Elevating New Zealand’s Real Estate

The conversation shone a light on why digital resilience is becoming so critical for occupiers. Teresa stated that buildings with the right digital infrastructure  – with diverse (physically distinct fiber pathways/ducts), redundancies, and with sufficient capacity for new fibers – are ‘table stakes’ for One NZ to enable them to provide the sort of user experiences they want to offer their employees.

Nicolas added that more robust occupier digital requirements are now hitting the market – including requests for integrating occupier and landlord systems and data sharing – pushing owners and developers to respond. After all, data is the new oil, and occupiers want to make sure they can get their hands on it to manage their real estate portfolios effectively.

But when it comes to valuations, are digitally resilient buildings worth more? Todd felt the simple answer here was “No…. not yet”. Yet using the green building movement as a spirit animal, where the ‘brown discount’ is certainly starting to impact building valuations globally, it’s easy to see a world emerging where assets that do not have the digital resiliency required to support occupiers face discounts.

The biggest takeaway from the discussion was that the opportunity for New Zealand asset owners to respond is massive. Physical resilience is already a pressing issue given the seismic risks in this part of the world. Extending the resiliency focus to the digital infrastructure of the building is surely the obvious next step in the journey to future-proofing these buildings.

When we zoom out and consider the WiredScore mission – to make the world’s buildings smarter and better connected – it feels like now is the perfect time for us to collaborate with New Zealand’s owners to tackle the quest for digital resilience and tech-enabled assets together. Our initial launch partners, Auckland Real Estate and Centuria, have committed to providing best-in-class digitally connected and smart-enabled buildings, and we’re excited to collaborate with more owners to support them in understanding, improving and promoting their assets.

With our 6 Accredited Professional Partner organizations onboard (Aecom, Beca, CBRE, JLL, NDY and Stantec), I look forward to supporting the New Zealand real estate community in navigating the journey ahead.

New Zealand is well practiced in ‘punching above its weight’. With a population of just 5 million, they continue to compete at the top level across the spectrum, from their obvious prowess on the rugby pitch to one of the leading global agricultural industries.  Whilst I have no evidence-based research to support my hypothesis, I think it’s the deep sense of community that helps drive this outperformance. Every meeting you leave is followed by an introduction to someone new or an invitation to something you should join. There’s a clear appetite to collaborate to push the whole industry forward. And I’m very excited to have joined that community, to play my part in helping New Zealand’s real estate market flourish.