millions on reinventing the wheel to analyze and visualize the exploding amount of data. Solutions to cut emissions, save energy, guarantee indoor climate are already there, ready to be adopted.

AI and other digital solutions will enable the real estate industry to meet its challenges.

By utilizing AI solutions to diagnose and perform real-time optimization of a building's HVAC and energy system, building owners can start reducing their energy consumption within weeks without investing in new hardware systems or infrastructure. Instead, extend the lifetime of their current systems.

The result is instant. When AI is implemented in a regular office or public building, we see a reduction of energy consumption and carbon footprint by 20-30%. And since the maintenance organization no longer must manually look for faults, manual inspection work is reduced by 50%. All this allows organizations to switch to more predictive ways of working.

Additionally, the mobile revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa also pawed the way for new mobile-based payment systems and micropayment solutions resulting in new possibilities and progress in the region. Modern AI solutions offered as SaaS can also revolutionize real estate: no need for upfront investments, net open savings from day one.

The real estate industry should embrace the leapfrog approach and start utilizing the possibilities that new technologies can bring to their existing buildings — enabling them to become intelligent and self-optimizing, flexible and predictive, and sustainable. Today.