Kylie Davis: (00:02)

Welcome to The Proptech Podcast. It's Kylie Davis here, and I'm delighted to be your host as we explore the brave new world where technology and real estate collide. I passionately believe we need to create and grow a sense of community between the innovators and real estate agents, and sharing our stories is a great way to do that. Now, the aim of each episode is to introduce listeners to a prop-tech innovator who is pushing the boundaries of what's possible and to explore the issues and challenges raised by the tech and how they can create amazing property experiences.

Kylie Davis: (00:34)

This week, a really interesting conversation about commercial property data and the move by the CSIRO to create a commonly-owned commercial data lake. My guest is Caoimhin Ardren, the Managing Director of DeltaQ, the energy management and efficiency consultants who are the originators of the commercial building energy rating scheme, NABERS. Now, if you're in commercial property, everyone knows the NABERS scheme. Now, Caoimhin has an intensive background in energy efficiency and consulting. And in this interview, he and I discuss the back story to the NABERS programme, its successes, and how the model is now being used for an exciting new project with CSIRO to create a commercial property data lake. In the interview, we discuss how a commercial property data lake could power further innovation across commercial property while also creating the foundations for smart building rating system. It's a little bit geeky, but it's very exciting stuff. So here to explain more, Caoimhin Ardren. Welcome to The Proptech Podcast.

Caoimhin Ardren: (01:38)

Thank you, Kylie.

Kylie Davis: (01:39)

It's great to have you here. Now, Caoimhin, we're going to have a conversation that's a little bit different to the typical way that we do the podcast interviews, because we're going to talk about this issue of smart buildings in Australia and some of the things that are needed to make that happen. But let's kick off by talking about you and your background. You're one of the founders of DeltaQ. What's DeltaQ?

Caoimhin Ardren: (02:06)

Thanks, Kylie. DeltaQ is a energy efficiency, energy renewable consultancy. We work on the client side of projects, helping them to identify energy efficiency opportunities, helping them deploy those, and spending a fair bit of our time working with clients, particularly with their controls contractors, to implement controls that are going to make the buildings operate as optimally as possible.

Kylie Davis: (02:37)

Right. Okay. I understand that DeltaQ was heavily involved in the creation and the development of the NABERS scheme. So tell us what NABERS is.

Caoimhin Ardren: (02:47)

That's correct. NABERS is a acronym for National Australian Built Environment Rating Scheme. NABERS is a rating scheme which measures building's performance in operation. So this is not a design rating, which is done before the building is built, but is actually created or it's assessed from the day-to-day operations of a building. NABERS covers both energy, water, indoor environment quality, and waste. So there's four different ratings you can get for buildings. In fact, these days we also now have a NABERS carbon neutral rating.

Kylie Davis: (03:32)

Right.

Caoimhin Ardren: (03:33)

NABERS covers baselines for commercial office buildings, for shopping centres or hotels, hospitals, gala centres. And at the moment, they're working through a series of another eight different building sectors to create NABERS ratings for those areas and sectors.

Kylie Davis: (03:54)

Right. So we don't have them for residential, do we? It's just for the commercial end of town?

Caoimhin Ardren: (04:00)

Correct. So NABERS is for commercial industrial buildings, whereas NatHERS is the rating scheme for residential.

Kylie Davis: (04:08)

Right. Okay. Well, look, let's just stick with NABERS. Caoihim, what are the benefits of NABERS? How successfully has it been adopted?

Caoimhin Ardren: (04:21)

NABERS has the benefit in that it is measuring your day-to-day energy or water or waste or what are called consumption. It's baselined against other buildings of a similar size, nature of operation in your same climate zone. It's a star rating system, which currently goes from zero to six, with zero being a very poor performance, six being a high performance, three being the actual average of the properties in the industry. Hitting a four and a half, five, six star rating is quite attractive to a number of tenants these days.

Kylie Davis: (05:13)

Yeah. Because, you see, I see the NABERS rating sometimes when buildings are for lease. The agents we'll use it as a promotional way of marketing the building as being high quality I guess.

Caoimhin Ardren: (05:26)

Well, as of 2010, it no longer was a voluntary system but become mandatory.

Kylie Davis: (05:34)

Right.

