Date: Tue 21st June, 2011
Venue: 7th Floor, 4 Piccadilly Place, Manchester
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At Insider's Property ICT breakfast event held in June at Piccadilly Place in Manchester city centre, there emerged a whole range of reasons and examples of how the application of new technology is actually starting to transform the property industry.
The panel, hand picked for their unique and diverse experiences of using new technology had some differences of opinion and emphasis on a number of issues.
How buildings can be smarter to use energy better was foremost on the agenda for Ivan McEveer, a director of WEMS, an energy management company said: "Energy costs have risen by 25 per cent in the last three years and government legislation is set to increase carbon tax for UK businesses. With these macro economics working against UK businesses, the only viable solution is to reduce energy usage.
"Currently, 80 per cent of all buildings in the UK have no energy management systems in place. The most cost-effective way to deal with this is by retro-fitting a wireless system, because it causes little disruption to the fabric of the building, it is faster to implement and it's much cheaper than conventional wired systems."
On the subject of how the property professionals could and should embrace platforms such as social media, Paul Marples from Costar was very much in the sceptical camp. He was surprised to see such a sea of hands when event chair Neil Tague asked the Twitter users to identify themselves.
"There has not been a great adoption of social media by the property intermediary community. They are gregarious networkers but my hunch is there is very little use of social media. It may be cheap and provide a route to market, but it does take up a lot of time."
He did say however, that there was now so much data available and so much information, that being able to aggregate, analyse and give it back is so important.
Panellists included:Jeremy Gray, senior product manager, Daisy Communciations
Paul Marples, UK managing director, Costar
Rob Charlton, chief executive, Space Group
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