Immersive marketplace for the European real estate sector

Project Information

IMMERSION

Grant agreement ID: 885492

DOI

10.3030/885492

Project closed

EC signature date 27 November 2019

Start date 1 December 2019

End date 31 March 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

NUMERI PLAN
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IMMERSION (Immersive marketplace for the European real estate sector)

Reporting period: 2019-12-01 to 2020-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Most actors of the Real Estate market express frustration in their day to day experiences.

Individual investors who look to buy or rent a property have to rely on lengthy face to face processes. While certain virtual tours exist, those generally differ from reality, do not allow interaction and require moving to developer´s facilities. Clients who want to renovate their assets struggle to find reliable contractors, cannot properly assess the scope of the needed work and feel they cannot take informed decisions.
On their side, professionals from the building industry (builders, electricians, plumbers,…) have difficulties to promote their services and suffer from a lack of quality. Such professionals generally have to work with incomplete or inaccurate information, which complicate interaction with other professionals.
Providers of interior design products and services feel they cannot advertise their services to the right audience and that many advertising actions are inefficient.
Finally, real estate developers have difficulties to reach the right target audience and have trouble in selling “off the plan” projects as users and investors do not trust in mock ups.
Finally, public entities struggle to implement their energy efficiency programs, as they lack data on the residential housing market and have no effective communication channels with the real estate market.

In this context, our innovation proposes an online real estate community centered on 3D visualization and the increase use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) to serve all actors´ needs.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Since the beginning of the project, we have been working on technical, commercial and financial aspects.

On the technical side, we have designed a technical roadmap, identified associated risks, costs and defined planning.
In particular, we analysed in details the needs and interactions of each of our target group. Attending such needs, we defined the structure of the platform and the different technological modules that should support such structure. Finally, we made a gap analysis, identifying all the requested actions in order to bring each module to TRL8. Such gap analysis allowed us to design our technological roadmap, plan costs and identify technological risks.

On the commercial side, we analysed the real estate market, with deep dives on building industry (Sanitary, heating, plumbering industries; electrical contracting, building materials); arquitectural & design sector (arquitecture, interior design, furniture & accessories). Such analysis allowed us to identify our priority markets: France, Germany, United Kingdom, Netherland, Spain and Belgium. We could also fine tune our market risk analysis.

On the financial side, we could confirm our projections after having validated our technological and market assumptions

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Real Estate market has many technological issues.

In particular, 3D virtual reality applied in the real estate sector offers frustrating experience.
3D devices are only accessible in very few locations; experiences do not accurately reflect reality while users cannot interact with the virtual environment.
Our project will allow users to get access to 3D virtual tours from home, interacting with spaces and objects based on accurate plans. Such technology will have many positive impacts: users will be more comfortable while dealing with the real estate sector, developers will increase off the plan sales, while providers of interior design services & products will be able to advertise efficiently.

Real Estate and building sector currently lack of homologation and coordination as there is very little format integration. Our project will promote the use of BIM (Building Information Modeling), putting it at the center of our collaborative digital platform for the real estate sector. In particular, we will promote all the new technologies allowing digitalizing plans or assets in BIM. Such promotion will have many positive impacts as well: professionals (e.g. plumbers, electricians, …) will be able to work in a collaborative manner, diminishing non quality errors. At the same time, public entities (e.g. social landlords, states, …) will be able to have a clear view on the residential housing sector and will be therefore able to plan adequate actions.

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