Caoimhin Ardren: (05:35)

So NABERS rating for any office building which is going to be either sold or leased and the space is greater than 1,000 square metres, by law has to publish its certified NABERS rating before it's able to leased... sorry, advertised for lease or advertised for sale.

Kylie Davis: (05:58)

Right.

Caoimhin Ardren: (05:58)

This has had a fair impact on the number of buildings that are rated. What we have in the normal rating scheme is from zero to six, where three is the average of buildings that are in the industry. But when we look at the average rating for rated buildings or offices across Australia, that has risen, well, from the three all the way to sitting now at about four to 4.6. So it's had a massive impact on the ratings and the performance of those buildings.

Kylie Davis: (06:38)

Right, because there's a rating system in place and that's creating something really transparent and visible, we're seeing standards rise.

Caoimhin Ardren: (06:47)

Correct. There's a few things that are quite important with that. This is one is that it's a very stringent measurement of energy and how energy is attributed and used within the buildings. So anybody who's a NABERS assessor, who's accredited, one has to sit and go through probably a two or three-day course, then go through some exams, and then actually have their first couple of ratings supervised to make sure that they're getting it right. And so this is to ensure that the industry actually values NABERS ratings as being completely objective and a true representation as to the actual energy efficiency.

Caoimhin Ardren: (07:34)

Now, when I say energy efficiency, it's slight misleading, because on energy, NABERS measures the intensity of your emissions. So it looks at the emissions associated with that energy not with just the kilowatt hours that we're using.

Kylie Davis: (07:50)

Right. And so what does that mean?

Caoimhin Ardren: (07:55)

What that means is that when we're looking at buildings which are in different areas or different parts of the country, which have a different feeding in terms of the grid energy and the carbonization of that grid, it actually varies from state to state. However, NABERS has been normalised to allow for that so that if you're comparing a four and a half star building in Melbourne versus a four and a half star in Sydney, you actually still are comparing similar buildings [inaudible 00:08:28].

Kylie Davis: (08:29)

Right. So it's basically created a baseline for how commercial buildings are using energy, their emissions from that energy, and that transparency is leading to improvements in how buildings are run and, I guess, built as well.

Caoimhin Ardren: (08:49)

Correct. The other major driver behind the uptake of NABERS was in about 2008, all state and federal governments made a law that they would only lease commercial property which had four and a half star NABERS rating or at least had a plan on how they would achieve a four and a half star NABERS rating. This has had a major impact on building valuations, because as we know, the people that are most likely to be to assign a 10 or 15-year leases and then generate a very good long-term building valuation are government. And so many property owners have then pursuit government tenants to get those long leases and get the valuation done associated with that.

Kylie Davis: (09:54)

So, look, I'm curious to know too, when NABERS came in, did we see a lot of building upgrades going on to improve the ratings of existing buildings?

Caoimhin Ardren: (10:09)

Look, in the first, probably NABERS started life as a slightly different rating scheme, which was in New South Wales only, which was ABGR, Australia Building Greenhouse Rating scheme, which has changed its name in 2008 to NABERS. And that's when the uptake through government departments took off, and then followed by [inaudible 00:10:35] in 2010.

Kylie Davis: (10:38)

So who else was involved? Tell me a little bit about the history of it, because 2008 sounds like we're going quite a long way back. But apart from DeltaQ, who else has been involved in it?

Caoimhin Ardren: (10:49)

Look, there's a whole dedicated team that sits in the Department of Industry. It used to be called OEH, Office Environment and Heritage, in New South Wales. That department actually develops and administers NABERS across the country. Even though its part of New South Wales, it does it across all states and territories.

Kylie Davis: (11:12)

Right.

Caoimhin Ardren: (11:15)

NABERS, since its creation has been rolled out in New Zealand.

Kylie Davis: (11:25)

Okay.

Caoimhin Ardren: (11:28)

It's actually been rolled out in the UK. We actually have NABERS UK. It's interesting that they've used the name NABERS as opposed to the underlying words. NABERS UK was launched late last year as we've been heavily involved with the team over there, getting that established.

Kylie Davis: (11:52)

Cool. Okay, so this is a concept that we've exported basically.

