Financial benefits for the real estate sector by using technologies of AEC industry

A wide range of partition forms the real estate sector, such as asset management, investment management, property management, or facility management. A main objective in real estate sector is the allocation of housing and gaining benefits in dealing with properties. The real estate industry is comparable to automotive industry, architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, or logistic industry. In all of these types of industries, digitalization gains high importance. Comparing digitalization technologies from various industries it can be shown that these technologies are used heterogeneously. A widely used digital technology in AEC industry is the method of building information modeling (BIM). A building information model is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility, serving as a shared knowledge resource for decision making during the life cycle of a building. A reason for using BIM is a saving of time resources, of human capacities, and of money. The financial benefits for the real estate industry by using BIM are especially considerable in facility management. By an early integration of a real estate maintenance phase into planning phase and construction phase, reinvestments necessary caused by suboptimal planning are avoidable. BIM integrates real estate-relevant data for all kind of the sector participants. Digital tools of the AEC industry can be used for marketing and distribution (e.g. analysis of building proposals, performing simulations, or benchmarking performances) and for decreasing maintenance costs (e.g. by controlling whole life costs and environmental data). Several case studies have shown that by using BM for the real estate sector, up to 40% of costs can be eliminated. Furthermore, time taken to generate cost estimations can be reduced by up to 80%. Moreover, savings of up to 10% of the contract values through clash detections and a reduction in project time up to 7% are the benefits of using BIM for the real estate sector. The case studies focused on savings of the facility management industry. A cost elimination and a rise in benefits will occur while implementing AEC digitalization tools to asset management, investment management, and property management as well. The objective of this paper is an investigation of already existing digitalization tools in the real estate sector, comparing and evaluating these tools with the digital method of BIM. This paper assesses the portability of the outcome of these studies for the European real estate industry of today.