The Future of building

We’re often asked “what’s the future of building look like”.

It depends on what you mean by future but, for the sake of the conversation, let’s assume we’re talking about the next 10 years.

In that time it’s unlikely to comprise widespread use of robotics, drones and printed houses. Not that all of them aren’t exciting, and have a firm role in the future of building, but not that soon.

From everything we’ve researched and from everything we’re seeing happen day to day, we think we’re in a pretty good position to assess what’s coming and we think transformation in building is going to be far more granular, because it really needs to be.

Fact of the matter is building, home building in particular, has changed very little since WWII (believe it or not, but true). Due to that alone, the transformation to occur in building is largely about playing catch up. Catch up in a space where the single greatest commodity is time and, in building, time is wasted too much too often.

The single greatest transformation coming, and it is because clients of builders are rightly and reasonably expecting it, is that the main protagonists in building still spend an average 2 to 2.5 hours per day (EVERY DAY!) just talking on the phone to issue directives and instructions, and not using it smartly to optimise project communications and collaboration, or to build a verifiable flow and resource of project data.

That imperative alone is big enough to ensure that the future of building becomes smarter, more visible and verifiable project management, all remotely capable. But, add to that the fact that builders, or their project teams, will on average visit a building supply or hardware outlet to buy something which they simply failed to plan for, on average 5 times a day.

And in terms of “ecosystem”, any SME builder or home renovator (by default) has no access to a procurement solution or to the advantages that can bring, let alone to enjoy the convenience and cost savings that can come from a holistic integrated building supply chain initiative.

These are compelling issues, which are made all the more confronting when you realise that building has seen the worst productivity growth performance of any sector of industry, and for the past 20 years too, year on year.

So the challenge is that the long game in the future of building is brimming with loads and loads of little games. We’re talking about the single largest sector of industry on Earth, and yet it acts and operates like it’s still the 1950s (not at all a criticism, but sadly a fact).

We’ve been working in and researching this space for years and the pain points and friction points in it are myriad. And that complexity is made all the more challenging because most operators in this sector are technology laggards, if not luddites (that’s by their own admission, we’re not being sarcastic!).

But anything which changes behaviour and enables people, generates resistance.

How we overcome that resistance is crucial, so the scope of pain points and friction points we address is fundamental to doing so, and that there is the future. Enablement, but not just bits of it, it has to be about the entire building ecosystem.

I’ve long said that what we are bringing to life is a three-legged stool (our business model that is), comprised of a suite of workflow tools, a network and a marketplace. I later discovered that this is actually what’s known as a market network.

Each of these things can each exist independently of the other, but together the whole is so much more valuable than the sum of the parts and by the nature of the sector, this integration, this accessibility, this enablement is what’s needed and that’s the immediate future of building.

Workflow tools are, frankly, a dime a dozen. Mobile-first cloud-based workflow tools (call them project management tools if you like) are nowhere near as prevalent, in fact, most which hold themselves out as being Apps are little more than mobile optimised, and that’s band-aid at best.

But mobile-first cloud-based workflow tools wedded to an integrated marketplace, for all project requisites and inputs, together with a network, in other words the entire built environment ecosystem, that’s transformative.

Fact, the vast majority of technology in building is enterprise based, and that’s interesting (if not scary) when you think that the vast majority of builders, renovators, trades and sub-contractors are SMEs (or consumers), and therefore anything which doesn’t enable them remotely is largely useless.

So the vast majority of the industry is being overlooked, so that’s where the future, where all the transformation, needs to exist.

So the future of building, at least for the next 10 years and for the masses, not just the enterprise end of it, is all about an entirely remotely enabled ecosystem and one where all the stakeholders are engaged with it and where the reliance on using telephones (smartphones being used un-smartly, if you like) is made redundant.

An entirely integrated ecosystem for one of the most un-necessarily complex sectors of industry on Earth, that’s the future of building and it’s precisely what the industry at large and all of its stakeholders, consumers and clients need so desperately (before all the robots and multi-storey printers take over).

© Tony Huxley, Trabr Limited 2021