Smart living is not a luxury
Why digitization is making inner cities emptier
07/12/2023, 10:00 a.m
Smart energy management in the home, houses with their own operating systems, sensors that send the health data of the residents directly to the health insurance company and doctor: real estate expert Andreas Pfnür is certain that digitization will not work in the future.
For Andreas Pfnür, we are witnessing a remarkable development: inner cities are emptying and people are willing to invest a lot of money in smart living. “People are going outside the city gates again. That doesn’t mean that you really go into the countryside. But at least into the suburbs,” says Pfnür.
Andreas Pfnür is a professor for real estate management at the TU Darmstadt.
(Photo: Tomchuk, TU Darmstadt)
For the professor of real estate management at the Technical University of Darmstadt, the digitization of living is not just a nice extra, but an urgent necessity. “Houses react. In other words, living reacts to the digitization of living and working conditions,” explains Pfnür.
In a study he produced, it becomes clear that there are signs of a decline in demand for residential real estate in inner cities. The digitization of living space strengthens outskirts and living space in the countryside. More than half of those surveyed see an urgent need for the digitization of living space in order to maintain the value of the property.
75 percent of those surveyed are willing to spend almost 17 percent of their investments on digital technologies. Pfnür believes that we have to hurry, because digitization is not just a fad, but an “operational necessity”. The development is a challenge for the construction industry. “The industry has never known that before and it’s actually like stepping onto the moon,” he explains.
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