Caoimhin Ardren: (11:57)

Correct. And it goes back to the mention of being how stringent the rating scheme is. That stringency and robustness of it has meant that NABERS has been looked on favourably across the world because it's a system which has been clearly demonstrated to be able to deal with variability and flexibility in application. But also that it's not able to be played with.

Kylie Davis: (12:27)

Right.

Caoimhin Ardren: (12:27)

So that's you don't have individual owners...

Kylie Davis: (12:31)

Saying, "Well, that doesn't work for me. Just tweak it a bit." Awesome. Okay, so back in 2008 or a little bit earlier, I'm assuming there was a bunch of people who realised that if we were going to get serious about how buildings use energy we needed a stringent, robust measuring and monitoring and, I guess, labelling system for buildings. What are the lessons that we can learn from that around the conversations we're having today around smart buildings, because there are real parallels, aren't there?

Caoimhin Ardren: (13:09)

There's extremely good parallels. In the past, prior to NABERS being created and being accepted as an industry standard, many owners or property owners would make up their own baselines, but then you were comparing their baseline... or you weren't able to compare their baseline from one building to the next and one property to another for a different state. There were all different baselines they were working to, and so you couldn't look across the industry and understand how the industry was moving forward. So having a standardised structure... I mean a standardised methodology, and applying that consistently across the board has been able to provide direct benefit to the industry and [inaudible 00:13:53].

Kylie Davis: (13:53)

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Kylie Davis: (14:50)

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Kylie Davis: (15:05)

I mean, because this is one of the things that astounds me about commercial real estate is that the whole idea I get told a lot that, "Look, commercial data is quite proprietary and that we're not going to share and that we don't see value in it and that it's better off done the way we've always done it." But clearly, there's an example here of data standardisation, of common language, and common understanding and rigour around what constitutes benchmarks that has been so good that not only has it been adopted nationally but it's actually been exported overseas as a concept. So this kind of the model that we should be working on in how we move from our current building stock up to smart building stock for the future, right?

Caoimhin Ardren: (16:02)

Correct. One of the downsides that we have in the industry at the moment is the number of different proprietary systems that are available, which all work off different languages or different protocols. Which means that property owners are often held to ransom, because once they've put in a particular system, they are unable to afford to undo and remove all the history and lose that history if they want to change systems.

Kylie Davis: (16:36)

Yes, the cost of legacy, right?

Caoimhin Ardren: (16:39)

The cost of legacy. While we've had, particular in commercial buildings in the BMS space for a number of years, we've had what's known as BACnet protocol being available. While there's been a fairly good uptake on the use of BACnet and the acceptance of it, they are many providers that have adopted their version of BACnet. What that means is that while they are BACnet compatible, it doesn't mean that you can move from one system to another and transfer the data from one BMS system to another if you needed to change. And so property owners are often held to ransom and are unable to afford to be able to change out of BMS at any time, and continue with something that may be a poor service simply because they can't afford to actually take out or remove or to put in.

Kylie Davis: (17:36)

All right. So you're now working on a new project around a shared data lake to help enable smart buildings. Tell me a little bit more about that. How could that work? And why do we need it. Well, I mean, I think that's self-evident but let's pull it apart.

Caoimhin Ardren: (17:58)

Yeah, look, so the project that we are assisting on, which is supported and then working through with CSIRO is establishment of a centralised, standardised data lake for building performance data. It's a concept that the data lake will be set up and structured in a consistent way so that any building, no matter what type of BMS, lighter control, fault diagnostic, [inaudible 00:18:33] is in the building, it's connected through a bridge or API, into the data lake, and is then stored in there in a standardised structure. So that as a building owner, if you want to move or bring in a new system, as that system connects through the bridge, it's able to read into that data lake and there, for a lack of a better term, it knows where the data is for each data point, because it's a standardised consistent structure. Which then what it does is, it opens up the ability for the owner to change which service or system operates on top of that performance data. It allows them to carry over history from one system to another, because it stays in that sovereignty of that data. And it allows new applications to be developed in a way that, again, they understand exactly how the data is stored irrelevant to what system is installed on site or across multiple different buildings.

Kylie Davis: (19:42)

So it's like a common language that all systems would understand?

