Smart Spaces Recap: Insurance, Energy, and "4 Lenses of the Market"

Check out the recap from some of our session at Parks Associates inaugural event Smart Spaces: Apartments, Hospitality, and Community Living. Thank you to our event sponsors Arize , Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), Rapid Response Monitoring , Nimbio , Cox Communities , Cox Communications , ADT Multifamily , Nice Group , Vantiva ,? Xfinity Communities ,? Homebase , Aquana ,? Eleven Software , LiftMaster , 凯易讯 , Cooktop Safety Corp. (CTS) , and EVPassport .

Take a glimpse into our Smart Spaces panel, Insurance and Building Tech, highlighted by?Aquana, where industry experts discuss the impact of proptech on insurance and MDUs. ??????

New tech solutions can reduce risks from theft and losses or damage from inclement weather or malfunctioning equipment. The extent of these use cases depends on the equipment and levels of integration, but they offer a variety of opportunities to secure the property. While the main benefit is mitigation from loss, some insurance companies are starting to offer discounts for smart solutions, notably in the single-family housing sector.

???? INDUSTRY INSIGHTS ???? FROM THE IN PERSON SESSION?

Ken Deering, CEO,?iGuard Home Solutions Inc:

?A lot of companies are starting to become aware of the fact that technology can provide real value.

?Once three companies used our product in senior and independent living, we started to see the rest follow. Being able to market safety and security is essential.

?One of the biggest problems we worked on solving was becoming part of the larger smart technology ecosystem.

Jeff Morrison, Vice President,?Aquana?Water Protection Systems:

?What’s happened in multifamily is that there’s been a false sense of security with surface-level leak detectors that require users to turn off their system manually and immediately. It’s human nature to lack urgency about the problem unless there was a recent issue with damage.

Dustin Orr, MBA, General Manager,?ZoJacks?Flood Prevention Systems:

?Insurance is extremely high in the construction phase of development. We’re being implemented in the construction phase to reduce the cost of insurance premiums dramatically.

?One of the biggest barriers is that people are not interested in flood prevention until after it happens.

A glimpse into our Smart Spaces panel , Energy Management and Indoor Air Quality: Healthy Environments, where experts discuss the implementation of new tech related to energy management and healthy air solutions.

?? INDUSTRY INSIGHTS ??

Joel Berntsen, MBA, Vice President, Channels & Partnerships,?Vutility:

?What we’re trying to do is collect data that wouldn’t have previously been available and try to present that in a context that someone can take action on.

Michael D. Ham, Co-Founder & President,?RePure:

?If you want to mitigate against risk, you need monitoring and numbers to manage air quality. It’s not just an issue for other countries; it’s important in the US as well. We have to ensure our air quality is in the green zone through monitoring.

?Air quality is something in the value chain that developers can look at to raise the value of your property and offer as a key health feature to residents.

?Social good is about community empowerment. Community is very tied to health.

Jeff Hendler, CEO,?Logical Buildings:

?We are able to transform buildings into a virtual power plant. We can bring a building to life really quickly and translate smart technology into revenue.

?There is value not only in savings but also in well-being.

?Providing gamification to residents helps educate the community on energy management and demand response. In one of our projects using gamification, we were able to reduce energy by 30% and have an ice cream party. We were able to be successful in terms of helping the environment while also having community engagement.

?A real conversation happening now is that people consider EV charging a decision maker before leasing – even when they don’t currently own one, but intend to in the next 1-2 years.

Adam Miller, VP, Microgrids,?Sunnova Energy:

?Virtual microgrids working with utilities improves ROI and delivers savings to residents themselves.

?We back our projects for 25 years. It’s covered, monitored, and surveilled. We need to bring projects together to make more adaptive communities.

?A greater sense of community occurs when you have distributed energy resources on site that you can share with your neighbors.

Mary Nitschke, Vice President of Sustainability,?RealPage, Inc.:

?It’s not just data for the sake of data; it has to tell a story.

?What really matters to people is taking this air quality and energy and converting it into the metrics of their carbon footprint. Taking that information and toggling the data between different personas is critical.

?If you don’t have visibility to energy usage in each unit, you’re in darkness.

?You have to be able to balance out the smart grid. When creating technology and making decisions for the future, it’s necessary to keep the grid in mind.

Check out the recap from our Keynote Speaker Robert Grosz from the in person session - “This is my very first Parks Associates conference, and it’s a great one. It’s focused on the right thing.” ??????

Robert Grosz, President of?World Cinema, ditches the stage for his keynote at Smart Spaces this afternoon to dive straight into the understanding of opportunities and challenges associated with property technology deployment, and practical strategies for integrating these technologies into their operations to drive success.

The 4 lenses of the market to reflect on:

??Owner (buyer or seller)

??Investor, Capital Markets, or CFO

??Property Operator

??Resident

“Everything is just a math problem, but people are very important in that equation. You can’t make a person a number. People are happy when they get what they want, and what they want is technology.”

“There are a lot of new people in this industry. There are going to be failures. Investments can stop. And we have to be prepared for that.”

“Not all multifamily is created equal. There’s going to be a hotel-ification of certain segments of multifamily. Student housing has the most solid network in terms of design and deployment.”

I will be posting more summaries of what happened at Smart Spaces - The event focuses on the role of technology in MDU environments, especially the impact of connectivity, smart home technologies, and services.

If you haven't attended one of our events, consider our 27th annual CONNECTIONS Conference, co-located with our Connected Health Summit, where you will be surrounded by the technology leaders building our past, present, and future.

For more information on Parks Associates events or research, contact Ashton Gambrell .

#leaders #businessmodels #innovation #startup #broadband #business #life #home #apartments #builders #investments #smarthome #health #flood?#fire?#insurance?#proptech?#multidwelling?#mdu?#SmartSpaces23