Real estate development in the United States has long been driven by the qualitative: by rules of thumb, insider knowledge, and the gut instinct of risk-taking developers. All that is changing in the age of “big data”. Real estate sales data, amounting to hundreds of millions of data points each year, is inducing a paradigm shift in construction and development comparable to that currently sweeping the sciences. This avalanche of numbers has made the fortunes of tech giants such as Zillow and Redfin, and is reorienting present practice in the development industry towards computational methods. Design and construction teams are following suit, using real estate sales data as the basis for optimizing building characteristics.
This presentation will explore the rise of “big data” in the real estate development and construction industries; will examine the ways in which this data is being put to use by investors, developers, construction companies and design teams today; and will survey the emerging field of “prop tech”: the loose network of research labs, startups, coders, and entrepreneurial academics searching for innovative uses for this new source of information.
Tommy Shay Hill is an urban planning scholar and PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a Masters in Urban Planning from Harvard and a B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia University. Tommy’s current research focuses on the use and misuse of “big data” for the built environment; “smart city” technologies; and the history, theory and practice of urban simulation. Tommy’s professional background is in data analytics for the construction and real estate development industry in New York City. Tommy’s work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Environmental Research Letters, and Metropole.
About Staging Construction
Staging Construction is an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M&A (CCMA).