Caoimhin Ardren: (19:46)

That's right. So it goes in a structure, it has the relevant APIs and bridges built so that you can have different systems talking to it. And every time it gets brought into the same consistent protocol and structure.

Kylie Davis: (20:03)

And I mentioned that the enormous benefits to doing this, because as you add more of your systems into the data lake, you'd actually be able to start to layer your data on top of it and start to see new things out of the data that's being captured by all your different apps or programmes that you're using or platforms that you're using.

Caoimhin Ardren: (20:26)

Correct. The two aspects that one needs to consider is that when you're building a new building, or even an existing building, and you're trying to put in integration between systems to try and reboot the data from two different system, each and every time you try and do that on an existing building, because you don't have the shared structure, you have to build a bespoke solution for that particular building. So from a building owners point of view, they then have to wear the cost and also the risk around building that application.

Kylie Davis: (21:02)

Yeah. Yep.

Caoimhin Ardren: (21:05)

So, they need to see that they are going to get a return, and then they need to maintain that application and maintain the software on that side.

Kylie Davis: (21:16)

Yes. Okay. So basically, the cost of the way that we're doing it at the moment is borne by every building owner individually or every platform individually in that we have to build our own infrastructure every single time we want to connect with somebody else?

Caoimhin Ardren: (21:37)

Exactly. So each owner for each building has to have separate bespoke application developed for their site. This is extremely costly but also-

Kylie Davis: (21:49)

It does seem very costly and slow.

Caoimhin Ardren: (21:54)

... many of the applications that might have been possible to be shared just can't be shared, because they've got to be reconfigured for your site. In many cases, there's a whole lot of hardware that needs to be put in place on the site to make this work as well. And so this is, again, additional costs that the building owner, who in many cases won't see the benefit of these applications, is just another barrier to prevent them from effectively creating a smart building as we expect smart buildings to be in the future.

Kylie Davis: (22:29)

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. So what would the benefits be of having an infrastructure in place that allows everyone's data to talk to other datasets? And what would the rules and regulations be in place around privacy or access?

Caoimhin Ardren: (22:52)

Look, privacy and access in cybersecurity are extremely high in the list and have been tackled by CSIRO and their development team, to make sure that they are implementing the platform with best practise. With each property owner and building that gets connected, that property owner will have the ability to select which applications they would allow to operate across their data.

Kylie Davis: (23:24)

So you get to set your own permissions, basically?

Caoimhin Ardren: (23:26)

You set your own permissions, you set your own rules. But the advantage there is that they can applications that they may not have a benefit of as an owner. For example, they might be an application created that can work off the data from the building, which is of great benefit to a tenant, but maybe only 30% of the tenants within a building. The owner doesn't need to necessarily develop and build an application for those tenants, again, who may move on. They can just say, "Our data is available to be used by these applications, because we know that the way the data is secure, it's not going to use that data in any other way other than providing a benefit of that application to a tenant."

Kylie Davis: (24:17)

Right. Right.

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Kylie Davis: (25:31)

This seems like a complete no-brainer to me, Caoimhin, but what are the obstacles? What's stopping us from doing it or what are we going to face in adopting it?

Caoimhin Ardren: (25:43)

One of the big obstacles that we've been facing up to now in this sort of initiative has been this concept of many systems, building a proprietary system, they want to hold the data themselves and not share it across the board. The concept behind the platform or data lake we're talking about and the data clearing house with BCH, now the idea is that this will be established as an industry body. It'll be a not-for-profit association, so that property owners and app developers would sign up as members for them to be able to get access. The model therefore works in the basis that it's not one single proprietary commercial entity that owns the data or owns the structure, it'll actually be owned by the industry itself.

Caoimhin Ardren: (26:37)

And again not only by the industry, but it won't be owned by government. The concerns people have raised about how this data will be used, it will actually be driven by the association that is set up and owned by the actual property owners and the people that create and own the data.

Kylie Davis: (26:57)

Fantastic. Is that a similar model to NABERS?

Caoimhin Ardren: (27:02)

NABERS has always been a government-regulated body.

Kylie Davis: (27:06)

Right. Okay.

Caoimhin Ardren: (27:10)

The data is put onto their NABERS rating database, but there's not sharing of that data outside. The [inaudible 00:27:21] Department uses it for certification only.

