What’s on the mind of Technology Committee members

From PropTech and smart buildings to the adoption of AI across the investment lifecycle, recent INREV Technology Committee discussions have highlighted a broad range of important themes shaping the real estate investment industry. We asked two technology experts from the committee to share what they see as the most pressing topics and where they believe the real opportunities lie.

From tools to transformation: technology is no longer a side conversation

Question #1: Looking at recent industry developments, what technology themes are top of mind for you right now?

For Shreya Sheth, Director of real estate technology at PATRIZIA, the shift is structural:

“Technology has moved from being adjacent to the business to sitting inside the investment engine itself.”

Three themes stand out for her: 

• Data moving up the value chain, from operational reporting to informing underwriting and portfolio strategy
• The convergence of sustainability and technology, driven by regulation such as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD)
• Integration across the lifecycle, where the biggest inefficiencies sit between development, asset management, sustainability, and reporting, and where technology that connects these workflows will create real value.

Robbert Heekelaar, Vice President of Architecture & Emerging Technologies at Prologis, echoes the maturity shift. "It's no longer about pilots, it's more about: does this scale, and does it create value?" 

For Prologis, this means building a connected data layer across buildings, where sensors and asset mapping serve as the foundation for understanding and ultimately controlling building performance.

The opportunity: from insight to action

Question #2: Where do you see the biggest opportunity for value creation in PropTech today?

Both experts pointed to the same central challenge in PropTech value creation: the gap between visibility and action. 

"Most PropTech still stops at dashboards. That's not value, that's visibility," says Robbert. "Value comes when data drives automated decisions."

For Shreya, the opportunity lies in embedding technology directly into asset performance strategies – translating data into specific operational actions, aligning those actions with asset business plans, and scaling them consistently across portfolios. Energy optimisation, predictive maintenance, and occupier experience are not new concepts, but when systematically applied, they can materially impact NOI and asset liquidity. "Technology is now expected to perform and not just support," she says.

What has changed is context. With tighter market conditions, higher cost of capital, and increasing regulatory pressure, the firms that succeed will be those that treat PropTech as a core lever of value creation rather than an overlay.

Smart buildings: the execution gap

Question #3: Where do you see the biggest gap between ambition and reality when it comes to smart buildings?

Shreya points to fragmented ownership as the core problem: 

"Smart buildings sit across too many functions and rarely have a single owner, so the core issue is vertical and horizontal integration. Without alignment across development, portfolio and asset management, sustainability and IT, the progress stalls or fragments."

Robbert agrees: “Smart buildings sit everywhere and therefore nowhere if you don’t organise it well.” He adds a less discussed but very practical dimension: the operational burden of IoT at scale. "Once you deploy IoT, you have to operate it. Sensors need monitoring, batteries fail, connectivity drops, and someone has to go on-site to fix it. For many real estate teams, this is a completely new operational layer that didn’t exist before, and it can quickly become a bottleneck if not designed properly." 

AI: the last layer, not the first

Question #4: AI is part of the conversation, but not in isolation. Where do you see AI adding the most value across the investment lifecycle?

On AI, both experts see clear use cases across the investment lifecycle: document parsing and faster underwriting at acquisition, energy and operations optimisation in asset management, and more efficient sustainability reporting. But the value depends entirely on what sits underneath.

"AI is not the starting point. It's the last layer," says Robbert. "If the data foundation is weak, AI won't deliver." 

Shreya agrees, arguing that the most practical approach is to focus on specific, well-defined use cases and build from there, rather than applying AI too broadly.

Question #5: When you look across PropTech, data and AI together, are firms focusing on the right priorities? 

Looking ahead to the next 12 months, both urge the industry to shift from experimenting to scaling. Getting data foundations right, ensuring systems integrate, and embedding outputs into day-to-day asset management are the priorities.

For Shreya, it comes down to one test. “If technology isn’t influencing asset performance, it’s still peripheral.” 

As Robbert puts it simply, "We should stop collecting data and start using it."

Want to find out more about PropTech and smart buildings? Explore the INREV Technology page for more resources.