MIT Break Through Tech List Highlights Tech Changing the Real Estate Space

Written By: Turner Levison

Smart cities. Artificial - Intelligence for the masses. Neutral networks. These are just some of the technologies poised to become breakthroughs, shaping and transforming the future of tomorrow’s real estate landscape and having a profound impact on our lives. With that in mind, MIT Technology Review recently published its 18th annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, showcasing some of the technologies primed to become mainstays in our lives. While future generations may regard these trends as the norm, they are truly on the cutting edge of today’s technology. Here are some of the technologies that MIT predicts will change the real estate space.

SMART CITIES - Smart cities are just what they sound like — communities, cities, and municipalities that use information technology and communications technology to improve their operational efficiencies. Information is easily shared with the citizens, improving the quality of both government services and the welfare of the public.

This, in and of itself, sounds like an idyllic goal, but can the idea be efficiently put into place? While many of these smart or sensing communities have failed or have run into hurdle after hurdle, slowing their development, some have taken off and are growing and thriving. Let’s take a closer look at the city of Toronto, the epicenter of what can be considered today’s initiative of a digital city. Toronto boasts a neighborhood community known as Quayside, a city that is being completely rebuilt, being developed from the bottom to the top utilizing the latest technologies. Everything from city design, technology and policies will be built using information gathered from a large network of sensors — things such as measuring noise levels, air quality, activities of the public, and more. The plan set forth for the cities calls for all cars and automobiles to be shared and autonomous. And, taking it even one step further, robots will manage many of the tedious tasks, performing basic day to day operations such as delivering the mail. MIT predicts that technology will further build on their capabilities, comparing the robots to mobile phones that have the ability to have multiple apps and programs overlayed on top of their basic functions and processes.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR EVERYONE - To date, artificial intelligence, or AI, has been the workings of cutting edge startups or massive tech companies, such as Google, Amazon, and the likes. For most other companies and industries, these technologies are simply too expensive to implement or difficult to learn. So how, then, is it expected that artificial intelligence will be brought to the masses? Today, cloud-based machine learning tools are bringing artificial intelligence to a much wider base, setting the bar for tomorrow’s technologies today.

DUELING NEUTRAL NETWORKS While it’s no secret that today’s artificial intelligence is great at deciphering existing information, such as determining which of a series of existing images contains a picture of a storefront, it can easily be stumped when it comes to generating new, original content on its own. So what can be done? Enter dueling neutral networks.

If the idea sounds complex, that’s because it is. First occurring to Ian Goodfellow, at the University of Montreal, this approach is known as a GAN, or generative adversarial network. The two neutral networks are pitted against each other, one known as the generator and one known as the discriminator. These two networks are pitted against each other, almost in a game of trying to outsmart the other. This technology is, without a doubt, one of the most promising advances in AI within the past several years.

ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE TAKE THE NEXT STEP

While the previous technologies may sound and feel like distant technologies that do not immediately affect our daily lives, many technologies that shape the future of the real estate space and also our everyday lives are already having advances that will simplify and manage our businesses in more productive ways. Companies like CommissionTrac (www.commissiontrac.com), Delius (https://dealius.com), BrokerSumo (www.brokersumo.com), and Brokermint (www.brokermint.com) have all automated, to some degree, the broker pipeline and deal transaction adding transparency and efficiency to back office broker operations.