Kylie Davis: (27:23)

Okay. Okay. So a different structure for this but a similar concept behind the idea that if you have common standards and rigour and transparency around the model, then as a whole industry we can start to move forward. In fact, we can all start to save money on how much we're spending on building infrastructure to make our data talk to itself.

Caoimhin Ardren: (27:54)

Correct. And we can actually start thinking about the future of the types of applications that we could actually develop on this platform going forward. A key difference compared to the NABERS data, NABERS data is a once-off snapshot per year.

Kylie Davis: (28:10)

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Caoimhin Ardren: (28:13)

Where the total energy used, the total water used, et cetera, it's uploaded as a single snapshot view as to how that building performed over the last 12 months. With the data lake, this data will be transferring in almost real time. So that the building data, temperature sensors, occupancy sensors, lighting controls, all this information will be transferring on a real-time basis into the data lake. This allows an application to be working on pretty much real-time data that is being presented and can look at how that can actually then feedback either to the building, to other systems, and/or how it interacts with some of the marker signals. So some of the areas that data lake is looking to work with is how to interact with the energy grid and energy market to see potential for opportunities for demand management, demand response, and be able to react in a way that's beneficial to the owner in that matter.

Kylie Davis: (29:24)

Awesome. Okay. What are the steps to making it happen? How far away are we from it?

Caoimhin Ardren: (29:31)

Well, the good news is the actual application in terms... sorry, the data lake platform has been selected. CSIRO have three or four of their own buildings already set up on the platform. They have a plan for the roll out of this to all their buildings, we're talking in excess of 100 buildings across the country.

Kylie Davis: (29:53)

Awesome.

Caoimhin Ardren: (29:54)

And we're talking to a number of government departments and schools to actually have their data captured. There's probably a series of programmes to capture anywhere up to another 600-800 buildings over the next 12 months.

Kylie Davis: (30:11)

Fantastic. And where would that place Australia in terms of smart building innovation?

Caoimhin Ardren: (30:15)

Look, it places us at the forefront because nobody has looked at the idea of tackling the enablement of smart buildings through a centralised, standardised database. Throughout the world, everybody is still very much talking about smart buildings being created on a building by building bases.

Kylie Davis: (30:43)

Which makes no sense, does it? Because basically cities are, at the end day, shared infrastructure.

Caoimhin Ardren: (30:49)

[inaudible 00:30:49].

Kylie Davis: (30:50)

We're really just applying what city builders have known for centuries but to a digital space.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:00)

Exactly. It's going to be a very slow process. And as we understand, at the moment where the smart building rating schemes are, currently they're looking at effectively your potential to be a smart building as opposed to a measure of-

Kylie Davis: (31:17)

Oh no.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:18)

... how smart your building really is.

Kylie Davis: (31:21)

Oh no, that sounds disastrous.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:27)

It's a starting point.

Kylie Davis: (31:29)

I guess, I guess.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:32)

If none of your systems can talk to each other, obviously you can never be smart.

Kylie Davis: (31:36)

No.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:37)

So having the potential to connect and talk is a good thing.

Kylie Davis: (31:41)

Yes.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:41)

But it's a very slow process as opposed to really measuring how smart is your building. And having lighting control is not smart.

Kylie Davis: (31:52)

No.

Caoimhin Ardren: (31:53)

Lighting control is last century, so is a BMS. But how these things talk to each other and actually develop improved and automated learning coming out of that so that they actually provide predictive information or concepts, that's where smart programmes will be looking to in the future.

Kylie Davis: (32:14)

Right. Right. So how long are we looking at, Caoimhin? Five years or more, or what does the length of this project look like before we have a roadmap for making Australian commercial buildings go from dumb to smart?

Caoimhin Ardren: (32:30)

Look, it's actually not that far away. Because with the way the data lake's been set up, as buildings come on, you can connect and will be able to connect any type of system that you currently have. But it will be available to be able to connect any new systems as they get created. As we get the next, say, 1,000 buildings on board, there'll be opportunities for application developers to create applications based on the data that they've seen it's available. So as soon as you've got, let's say, your BMS data, your lighting control, your car park recognition, all this data had been collected and stored in the data lake... I guess the data lake will not actually have the membership structure actually commercialised in applications. It'll allow commercial app developers to create an application that sits on top of the platform and interface with that data. Which means that it's up to the market to decide how fast they would like to actually develop any applications and deploy them on the data lake.

