Our Mission -

Shaping the Future

The Future Real Estate Institute's mission is to build bridges between innovative technologies as well as disruptive trends and the real estate industry. It functions as the intersection of innovation and business intelligence, incorporating academic excellence, creativity, industry insight and business practice.

Our goal is to make the real estate industry more efficient, sustainable and innovative. The Future Real Estate Institute will help academia and businesses to make their digital transformation and to implement as well as profit from the innovations of our age.

The Future Real Estate Society shall function as the non-profit branch of the Future Real Estate Institute. It will foster innovation on a corporate and governmental level.

There is a gap between what is written, told on conferences and the true level of digitalisation in real estate. Even though our industry is likely the most important of all, we are behind others such as automotive, fashion or entertainment in terms of innovativeness and digital permeation. The Future Real Estate Institute has addressed 10 challenges that it will solve in the coming years and decades.

Self-driving cars, applications like Amazon's Alexa and algorithmic High Frequency Trading have created awareness for data-driven opportunities, while multiple data-leaks and hacking attacks have highlighted the vulnerability of our digital economy. Nevertheless, real estate's digital benchmark, at least in most cases, are cloud storage solutions, social media and mobile applications. Yet, there is more.

We want to create awareness regarding new technologies and their implications on our daily life, how we build, research, produce, consume, live and work. Real Estate will be impacted by increased longevity, new 3D printing techniques, connected robotics, artificial intelligence, distributed networking, quantum computing, synthetic biology and other astonishing fields of research. The Future Real Estate Institute will find, research and communicate these implications.

Awareness is the first step towards knowledge. We want to foster new research, continuously learn, test ideas, cease opportunities for future business development and foster bold business model innovation, while creating knowledge that shall be shared with the public.

Even though construction, an essential component of real estate is highly technical, our overall industry is not. The Future Real Estate Institute shall function as intermediary between corporate real estate or governmental entities and technology driven-companies as well as ground-breaking research. Due to our continuous work and self-development at the intersection of technology and real estate, we will make both worlds accessible for another.

PropTechs, CreTechs, ReTechs or ConTechs are all proxies for startups offering technological or digital solutions within the sphere of real estate. Yet, the buzz around rapidly scaling startups, which later - hopefully - become SMEs or corporates, has led to wrong expectations, semi-useful accelerator or incubator programmes and poor strategic interaction between large companies and startups. We see collaboration with aspiring entrepreneurs as well as their teams as a vital pillar for corporate growth and want to broker contact between them. Furthermore, we see it as our responsibility to guide the way for successful incubation/acceleration projects, which we derive from our work-experience with startups across Europe and our own founding experiences.

80% of all digital transformations fail and above 70% of all lean transformations do not work out for corporations. Change is tough and is a highly complex matter with multiple unknown, hidden success predictors. Hence, the Future Real Estate Institute dedicates its resources towards increasing success rates of digital transformations by aggregating academic knowledge and practical insight, paired with our creative and people-centric approach.

Implementation trumps theory building and ambitious plans that are never realised. Thus, the Future Real Estate Institute is not only consulting real estate businesses, but assisting in the realisation of its strategies and their technical implementation. Even though we are changing the business landscape, we see ourselves as responsible change agents who care about the economic, social and ecological consequences of their work.

We want to bring the code into real estate by assisting in-house development or offering complex software solutions with our trusted partners. Hence, we see it as our duty to make the benefits or process optimisation and automation accessible to people as well as companies that have previously shone technology. Our long-term goal is to focus on the division FREI Development, which shall build artificially intelligent solutions for valuation, automate real-estate life cycle management and much more.

It is our hope that our work, publications and research will inspire future researchers to dedicate their efforts towards a more digital real estate environment. The Future Real Estate Institute will not merely focus on the most lucrative, but most useful research projects that are most benign to the industry as well as society.

We are aware of our role at the intersection of real estate and technology, which is why the Future Real Estate Institute will not associate itself with one specific corporate cause or interest group. The Future Real Estate Institute rather sees itself as think thank that offers guidance, consultation and insight for corporate, social and governmental purposes that are ethical and benefit the advancement of humanity.

The most important asset of our future are the leaders of tomorrow as well as broad knowledge that has be accessible to everyone. In order to propel education in digital real estate the Future Real Estate Institute offers pro bono lecturing at universities. Furthermore, we are keen to assist student research by providing insight and guidance.