Kylie Davis: (33:45)

I guess the speed or the velocity of that will be determined by how much people see that they can save and how much time or insights they're able to gain from starting to pull all this together, right?

Caoimhin Ardren: (34:03)

Correct. I mean, when you start talking about smart building applications and the data lake, think of these applications like you have apps on your phone. They can be created and will be able to be created on fairly simple benefits you may want or functions, which then can grow over time. So you might sign up to an app today which only has one or two key benefits or functions available, but that app developer is able to increase that over time. So that's a start quite light because they don't have to sign up hundreds of buildings themselves. [inaudible 00:34:45] they have a standardised structure that they can talk to. They don't need to look after it. They don't need to manage it. They don't [inaudible 00:34:54] security. All they do is create the application and demonstrate and get people to start using.

Caoimhin Ardren: (35:00)

So that allows them to maximise economies of scale of actually having that application being shared and used by as many building owners and tenants that are in that space in the near future.

Kylie Davis: (35:16)

So, if we go down this path, a lot of the legacy tech businesses in the commercial space are no longer going to be able to indirectly lock in clients. Do you see any pushback in that space, or are the benefits of shared data enough to get them over the line?

Caoimhin Ardren: (35:38)

It's both a threat and an opportunity to these providers. While they perceive that suddenly the data is shared and they don't have that proprietary ownership of that data, what it also does is it opens up the market to a whole range of other property types, which they typically wouldn't have been able to tackle.

Kylie Davis: (35:58)

Hm. Because they're too busy [inaudible 00:36:01], they're too busy spending time maintaining the barricades, I guess.

Caoimhin Ardren: (36:07)

Well, not only that, but by managing all the proprietary structures themselves, they'll end up being priced out of the market for a lot of the medium-sized or lower-sized properties out there.

Kylie Davis: (36:21)

Yes. Yeah.

Caoimhin Ardren: (36:24)

The lower grade properties out there don't have complex BMSs. They've just got really, really simple individual, isolated controls to say, "Well, actually, we can now open the door to many of those providers by saying, 'These guys aren't priced out of the market. The data is now shared in this space and you can have a simplified version of your control system, whatever it happens to be, across this data which can suddenly be picked up the middle grade and lower grade properties.'"

Kylie Davis: (37:02)

Yeah. I guess also you're getting resource back to truly innovate in areas that are going to grow your business as opposed to legacy costs that just need to be managed to maintain your business.

Caoimhin Ardren: (37:15)

Correct. And you can move away from the age-old system as we were with software 15 years ago, when you had to buy the software and upgrade the licence every year, et cetera, et cetera.

Kylie Davis: (37:29)

Instal it with a floppy disc.

Caoimhin Ardren: (37:30)

Exactly. We're now sitting with software as a service. You never have to do an application updates. You never worry about that sort of thing. It's on the cloud. You just keep moving, and the app developer will provide as a control system, makes the changes to the background, and everybody gets it. It's all deployed, and you're not spending time and money going to roll out new software on an old PC that's sitting in a basement somewhere.

Kylie Davis: (37:57)

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Caoimhin, let's break it down into down into how can get involved. If I'm a property owner, how can I get involved?

Caoimhin Ardren: (38:08)

Look, as a property owner, we are talking to a number of property ownership associations. We in the next three to six months running a couple of focus groups to talk about the concept, what's required to connect these buildings or any building to the system, and to actually finalise how the association or membership association will be established. That hasn't been locked in yet. The concept of being not-for-profit and being industry-driven, it is critical. But the exact structure to how that'll be hosted is still to be worked through. We look forward to getting information or feedback through the consultation and focus groups.

Kylie Davis: (38:55)

Awesome. And so if I'm a tech business or a proptech that is working in this space, whether I'm an established supplier or even a newbie on the block, a startup, how could I get involved with it from that side?

Caoimhin Ardren: (39:10)

Look, over time we've been speaking to some of the existing tech developers and control system operators that are out there. We want to open this up, and we want to talk through associations like Proptech Association of Australia and others, to again have some sort of focus groups but explore with developers the opportunities that will become available to them and then how they will be able to sign up to be part of the association to be able to enable them to have access to the data lake and then be able to create apps from there.

Kylie Davis: (39:47)

Fantastic. And so, Caoimhin, one last final question. Going to down this path, how long do you think it will take before we can start to move Australia's buildings from being dumb to being smart?

Caoimhin Ardren: (40:02)

And so the expectation is that we would have, hopefully, up to 1,000 buildings connected to the platform within the next 12 months.

Kylie Davis: (40:15)

Awesome.

Caoimhin Ardren: (40:16)

We already have one application which is a [inaudible 00:40:20] notification of energy performance created. But there's actually no barriers at the moment to stopping anybody else wanting to come in and create. We welcome opportunity to work with app developers, to look at that and potentially use that if we need to go and seek funding to help get the creation of these applications moving forward.

Kylie Davis: (40:48)

Fantastic. Well, Caoimhin, it has been absolutely fascinating to talk to you to find out about the work that's going on behind the scene to make Australia's commercial buildings go from dumb to smart and the infrastructure that's required for it. Thank you so much for being part of The Proptech Podcast.

Caoimhin Ardren: (41:09)

No problem. Thank you, Kylie.

Kylie Davis: (41:10)

So that was Caoimhin Ardren from DeltaQ, working with CSIRO on a commercial property data lake project. Now, I'm going to nail my colours to the mast here, I think this is a fantastic project, and it's one we all need to get behind in commercial property. The closed and opaque nature of commercial property data is holding back both innovation and it's adding significantly to its costs to implement. It adds legacy costs to property owners, it increases our carbon load of buildings, and it makes it more difficult to upgrade buildings that we own. In the push to create smart buildings and smart cities globally, there is one major challenge that we're all struggling to overcome, and that is, how do we move from where we are now to where we want to be? What does the roadmap for going from dumb buildings and cities towards smart buildings and cities look like?

Kylie Davis: (42:03)

Rating systems that are well-run bring great clarity and structure to that, as we've seen from the NABERS scheme. An article in The Economist back in 2019 stated that data was the new oil. But in commercial proptech, we have a host of businesses who are not only trying to invent the machines that will do the new work, but they're also being required to invest in and invent their own fuel sources. And this makes the tech more experience. It makes rolling it out slower. It makes sharing it and gaining the full benefit of it infinitely more difficult. So the commercial property industry is actually on the cusp of a major crossroads here. Do we go down the collaborative path of common data language and structure that allows easier sharing, faster iteration, and more affordable innovation that will empower us to make better investments and maximise the value of our property portfolios more quickly? Or do we want to hang on to legacy traditions of doing business because of a sense of entitlement and comfort?

Kylie Davis: (43:00)

The irony is that while legacy thinkers clam they're being financially prudent in protecting their data assets, the tipping point where legacy thinking locks us into higher costs, lower returns, and poor investment decisions, well that's fast coming. So if you are a commercial proptech keen to hear more about the CSIRO project, I've included Caoimhin's details in the show notes, and we will be doing some more interviews down the track on this topic.

Kylie Davis: (43:26)

So now, if you have enjoyed this episode of The Proptech Podcast, I would love you to tell your friends or drop me a line either via email, LinkedIn, or Facebook. You can follow this podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor, and Apple iTunes. I'd like to thank my audio support, Charlie Hollands, and the fabulous Jill Escadiro, and our sponsors, Direct Connect, making moving easy, Smidge Wines, exclusive wines made by Matt Wenk in limited quantities and available only via thesalvador@smidgewines.com, and ActivePipe, now helping you win more leads through your email marketing with content-driven campaigns.

Kylie Davis: (44:02)

And if you run a proptech business or if you're a founder of a proptech, make sure you join the Proptech Association of Australia. It's Australia's new not-for profit association made up of tech people who are passionate about the property industry and committed to improving experiences in how we buy, sell, rent, manage, build, and finance property. Joining will give you access to events and networks across Australia and globally that will help you promote and grow your business. Go to proptechassociation.com.au. Thanks, everyone. Until next time, keep on propteching.